The Language Flagship: Creating Expectations and Opportunities for Professional-Level Language Learning in Undergraduate Education

Michael Nugent and Robert Slater

Introduction

This chapter describes the first decade of the Language Flagship, beginning with a discussion of the national need for a systematic approach to creating opportunities for advanced- to superior-level language learning in US post-secondary education. It discusses how the Language Flagship was developed within the context of language education in US higher education and follows with an analysis of the initial implementation and subsequent evolution as the Flagship began involving increasing numbers of institutions of higher education, faculty and students. The chapter covers the programmatic decisions that established clear expectations necessary for professional-level language learning outcomes at universities while at the same time creating the realistic opportunities for undergraduate students to achieve proficiency. It discusses how the Language Flagship strived to maintain a balance between a process driven by federal needs and one that represented a strategic investment in the development of capacity and expertise to address a fundamental long-term shift in philosophy and approach.

The Flagship Concept

The Language Flagship is one of the more important national innovations to language learning within the US higher education system. Flagship established for the first time a responsible and accountable partnership between the federal government and higher education with a goal to produce high-level language proficiency skills, identified as a critical shortfall by the national security community throughout the 1980s and 90s (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services, 2008). The events of 9/11 served to galvanize support for efforts to challenge higher education to enable students to graduate with certified foreign language proficiency. A 2002 review of the US Department of Defense language requirements identified the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 (Appendix A), General Professional Proficiency, as the target proficiency level necessary for professionals to perform their duties adequately. College and university graduates with such language skills were seen as an important new resource for a civilian workforce (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services, 2005). Increasingly, the need for such high-level language expertise was also felt in the private and non-profit sectors (National Security Education Program [NSEP], 2009).

Why was this expertise so difficult to find? Unlike most other countries, the US elementary and secondary school system has not historically recognized proficiency-based second language learning as a priority, particularly following an era of educational reform defined by efforts to test in other core areas (Rosenbusch, 2005). Fewer than 25% of colleges and universities require prior language study for entrance (Modern Language Association [MLA] Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, 2007); the US higher education system in general has not focused on language proficiency development as a skill set across the undergraduate curriculum. Instead, most language departments have defined their roles in terms of the foreign language major, emphasizing literature studies over more measureable language skills (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, 2007). In responding to this dilemma, the Language Flagship concept rests on a clearly defined purpose of challenging a limited set of universities to create a pool of educated university graduates with demonstrated professional-level language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing (NSEP, 2004).

Creating the capability to reach these proficiency goals presented significant challenges to US higher education. The liberal arts tradition of the US higher education system has contributed to a form of undergraduate study in the United States that is unique in providing a wide array of course requirements and electives that, in some ways, resembles the broader curriculum and requirements in advanced secondary schools in other countries (Geiger, 1986, 2015). As Clark (1985) has pointed out, such a broad focus of requirements within the US undergraduate curriculum has in some ways relieved US high schools from providing a similar preparation for US students in high school, creating a situation where basic language acquisition is a part of the US higher education curriculum along with students' major concentrations and other elective courses. Unfortunately, despite the ubiquitous rhetoric about globalization by many university leaders over the last two decades, fewer universities require language study for graduation, and the overall enrollments in foreign language remain low relative to those in many other industrialized countries (Skorton & Altschuler, 2012).

Producing such capabilities in US college graduates in meaningful numbers and making language learning available to a broader cross section of students (i.e. to those whose area of specialization is not in language) meant that a critical mass of higher education institutions would have to agree to change the way that Americans...