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511 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1990)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0511 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The United States is experiencing a minor surge of interest in foreign language instruction at all levels of our formal education system. While we have had no hard data since 1986, enrollments seem to be up-spottily and with various strength in different languages, but, in general, up. Colleges and universities are reinstituting entrance and graduation requirements for foreign language study. Secondary and even primary schools are experiment- ing with new teaching strategies, new program organizational styles, and the spread of Chinese-, Russian-, and especially Japanese-language instruction into more and more schools and at more and more levels. It is not surprising, therefore, that the primary focus of national attention has been on different aspects of school- and college-based foreign language instruction, what its goals should be, and how to improve it. This issue of The Annals takes a somewhat different cut. It starts not with the formal educational system but with the utilization of foreign languages by adults. It shares the premise expressed at the outset in Richard Lambert's article herein: The greatest barrier to the expansion of foreign language competences in the United States is the low value placed on such competences by American society as a whole. It proceeds on the assumption that a major contributor to that low evaluation, one that must change if America's devout monolingualism is to be cured, is the low demand for and use of foreign lan- guage competences in key occupations. This is not to denigrate the general educational value of foreign language learning or the value of the study of a foreign language in producing a more cosmopolitan perspective. It does, how- ever, focus on a particular goal of some of our language instruction, language for occupational use. Most of the articles in this volume are concerned with foreign language competences. One article looks at other aspects of language in the workplace, however. Written by Mary McGroarty, it covers the problems of dealing with bilingualism in the workplace. General issues of bilingualism have been dealt with at greater length in another Annals volume, Courtney Cazden and Catherine Snow's English Plus: Issues in Bilingual Education.' All of the other articles are concerned with foreign language competences, here and abroad. They concern what might be called the demand side of language competences: who wants them, who needs them, who uses them. In particular, they are concerned with occupations where either the foreign language competence itself is the primary skill being employed or it is an ancillary skill required for the successful execution of other duties. An example of the former is the translator described in Deanna Hammond's 1. Courtney B. Cazden and Catherine E. Snow, English Plus: Issues in Bilingual Education, vol. 508, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Mar. 1990). 8

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