Where are the Experts?

Most collegiate departments where one can find Spanish, French, German, and other non-English disciplines are referred to as “language departments,” either formally or informally. Such designations are interesting as they suggest to the outsider (i.e., non-language person) that these departments consist of experts in language. In this essay, I will lay out the argument that this is not the case. I will argue that a focus on literature and culture does not make for expertise in language. I will then offer representative demographic research on the percentage of language faculty that can be considered experts in language. As will be seen, the percentage is quite low. Subsequently, I will describe some of the consequences of this low percentage, and I will conclude with an open letter to deans and other administrators regarding the current state of affairs. As will become evident, underlying the issues raised in this essay are the development of language proficiency and the nature of language teaching in university settings. Because language departments are generally charged with language instruction, and because students (and others) often expect some kind of proficiency at the end of an undergraduate career in languages, it is not trivial to ask: who is driving the bus of language development?

A Focus on Literature and Culture is not a Focus on Language

The focus of most language departments at research universities is cultural and literary studies (I will present sample demographic research on this matter in the next section). At the risk of simplifying disciplines, the purpose of literary and cultural studies involves the analysis (interpretation) and preservation of what is typically called cultural production. In the case of most language departments, cultural production refers to literary texts, certain kinds of essays, theater, and film, among other human endeavors. The purpose of literary and cultural studies has evolved over the years and may indeed depend on the particular context of one’s scholarly pursuit (e.g., medieval studies as compared to twenty first-century studies, and European-oriented studies as compared to Latino Studies). But what is clear is that the focus of such research and the expertise developed in the formation of scholars is the analysis of “text,” whatever that text may be and however one chooses to define “analysis.” Nowhere in contemporary cultural and literary studies is language the object of research. That is, the nature of language, its representation in the mind-brain of humans, and how language is processed, acquired, and used do not constitute the center (or even periphery) of research in cultural and literary studies. Cultural and literary scholars are not experts in language, a point I will develop below.¹

In contrast to cultural and literary studies are the language sciences. In the language sciences, the object of inquiry is the nature of language itself—with language scientists focusing on various areas, including how language is represented in the mind-brain (often referred to as theoretical linguistics), how language is produced and comprehended (generally referred to as psycholinguistics), and how language is acquired. Although traditionally there has been separation between first language acquisition and second language acquisition, at the macrolevel of scholarship, there is good reason to group all contexts of language acquisition under one umbrella as researchers look for answers to questions regarding universality/constraints imposed by the human mind-brain along with the effects of bilingualism. In short, language acquisition is linked to more general cognitive science. Because those of us working within the language sciences endeavor to determine the nature of language and how it is acquired, it is fair to say that language scientists are experts in language. It is their domain of investigation.

So what exactly makes a language scientist an expert on language compared to scholars in literary and cultural studies? I will illustrate with a simple example: wh- (who, what where, why, how) questions in Spanish and English. The two sentences below ask the exact same thing in the two languages:

Where does Bill teach?¿Dónde enseña Bill?

Any non-expert in language can readily see that wh- questions don’t look alike in Spanish and...