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IN HER article “Building a New Public Idea about Language,” Mary Louise Pratt advocates a language education policy in the United States that explicitly recognizes “the lived reality of multilingualism and the imperatives of global relations” (111), and in so doing she provides a basis for a new public idea about language. She concludes that language professionals must find ways of convincing their diverse publics that knowledge of several languages constitutes an aspect of educated citizenship. They can do so, she suggests, by producing concrete proposals that embrace the development of advanced levels of ability in multiple languages, native and foreign.
I interpret the proposal side of her challenge as signaling that we must first build a new professional idea about language. Only then can we create a new public idea about language that is credible with lawmakers, politicians, the business community, school boards, and communities. I claim that we are challenged to develop a framework for language that intimately relates knowing diverse languages to diverse ways of knowing and to present that link not as an elitist good or liberal fad but as a core American value across all social and economic strata. Given the long-standing ambivalence of American educational policy toward multilingualism, that is a tall order. We will be able to fill it the better we meet the rhetorical challenge of presenting multilingualism in a story that aligns well with other major narratives of American culture, much as Robert Reich has enjoined the defeated Democratic Party to align its core values to the four enduring American narratives—the triumphant individual, the benevolent community, the mob at the gates, and the rot at the top—if it wishes, once again, to shape policy decisions.
Creating such a new narrative is not merely going “beyond grammar” or concluding that “life begins after proficiency” (Saussy 18). Rather, we are challenged to embrace an epistemology of language that relinquishes the deep-seated linguistic imperialism of much seemingly innovative thinking and, instead, understands all levels of language use, from the textual to the morphosyntactic (and that includes grammar), as being functional in terms of diverse meaning-making intentions and, therefore, primarily a socioculturally situated semiotic resource. By practicing the teaching and learning of any language from beginning to very advanced levels of ability in line with that conviction, we would not only devise a suitable agenda for inside the profession; we would also present the outlines of an agenda for educational policy circles and ultimately for society at large. I have referred to such an understanding of language and its corresponding educational practices in terms of pursuing advanced levels of multiple literacies (“Advanced L2 Literacies”).
As we turn inward, our immediate challenge is this: the educational goal of advanced competence in a second language is hardly a straightforward matter for foreign language departments—not in terms of the construct of advanced abilities, not in terms of intellectual resources and knowledge bases required for imagining advancedness, and most assuredly not in terms of the practices necessary for pursuing such a goal. For that reason, the first order of business is to declare, as a nonnegotiable basis for further discussion, that foreign language departments indeed aspire to enable their students to acquire a second language to competent levels of performance—even if various exigencies mean that not every student will necessarily reach that goal. That aspiration would, as a first step, require its public expression in departments’ goal setting, in the curricular frameworks departments create over long instructional periods in order to recognize the long-term nature of language learning to functionally diverse abilities, and, finally, in pedagogies that support students’ efficient and effective language learning toward the desired advanced capacities.
Given that such a well-exercised commitment on the part of collegiate language departments is the exception rather than the rule (for my department’s efforts, see “Developing”; see also Kern, Literacy, “Reconciling”; Swaffar and Arens), setting advanced second language ability as a goal is itself a powerful form of advocating a new professional idea of language. As I have observed elsewhere (“Constructing,” “Reconsidering”), joint goal setting, joint curriculum development, and consensually arrived-at pedagogical principles do not generally characterize language departments. Are we therefore to conclude that foreign language departments do not have a genuine interest in fostering their students’ educational progress through the medium that only they possess, namely the foreign language? Do we not even have a shared basis for discussing the changes that are felt to be necessary?
Rather than accept such harshly worded questions, I suggest the following possibilities: What if, deep down, departments’ knowledge base about the nature of the project is incomplete? What if their long-standing primary self-representation as national literature departments stands in the way of imagining the project creatively? What if their identification with the humanities as traditionally conceived is itself not conducive to the work that needs to be accomplished? What if, as Donald Freeman suggests, “language isn’t what we think it is” (169)?
If all these suppositions are true, the task the language profession faces is considerably more fundamental than we might have imagined, akin to finding “new metaphors to live by,” to echo the title of the book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It is the task of envisioning our educational goals differently and of finding new frameworks for those visions as we take important steps close to the ground: first, create well-articulated goals for a particular language program in a particular institution; second, develop a curricular progression that describes the performances we expect for learners, a progression that is publicly readable for both learners and the constituencies they represent; and, third, negotiate in a particular departmental context appropriate pedagogies that can scaffold students’ attainment of advanced language capacities. For that entire project a genre-based notion of literacy addresses both the needed specification of goals as well as their translation into educational means (Byrnes, “Advanced L2 Literacy,” “Content-Based,” “Reconsidering”).
Let me probe those connections. The construct of a genre-based literacy offers an elegant and rich way to describe advancedness in any language, native or nonnative. More important, both advanced abilities for use expressed in terms of a genre-based literacy and literacy as a framework for educational praxes point beyond language into society. This reach beyond language into sociocultural practice characterizes the necessary reconceptualizing not only of first- and second-language teaching and learning, not only of the position of the humanities, but, as sociocultural theorists of language like James P. Lantolf state, also of the very nature of any knowing through language.
Careful consideration of advancedness forces us to part company with the still-prevalent focus on decontextualized formal features of language, the accurate mastery of which too often counts as advancedness. Gone is the possibility of neatly separating grammar, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics from content, as though knowledge existed outside its formation in language; we could fashion that safe haven because our acquisitional goals did not extend beyond beginning or intermediate levels of ability. Untenable is a bifurcated understanding of language and culture, as though culture could be imagined separately from language or as though language capacity were an individual cognitive phenomenon existing before communication and socioculturally anchored interaction. Inadmissible are notions of a natural, pristine, native language capacity that educational practice merely formalizes or makes more fluent through reading, writing, and speaking activities but leaves unaffected in its meaning-making potential. Instead, we acknowledge that carefully planned educational practices are a critical aspect of social literacy. They powerfully shape continued expansion of the meaning-making resources of language users into a range of discourse practices that characterizes public and institutional language use, an expansion that Mary J. Schleppegrell traces in both native and nonnative language instruction. At its best, any education—and it will always be language-oriented education—provides all learners access to acquiring precisely how a society has come to accomplish with language the tasks that it primarily chooses to accomplish with language. At its worst, education conveys powerful messages that some learners cannot be given such access or will not be given sufficient help to acquire it.
In other words, a sociocultural approach to language foregrounds the essential fact that language is a semiotic tool for meaning making, and it locates language use in the context of social practice. Externally, the social, political, and economic environment for which we prepare our students necessitates advanced language literacy capacities. Internally, such a focus encourages us to begin to adopt what has been long in the making in linguistic theorizing, namely, a cognitive-functionalist and sociocultural view of language (for an excellent discussion, see Langacker).
I have freely used the word literacy as though its meaning were straightforward, and I have claimed an advantageous role for a genre-based literacy. A few details on both are in order. In line with systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as developed by M. A. K. Halliday and increasingly drawing on it, contemporary approaches to literacy understand language as a social semiotic that both derives from social contexts and actively construes them. Rather than see language as a fixed and static code, the preferred metaphor of behaviorist and generativist notions of language, or as a system of arbitrary signs, as Ferdinand de Saussure’s language analysis did, SFL focuses on the meaning potentialities of language in use. It follows that for an educational context, the critical question is how students best acquire the social meaning and form mappings of a second language that instantiate those social shared meaning potentials. James Paul Gee, one of the foremost United States scholars in literacy and education, puts it this way:
I argue for a sociocultural perspective on what is involved in literacy and language learning at any level, whether for children or adults. This perspective makes two key claims. First: people do not primarily learn language at the level of things like “English” or “Russian.” Rather, they learn one or another of a great many different varieties of English that I will call “social languages.” . . .
The second claim is that, in anything like the traditional ways in which philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have talked about meaning for things, like words, phrases, and sentences (e.g. in terms of definitions, concepts, stored representations), at the level of social languages, there is no such thing as meaning. In social languages, meaning is not something that is “stored” in the head and then looked up or accessed. It is actually “customized,” built, or assembled . . . here and now, on the fly, on the spot, “on line” when and as we speak/write or listen/read. (13)
What Gee calls social languages, the specific ways of talking/listening or writing/reading that result in different lexicogrammatical resources, systemic-functional linguistics has described in terms of register and, more recently, in terms of genre. Though variation exists in the definition of genre, for example, as typification of rhetorical action (Miller); as regularities of staged, goal-oriented social processes (Martin); or as consistency of communicative purposes (Swales), a key characteristic of genres, as highlighted by Vijai K. Bahtia, is that they reflect disciplinary cultures and focus on “conventionalised communicative events embedded within disciplinary or professional practices” (23). That conventionalization enables both an analysis of various textual genres and a genre-based pedagogy that powerfully links the prototypicality of textual organization, as it is represented in the notion of genre, to carefully scaffolded pedagogies (see the work of the New London Group; see also Christie; Hyland; Kalantzis and Cope; and Johns). It does so by linking the now ubiquitous notion of task to the diverse genres that are addressed in instruction, transforming them into genre-based tasks that enhance students’ critically important metalinguistic awareness of how language in use works.
From such narrowly drawn educational considerations, let us conclude by returning once more to a global perspective. In proposing literacy as a framework for advanced second language acquisition, I wish to capture the need to educate young people for the undisputed complexity of human meaning making in and through language, now heightened in dramatically changing and potentially unstable knowledge-based societies. Given the additional reality of multilingual and multicultural societies, fostering advanced abilities in at least two languages—for most American students, English and one second language—is at the heart of education that colleges and universities must now provide. The goal is to create multicompetent users whose resources for meaning making have been expanded through knowledge of several languages.
Such a sociocultural approach to language contrasts with prevailing interpretations of the humanities in American higher education. In a comprehensive discussion, David Pan interprets the role of the humanities in the university to be the consequence of an inappropriate assumption about the universality of knowledge that led to a decoupling from particular sociocultural interests, part of the marginalization of religion in higher education. At that historical moment, the humanities fashioned themselves into the leftover placeholder for universal moral values. However, multiculturalism has exposed the humanities as themselves representing a particular value system that is closely linked to the nation-state and, more generally, to the value system of secular Western societies.
For that reason, the repeated appeal to the humanities and to interdisciplinarity as a solution to our problems is a questionable response to the current situation of multicultural and pluralist societies that wrestle with the role they should accord to beliefs, values, and religion in public spaces.1 For that reason, too, it would appear that Robert Scholes’s exhortation in an MLA Newsletter is incomplete, if for no other reason than it does not sufficiently recognize the limitations of the humanities with regard to capturing the cultural groundedness, if not to say the ideological positioning of multiculturalism and multilingualism. Having recognized two polar opposites that Scholes identifies as two powerful ideological systems of value, one that is materialistic, technical, and pragmatic and the other that is spiritual and fundamentalist, he states:
What we must do . . . is to occupy vigorously that middle ground between a pragmatism without principles and a fundamentalism with a rigid and restricted set of principles. We need to insist on the value of dialogue, in literature and all other texts, and we need to incorporate the sacred texts of religion and political belief into our curricula, along with texts from the newer media.
In the light of what we now know about meaning making through languages, that middle ground may not exist, at least not in the way the humanities have idealistically fashioned it. That is true despite Scholes’s otherwise attractive recommendation that “we need to teach strategies of interpretation and the decoding of ideology across this entire range of textual objects. We must teach how language works, how texts work, how culture itself works.” Rather than that neat reserve of the middle ground, what is likely to exist are numerously overlapping discursive spaces—“Discourses,” as Gee calls them—that carry the inevitable quality of ideology as interpretive frameworks (see Gee; see also Pan’s discussion of Max Weber’s position). If that is the case, a metalinguistically reflective acquisition of a rich array of social languages within ideologically marked Discourses might actually bring us closer to the foremost educational task facing multilingual societies. Gee refers to that task as enabling learners to become moral agents in the contemporary world as they appropriate the “political geography of Discourses” (31)—a world that is characterized by and requires from its citizens the acquisition of multiple literacies.
1. For a closer analysis, see Kramsch; Langland; Stanton; and the essays in the special issue of the ADFL Bulletin (Language and Literature).
Bhatia, Vijai K. “A Generic View of Academic Discourse.” Academic Discourse. Ed. John Flowerdew. Harlow, Eng.: Longman, 2002. 21–39.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Advanced L2 Literacy: Beyond Option or Privilege.” ADFL Bulletin 36.1 (2004): 52–60. [Show Article]
———. “Constructing Curricula in Collegiate Foreign Language Departments.” Learning Foreign and Second Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship. Ed. Byrnes. New York: MLA, 1998. 262–95.
———. “Content-Based Foreign Language Instruction.” Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition: Methods, Theory, and Practice. Ed. Cristina Sanz. Washington: Georgetown UP, 2005. 282–302.
———. “Reconsidering Graduate Students’ Education as Teachers: It Takes a Department!” Modern Language Journal 85 (2001): 512–30.
Christie, Frances. “Genres as Choice.” The Place of Genre in Learning: Current Debates. Ed. I. Reid. Geelong, Austral.: Deakin U, 1987. 22–34.
“Conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Languages in the Academy: Constructing Dialogue, Imagining Change.” PMLA 117 (2002): 1233–94.
“Developing Multiple Literacies: A Curriculum Renewal Project of the German Department at Georgetown University, 1997–2000.” http://www3.georgetown.edu/departments/ german/programs/curriculum/index.html.
Freeman, Donald. “Language, Sociocultural Theory, and L2 Teacher Education: Examining the Technology of Subject Matter and the Architecture of Instruction.” Hawkins 169–97.
Gee, James Paul. “Learning Language as a Matter of Learning Social Languages within Discourses.” Hawkins 13–31.
Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold, 1994.
Hawkins, Margaret R., ed. Language Learning and Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Approach. Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual Matters, 2004.
Hyland, Ken. “Genre: Language, Context, and Literacy.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 22 (2002): 113–35.
Johns, Ann M., ed. Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2002.
Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. “A Multiliteracies Pedagogy: A Pedagogical Supplement.” Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. New York: Routledge, 2000. 239–48.
Kern, Richard. Literacy and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
———. “Reconciling the Language-Literature Split through Literacy.” ADFL Bulletin 33.3 (2002): 20–34. [Show Article]
Kramsch, Claire. “Alien Wisdoms in English and Foreign Language Programs.” PMLA 117 (2002): 1245–47.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
Langacker, Ronald. “Conceptualization, Symbolization, and Grammar.” The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure. Ed. Michael Tomasello. Vol. 1. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1998. 1–39.
Langland, Elizabeth. “Collaborating across Disciplines: ‘It’s a Small World After All.’” PMLA 117 (2002): 1236–41.
Language and Literature in the Academy: Papers from the 2003 ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar. Spec. issue of ADFL Bulletin 36.1 (2004). [Show Issue]
Lantolf, James P. “Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning: Introduction.” Modern Language Journal 78 (1994): 418–20.
Martin, James R. “Genre and Literacy—Modeling Context in Educational Linguistics.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 13 (1993): 141–72.
Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–67.
The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 60–92.
Pan, David. “The Crisis of the Humanities and the End of the University.” Telos 111 (1998): 69–106.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Building a New Public Idea about Language.” Profession 2003. New York: MLA, 2003. 110–19.
Reich, Robert B. “Story Time: How Democrats Can Relearn the Art of Political Narrative.” New Republic 28 Mar. 2005: 16–19.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. New York: McGraw, 1966.
Saussy, Haun. “Language and Literature on the Pedagogical Continuum; or, Life Begins after Proficiency.” ADFL Bulletin 36.2 (2005): 17–21. [Show Article]
Schleppegrell, Mary J. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2004.
Scholes, Robert. “Who Are We? Where Are We? What Is to Be Done?” MLA Newsletter 36.4 (2004): 3.
Stanton, Domna C. “From Imperialism to Collaboration: How Do We Get There?” PMLA 117 (2002): 1266–71.
Swaffar, Janet, and Katherine Arens. Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach through Multiple Literacies. New York: MLA, 2005.
Swales, John M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
© 2005 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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