Leadership in Foreign Language Departments

Abstract

In spite of common beliefs in higher education, language departments may not be the best places to learn languages given that the majority of faculty specialize in literary and cultural studies and a minority specialize Linguistics (VanPatten, 2015). The Chair is the assigned leader in foreign language (FL) departments which is not a field specific position, regardless of the make-up of faculty profiles. However, one assigned/emergent leadership role is that of the Language Program Director (LPD) which has a related scientific field of its own: Second Language Acquisition (SLA), a subfield of linguistics whose empirical research findings fuel language-teaching decisions and innovations. Traditionally, nonetheless, this leadership role has been held by faculty out of discipline and thereby this role is often emergent in nature. The purpose of the present chapter is to discuss strategic leadership in the FL department, common misperceptions, and approaches for improvement to ensure a successful pedagogically sound future addressing many scholars' concerns.