Fred P. Ellison and Portuguese Program Development Margo Milleret The written record of Ellison’s involvement in Portuguese program development begins in 1964 when he became chairman of the Portuguese Language Development Group that met at several Modern Language Association meetings before being accepted by the AATSP in 1967. The record ends in the Fall 2003 edition of The Portuguese Newsletter in an interview conducted by Libby Ginway of the University of Florida. That record constitutes forty years of writing and collecting survey data, publishing reports, and advocating for Portuguese teaching and curriculum development in the US. Most of the writing appeared in this journal Hispania, the publication of the AATSP, an organization to which Ellison remained loyal during his long career. Ellison remarked in several places that AATSP was the organization that added the “P” to its name in 1944 and thus recognized Portuguese as a co-participant. There are five concerns that Ellison addressed in his Hispania publications that will be reviewed in this short essay along with an update on the status of those concerns today more than ten years after the 2003 interview, and more than fifty years after Ellison’s first reports in Hispania. The essays are listed in the Works Cited at the end in order to avoid redundancy. The first concern that Ellison expressed was the difficult relationship that Portuguese had with Spanish in the AATSP and in the profession. Ellison wrote at length of living under the shadow of Spanish. He talked of the hegemony of Spanish, the subservience of Portuguese to Spanish, and the wish for an individuality for Portuguese. He also noted that he and others felt that Portuguese was not receiving its fair share in the AATSP organization. Ellison worked hard to change that relationship and joined with the other members of the Portuguese Language Development Group to push for change in the by-laws of the AATSP. Among the changes sought and won were representation on the Executive Council for Portuguese (one seat, not three as requested), a national newsletter, and a greater percentage of articles in Hispania. What Ellison did not accomplish was a significant change in the relationship between the two language professionals. Ellison felt Portuguese should be an equal partner in the organization, but that has yet to happen. To its credit, AATSP did host its yearly conference in 2002 in Brazil, and has focused attention on gathering teaching materials for Portuguese for its website. It now sponsors Phi Lambda Beta Portuguese Honorary Society for colleges and universities and has supported the development of an on-line National Portuguese Exam for high school students. Its yearly conference program also highlights the panels for Luso-Brazilian studies in opening pages. Ellison’s second concern was the development of instructional materials for all levels of college education, including for bilingual speakers of Portuguese. While Modern Portuguese did help alleviate the demand for a beginning language text in the 1970s, Ellison called for textbooks that would meet the needs of students pursuing Portuguese at the intermediate and advanced levels. One subtopic within this concern about good textbooks that Ellison expressed several times, was the need for greater linguistic research of the Portuguese language that would serve as a strong foundation for Portuguese teaching materials. This type of research is underway, but due to the narrow focus of many US graduate programs on literature and culture, it still lags behind the work currently being done in other languages. Technology has greatly increased [End Page 530] access to teaching materials as has the appearance of several new publishing houses. However, heritage students on both coasts and elsewhere are still without the appropriate materials to meet their growing numbers. Thirdly, Ellison recognized that Portuguese needed to be taught at all levels and not just for heritage and immigrant students. Students studying Portuguese in K–12 provide potential audiences for college-level courses and therefore guarantee more stable enrollments and more advanced level courses. Teaching Portuguese in K–12 also would make the language more of an equal to Spanish and more available to students everywhere. Ellison called on the AATSP to do more to promote the teaching of Portuguese at the...
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Jun 1, 2016
Rafaela Jorge + 2
Open Access
