DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL-LEVEL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

Abstract

DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL-LEVEL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY. Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman (Eds.) . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 308. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. In the face of a vast array of non-English culture and language media, increases in diaspora populations in the United States and elsewhere, the importance of global circuits of capital (and hence global communicative practices), and the increasing penetration of world events into the lives of Americans (with its implications for national security), one would surmise that developing professional-level additional language expertise would not be the exception that it is in the United States. Lambert ( 2001 ) described the low percentage of American students who study a foreign language at the advanced level and estimated that only 3% of those studying commonly taught languages such as Spanish or French enroll in advanced-level courses. Although support for less commonly taught languages (LCTL) such as Arabic have recently increased, students enrolled in LCTL programs are presumably even fewer in number. It is also clear that advanced-level coursework occupies only a fraction of most language programs' overall investment of resources. In a fiscal climate that makes the academy increasingly accountable to private sector logic, few interested students make developing advanced language programs a nonutilitarian choice.