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University of Colorado, Boulder CU Scholar University Libraries Faculty & Staff Contributions University Libraries 2014 Research in the Foreign Languages Alison Hicks University of Colorado Boulder, alison.hicks@colorado.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.colorado.edu/libr_facpapers Part of the Library and Information Science Commons This Book Chapter/Section is brought to you for free and open access by University Libraries at CU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in University Libraries Faculty & Staff Contributions by an authorized administrator of CU Scholar. For more information, please contact cuscholaradmin@colorado.edu. Recommended Citation Hicks, Alison, "Research in the Foreign Languages" (2014). University Libraries Faculty & Staff Contributions. 24. http://scholar.colorado.edu/libr_facpapers/24 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by CU Scholar Institutional Repository This is a post-print of an article that appears in: Hicks, Alison. "Research in the Foreign Languages." In Research within the disciplines: Foundations for reference and library instruction, edited by Peggy Keeran and Michael Levine Clark. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press. 2nd. Ed. Chapter 13 Research in Foreign Languages Alison Hicks Foreign language research is broad, dynamic, and complex. Encompassing the critical examination of regional and national traditions, cultures, and languages, scholars engage with a wide range of research methods and tools that often cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. The ultimate goal is to understand foreign societies, as well as helping us reflect on our own role as a member of a society that is foreign to others. Foreign language research tends to focus on a specific geographical area, time period, issue, or genre related to the traditions and cultures of the region. While this has traditionally been centered on the literary canon, it also includes travel narratives, film, journalism, human rights, or linguistics, among other areas. Scholars may also take a broad approach that looks at regional commonalities or the interaction between neighboring national traditions, for example Spanish and Catalan cultures. In this way, the field looks at a wide range of cultural manifestations, as well as theoretical and historical work, to examine the complex factors that affect relationships between culture, language, and society. Research methods are equally broad and draw mostly from the humanities and social science traditions, as well as adopting evolving methods of digital scholarship. Thus, while some scholars may engage in a close textual reading of a core text, others will focus on the analysis of raw public opinion poll data. One scholar may focus on contemporary literary work, while others will rely on archives and ancient codices. Another characteristic of foreign language research is that much scholarly work will take place outside of the United States, meaning that the scholar’s need for advanced linguistic capabilities is unquestioned. A fragmented publishing market, highly-variable attitudes to and rates of digitization, as well as fluctuating exchange rates add a further layer of complexity. Librarian and subject specialist expertise remains more relevant than ever before in the area of foreign language research. In this chapter, I will focus on research strategies in French, German, Italian, and Spanish languages, which form four out of the top five most studied languages in US higher education. Portuguese will also be included as a language that is experiencing high growth. The chapter takes a linguistic rather than geographical focus, which means that French resources will also cover those from Switzerland and Belgium, and German will encompass those from Austria and Switzerland. Spanish and Portuguese research will look at Latin America along with the Iberian Peninsula, due to their shared heritage and publishing history as well as the fact that many library positions do not separate the two.1 At the same time, the chapter will also offer strategies for searching for materials in other languages that are not covered here, for example Japanese and Arabic. In this way, while the chapter will take a broad approach, it will focus on finding sources in a foreign language. For this reason, it will not cover broader research strategies for International Affairs or Chicano Studies, for instance, where a majority of sources are found in English. Due to constraints of space, the chapter will only highlight major resources in each of the five languages; for further guidance, please see details for professional association webpages. Scope Research in the foreign languages has traditionally been focused around the department of modern languages. As part of the BA degree, undergraduate students typically spend the first two years studying the language and the second two years studying national literature topics.2 However, the Modern Language Association has started to question this hierarchy and their influential 2007 report recommended a much broader conception of language learning within higher education. In the past, language learning has often been seen as primarily instrumental, or purely for communicating information. However, as the language failures that were involved in US military inventions after 9/11 exposed, the need to understand people and their communities is key. As such, the MLA report centers on constitutive language learning, or the fact that language also reflects the established knowledge of a society such as memory and experience; notwithstanding, the report recommends that this should not just be experienced through the study of national literature. Instead the authors emphasize that foreign-language study should include the “ability to comprehend and analyze the cultural narratives that appear in every kind of expressive form—from essays, fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, humor, advertising, political rhetoric, and legal documents to performance, visual forms, and music.”3 While this has not yet been widely adopted outside of undergraduate education, it has important consequences for the scope of foreign-language research and will eventually be seen more widely in both graduate and faculty interests. Modern language departments are not the only places on campus to emphasize foreign- language research. Content Based Instruction (CBI) and Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC), which refer to programs where language teaching is embedded in a disciplinary context such as political science or engineering, are important in many undergraduate programs.4 In addition, research tools or collections of source documents in areas such as philosophy, classics, and art history are often published in French, German, and Italian. Lastly, the field of area studies has grown substantially since the 1960s and 1970s when Title VI funds were established to support area studies education.5 The creation of area studies centers, for example for European or Latin American Studies, not only calls for much wider research in the foreign languages, but has also played a part in blurring disciplinary divisions and boundaries. As such, research in the foreign languages is both qualitative and quantitative. With its roots in traditional literary research, foreign-language research has expanded since the 1960s to cover not only disciplines as varied as anthropology, political science, and sociology, but also other fields such as international business, translation, and cultural studies. In this way, typical issues could include: ! A scholar looking to use an image from a public domain work held by the Biblioteca Nacional de España; ! A student trying to find microfilm of nineteenth-century German newspapers; ! An international affairs student looking for statistics about Moroccan beggars; ! A producer who needs to find an eighteenth-century play in the original Italian; ! A theater student who needs to find reviews of a play that was produced in France in the 1990s; ! An NGO researching oil palm and pesticide use in Costa Rica; ! A graduate student researching the lateralization of the /r/ to /l/ in Spanish; ! A community member looking for recommendations for resources to maintain her Portuguese skills. Information Seeking Behaviors Faculty and Scholars There have been very few studies of modern language researchers. However, other than some obvious key linguistic differences, researcher scholarly habits are, for the most part, similar to their English-language counterparts’. Basic research methods have changed surprisingly little in the networked information environment. For humanities scholars, research still relies on original works such as books, films, or manuscripts as well as secondary critical literature in the shape of books, journal articles, or collected essays.6 There are significant regional characteristics though, such as greater reliance on bibliographies and research guides in French and German, or the essay in Spanish. For interdisciplinary or social science scholars, research focuses on cultural artifacts as well as records and qualitative and quantitative data. Secondary sources such as journal articles and grey literature are also important.7 Scholars tend to discover these artifacts through “chaining” or citation tracking rather than database searching, as well as through the building of personal collections and through talking with colleagues and at conferences. As technology has made sources more accessible, even if this has happened at a slower rate than in other areas, researcher habits have changed accordingly. Foreign-language scholars now have many more ways to find books, for example. The integration of major world libraries such as the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France among other national libraries, into WorldCat provides the researcher with a much larger universe than the local university catalog for finding material. These developments provide another welcome discovery tool in WorldCat.org, though, uploads/Societe et culture/ research-in-the-foreign-languages.pdf