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FOR most of us who teach in a postsecondary foreign language department, our scholarly activities conjure up a universal image: the literary researcher, poring over texts (ancient or modern) and bent on the discovery of truths hitherto hidden or incorrectly interpreted by other scholars. In undergraduate and graduate school, research meant reading literary texts and critiques of them, then providing interpretation of those texts. As we quickly learned, most faculty members in foreign language departments engage in research based on literary analysis and criticism in which a theory--structuralism, postmodernism, feminist theory, queer theory--is applied to a literary work. This literary analysis finds its way into lecture notes, scholarly presentations, articles in professional journals, and book-length monographs with topics such as Don Quixote's journey into Hell or Petrarch's female voice. These presentations and publications constitute the necessary--and often sufficient--proof that foreign language faculty members are eligible for and probably worthy of tenure and promotion through the academic ranks.
A possible change in what might constitute recognized research activity for certain faculty members was fore shadowed two or three decades ago when these faculty members were assigned some nontraditional academic responsibilities. By the early 1970s, at most institutions with graduate programs in the various foreign languages, it became common for a faculty member or two in each foreign language department to take on extra duties as supervisor and trainer of teaching assistants and as coordinator of basic or undergraduate languages. These faculty members, whose coordinating and supervising responsibilities brought them into daily contact with issues concerning learning and teaching language skills, began to do some rudimentary research on these issues. Nevertheless, by choice or obligation, they continued to engage in traditional literary studies research. Any language-classroom-based scholarship that a few of these faculty members might have engaged in was viewed by their peers as peripheral to the substantive work that must be done in literary studies. All faculty members were to be evaluated on the basis of the traditional scholarship alone.
This view of what constitutes appropriate academic research has been reinforced by the hiring--especially in very large foreign language departments--of non- research-track, non-tenure-earning instructors as supervisors of teaching assistants and coordinators of language programs. The quasi-staff, quasi-faculty positions that these instructors hold reinforce colleagues' assumptions that the work these supervisors and coordinators do does not embody recognizable scholarship. Thus at most institutions for many years, that proverbial line in the sand has remained visible and unbreachable. Faculty members who explore issues of second language teaching and learning in the college classroom remain on one side of the line; faculty members who do "real" research have crossed over to the other side.
In the last five years or so, a number of us in the profession have begun to see some blurring in the line between "real" research and what "those other faculty members" do. For those who follow job trends through the MLA Job Information List, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other sources, it is clear that more and more tenure-track generalist positions include instructor supervision and program coordination. Although many of us in the past discovered that these duties were tacked on as an afterthought, in today's academic environment advertisements include such responsibilities from the outset. Furthermore, owing to the efforts of ACTFL's American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators and other professional organizations, more and more exclusively supervisor and coordinator positions are offered as tenure-track jobs. Research activities that are consonant with supervisors' and coordinators' assigned teaching and other responsibilities are coming to be recognized by academic hierarchies as, at least, reasonably legitimate. In an increasingly litigious society, faculty members too are recognizing that assigned duties are the basis on which they are to be evaluated for tenure and promotion considerations and that university administrations are paying heed to the validity of those assignments.
What is probably more important is the gradual but observable shift in perception of the value of what has traditionally been labeled pedagogical research. Although the best members of our profession have always been committed to improving their teaching and raising the standards of pedagogical excellence in their discipline, in recent years public opinion--often reflected in legislative and administrative actions--has focused on directing faculty members "back to teaching." Heralded by such scathing attacks on academia as Charles Sykes's Profscam, we are now rounding out a full decade of activity to return faculty members to the classroom, to reward excellence in teaching with so-called teaching incentive programs, and to incorporate teaching and learning issues into our research--no matter what the discipline. Teaching preparation programs for new faculty members and TAs are now the norm, while nationally recognized activities such as the Council of Graduate Schools' Preparing Future Faculty consortium enhance the climate for classroom-based research. From the academic department to upper-level administration to national organizations, expectations for research are changing as we all demonstrate a commitment to improve teaching and learning in higher education.
A field of inquiry that has become particularly attractive to foreign language supervisors and coordinators is second language acquisition, a subdiscipline of applied linguistics that encompasses a broad range of research activity. Researchers' interests span inquiries into testing and evaluation, grammar instruction, learning styles, reading strategies, language anxiety, and many dozens if not hundreds of other issues concerned with second language acquisition. It is almost a foregone conclusion that foreign language supervisors and coordinators would want to engage in this kind of research, given their daily contact with these issues and their desire to improve teaching and learning for the instructors and students for whom they are responsible. Not only does second language acquisition research provide intellectual satisfaction for the researcher, but in today's changing academic climate it is also receiving more professional and collegial recognition.
Foreign language supervisors and coordinators are in just the right place at the right time to embark on a research program that is essentially a classroom-based field of inquiry. They have primary responsibility for most of the elements or variables that may need to be controlled in the design of second language acquisition research projects. They have direct access to many of the necessary components of this research: instructional settings such as classrooms and language-learning centers (computer and audio labs) as well as foreign language students who can serve as subjects or participants. They have substantial control over the curriculum. They decide whether there will be six, seven, or eight quizzes during the introductory course and whether the future tense will be on the final exam. They determine whether the writing-assistant software will be required for intermediate-level composition work. They often have sole responsibility for choosing texts and ancillary materials as well as other departmental resources.
In addition, supervisors and coordinators are typically responsible for course and instructor scheduling. They can decide, for instance, whether they want all four native speakers in the TA corps to teach the introductory course or whether the native speakers should be assigned, one per level, across all the language courses that are offered. The coordinators provide the instruction and the training of TAs and others in a preferred teaching methodology through methods courses, workshops, or weekly meetings. Most supervisors have strong contacts and good working relationships with faculty and staff members across campus, enabling them to borrow a graduate student in statistics for help in analyzing test scores or to have an administrative assistant in the admissions office provide some data on the incoming freshman class. These faculty members have access to the university's student database and know how to use it.
Probably the greatest source available to supervisors and coordinators is their graduate students. Whether these students serve as research subjects, faculty members' assistants, or coresearchers, they have an interest and stake in the issues, design, and outcome of second language acquisition projects and will volunteer their time and energy to make sure that the research is successful. The close supervisory relationship that coordinators have with TAs carries over to the research arena. As a supervisor of fifteen French TAs and a basic-language coordinator of some sixty sections of introductory and intermediate language courses, I can illustrate how my position (like that of colleagues at many institutions) affords me extraordinary opportunities to conduct classroom-based research. I take as a brief example a study I completed last year with Carolyn Lally and show how our professional responsibilities supported this particular project.
Our study examined the effects of two modes of grammar instruction--an explicit versus a hybrid approach--on the performance of introductory college French students enrolled in a communicatively oriented course. Students in a control or explicit grammar instruction group listened to grammar presentations given by their instructor and then participated in manipulative drills and communicative activities. Students in an experimental or hybrid instruction group learned all their grammatical structures and did mechanical practice outside class, working with a textbook at home. For the experimental group, class time was reserved for communicative activities. All the usual variables (language experience, GPA, SAT scores, instructor, etc.) were controlled for both groups. My coresearcher and I were able to demonstrate statistically that the experimental- or hybrid-approach subjects could achieve significantly higher scores on a nationally recognized evaluation instrument (the SAT II) than the control- or explicit-instruction subjects could produce. The results of the study suggested that students could be more successful language learners if they were in charge of their own explicit grammar instruction than if they received instruction from the teacher. For the purposes of this essay, all the details of this research design and its outcome are less important than the facets of the project that were facilitated, indeed made possible at all, because of my position as TA supervisor and language program coordinator.
The question that prompted the study derived from my dissatisfaction with an introductory text that emphasized explicit grammar instruction. I chose a new text and decided to phase out the old one over the course of three semesters. During this period of overlap, I assigned the same TA to teach using the two very different texts and methods. This TA had received extensive training in the use of the two methods, and I monitored his teaching through weekly meetings and observations. I was able to obtain all the needed background information on the potential experimental and control subjects either from the TA or from the university's student database. After receiving the standard approval from the university's Office of Human Research, I secured permission from the student subjects to access normally restricted information (SAT scores, etc.) about them.
My familiarity with nationally recognized language evaluation instruments led me to contact Educational Testing Service and to receive permission to use the SAT II test at no charge for this study. When the student subjects took the SAT II, I arranged with the TA to have one class period available for this activity and to have his students receive a small bonus grade for participating in the test. A doctoral student served as my coresearcher throughout the project, doing a lot of the initial organizing and serving as the primary statistician in the data analysis phase. A colleague, who had let me sit in on his Statistics for Dummies course, offered backup advice when my graduate student and I got stuck. Once the study was complete, I invited my TAs to come to an informal departmental presentation on the research and to discuss the implications of the project's results on their own teaching.
From beginning to end, this particular second language acquisition research project was enhanced, probably made possible, by virtue of my position as TA supervisor and coordinator. I had control over the choice of text and teaching method, had contact with likely student subjects, could arrange the curriculum to support the requirements of the study, and had access to human and material resources that the project required. Like many foreign language supervisors and coordinators, I was in the right place at the right time to engage in this type of classroom-based research.
Although foreign language supervisors and coordinators enjoy ever-expanding opportunities to conduct research into second language teaching and learning, these opportunities are not free of risk. For almost every advantage identified above there is probably a cautionary note that must be sounded. The primary areas of concern involve collaboration, control, and ethics.
More so than almost any type of traditional literary research, classroom-based second language acquisition projects rely on collaboration. If faculty colleagues, department heads, or university administrators do not support this work or if they place obstacles in the path of researchers engaged in it, these researchers seldom have recourse to using other settings to accomplish their goals. Graduate (and sometimes undergraduate) students may lack the ability or experience to serve as collaborators, leaving the researcher solely responsible for a complex study. Departmental or other staff support may be inadequate or unavailable. The researcher cannot assume that staff members will be willing or able to supply required support. Before scholars embark on second language acquisition research, they must carefully consider all aspects of collaboration.
The second issue of concern is control, that is, those areas of responsibility that supervisors and coordinators carry out and that permit them most readily to take charge. Their spheres of responsibility can shift or disappear, sometimes without warning, leaving them with little or no control of a project. The department can institute curricular changes that mitigate against proposed research. Coordinators can be assigned additional or conflicting duties that interfere with carrying out a project. Circumstances within the study--for instance, students may change their minds about participating--can cause a loss of control. Materials required for the research may not reach the department in time. The supplementary budget used to pay the student assistant may be swept, leaving no one to videotape the project. The comfort that supervisors and coordinators feel about being in charge of a program where classroom research can reliably be carried out has to be tempered by the reality of the many ways researchers might lose control of a project.
The final area of concern, and surely the most important one, is ethics. Although professional conduct in every type of research dictates that scholars must follow personal and discipline-specific ethics, classroom-based second language acquisition research requires scholars to exercise even greater vigilance and prudence in designing and carrying out their projects. Foreign language supervisors and program coordinators are placed in positions of authority that could be abused for the sake of a successful piece of research. They could assign only the best TAs to teach experimental classes. They could weight the final exam to support a research hypothesis. They could fail to provide certain groups of students access to resources available to other groups of students. They could require that TAs purchase certain ancillary materials because those materials will be used in the research. The list of possible ethical abuses is a long one. I cite this concern as the most important one to acknowledge the degree of authority coordinators exercise over people's lives--those of the instructors who are supervised as well as the students they teach--and to advise faculty members that they must make the same ethical decisions in their research as they do in all their other areas of responsibility.
Even with the many admonitions associated with classroom research, foreign language supervisors and co or di na tors find themselves in a unique professional environment that presents frequent opportunities to pursue research. The prospects for classroom-based research appear favorable, especially as many faculty members begin to look at the effects of technology on second language acquisition and instruction. Further, as our colleagues who are engaged in more traditional research pursuits begin to see how second language acquisition research can improve teaching and learning, they will become more vocal supporters of this work. Collegial acceptance and institutional recognition should help integrate second language acquisition research into the academic fabric. For foreign language supervisors and coordinators, teaching, service, and research can become complementary activities, each activity infusing the others with ideas and energy. For all of us in the profession, this is indeed a worthy goal.
The author is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, November 1997, Nashville.
LeBlanc, Leona B., and Carolyn G. Lally. "A Comparison of Instructor- Mediated versus Student-Mediated Explicit Grammar Instruction in a Communicatively Based Introductory French Course." French Review 71 (1998): 734-46.
Sykes, Charles J. Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. Washington: Regnery, 1988.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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