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The Bulletin is pleased to offer the following nine comments in response to Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (Yonkers: Natl. Standards in Foreign Lang. Educ. Project, 1996). Our original solicitation invited opinion pieces on the implications of the Standards for higher education. Topics we suggested included the teaching of language and literature (the curriculum), the preparation of students entering postsecondary institutions, teacher education, student placement in college and university classes, and articulation. To date, we have received seventeen responses; we will publish the rest in the Winter 2000 issue. We hope this forum will enrich the conversation about the Standards and stimulate further discussion.
WILL Standards for Foreign Language Learning have an impact on higher education? On the one hand, at the level of K-12, the Standards are a reality. They are serving as the basis for state curricular guidelines, are being incorporated into K-12 instructional materials, are the subject of numerous workshops, sessions at conferences, and journal articles, and have been endorsed by the MLA Executive Council (31 May 1996). This groundswell of activity suggests that K-12 foreign language learning and teaching is likely to change significantly over the next decade. On the other hand, at the postsecondary level, Heidi Byrnes is less than optimistic when she states that "for foreign language departments the repercussions of an inability to change have become particularly destructive in the last few years" (Byrnes 8). Seemingly, therefore, two sets of opposing attitudes exist: K-12 educators moving swiftly toward the implementation of the Standards, college faculty stubbornly maintaining tradition and the status quo. As with all such extreme characterizations, the truth is more likely to be found somewhere in the middle. The documents (e.g., Standards, state guidelines) notwithstanding, K-12 teachers, like their college counterparts, range from the most innovative to the most staunchly traditional. The transition to a true and consistent Standards education, implemented in teaching and learning, is therefore likely to take many years. It stands to reason, then, that these transition years offer a unique opportunity at both the K-12 and the college levels for a reexamination of all aspects of foreign language education, with the Standards serving as the guiding principles and the innovators providing the leadership.
While many questions remain about the implementation of the Standards, one of the most important is whether postsecondary education will be a willing participant and partner in the changes occurring in K-12 and, it is to be hoped, beyond. An affirmative answer raises numerous substantive issues. Who in higher education is saying yes? (Is it the administrators, the faculty, or both?) Who are the change agents? (Is it primarily the faculty involved in language acquisition or does it include the faculty in literature and culture studies?) When and how will the changes occur? (How long will we wait before we begin?) And, most important, what kind of changes will be needed?
Clearly, the time has come to abandon the "reactive" wait-and-see attitude, usually resulting in no change at all. Or, as Dorothy James puts it, "Instead of worrying patronizingly about whether Standards-educated students will be adequately prepared to take our college-level courses, we would be better advised for our own sakes to worry about how to prepare ourselves to teach Standards-educated students" (13). Now rather than later is the time to collaborate with colleagues in K-12 so that extended foreign language study, as advocated by the framers of the Standards, will indeed span from K through 16. Any other position on the part of the faculty could have dire, if not catastrophic, consequences for college programs.
In order to begin to define and elaborate some of the changes that college foreign language programs will have to undergo, it is first necessary to understand the "new" student, the Standards-educated student who will arrive in college in a few years. What are likely to be this student's characteristics? Inferences can be drawn from the Standards document itself.
Among other things, the Standards-educated student:
How should we in higher education respond to these "different" students? How do we keep them interested in languages when they arrive in college? How do we build on what they already have instead of just repeating it? How do we challenge them? How do we motivate them to continue their foreign language study? Certainly, finding answers to these questions is neither simple nor the same for everyone; we might all well use as a starting point, however, the notion of flexibility. We at the college and university level need to rethink our traditional ideas of courses and classes, materials, classrooms, and majors in order to make them more flexible and therefore better able to attract and retain these "new" students.
Most of us continue to equate courses with classes. We bring together a fixed number of students for set periods of time (minutes, days, weeks) and expect them to develop the same skills at the same speed and with the help of the same activities. Moreover, even when the instructor steps off center stage and allows students to do group work, he or she still controls the pace of the class. Such a rigid structure--minimally successful, at best (as revealed by dropout and retention rates from one language level to another)--promises to become even more problematic as Standards-educated students arrive on our campuses.
Beginning and intermediate language courses will need to deal more and more with mixed populations where students with a year or two or three years of traditional preparation find themselves next to students from Standards-based curricula or students for whom the particular language may be new but who have already had a K-12 or an 8-12 experience with another language. Perhaps the individualization experience of the 1960s, unsupported as it was by efficient technologies, needs to be reintroduced in order to ensure flexibility. For example, small groups of students (similar language backgrounds, similar goals and interests) can proceed through the courses at their own speed: those able to accelerate can finish a course in the middle of a term and immediately begin the next level; those who need extra time may take a term and a half to complete a course.
At more advanced levels, where students' goals and interests diverge more widely, we need to multiply the available options. At larger universities, we can continue to develop special-interest courses (e.g., Business German, Spanish for Health Professionals, French for Engineers) and to expand language-across-the-curriculum opportunities. At smaller institutions, we can multiply the options not between courses but rather within courses. A series of films can serve as the basis for two separate courses taught simultaneously--one emphasizing speaking, the other writing. Students can share certain activities (e.g., viewing and initial discussion of the film) and then separate to pursue different modes of analysis and of feedback. Conversely, two parallel and simultaneous courses for focusing on listening and reading can initially separate to explore current events through different media (television and radio, newspapers and magazines, Internet) before coming back together to share and discuss what they've discovered. In addition, each of the preceding could be clustered with a contemporary culture course. Courses focusing on literature could share literary skills and approaches before allowing students to apply these techniques to texts from different periods or cultures.
Finally, as extended K-12 curricula are implemented, there should be little or no need for beginning and intermediate courses in college, except for a few sections to accommodate students who wish to change languages. The efforts of faculty and teaching assistants can therefore be redirected toward individualized guidance, language for special-purposes courses, languages across the curriculum, and a wide array of campus foreign language activities. The notion of the teaching load will have to be defined based not on number of credits or courses per term but rather on a combination of number of students and the hours of interaction with students in both a class and a nonclass setting, in both a real and a virtual environment.
Although publishers have begun to expand their materials to include a variety of multimedia components, these ancillaries remain just that: add-ons to the textbook (still often grammar-driven and topically limited), which remains the focus of most beginning and intermediate courses. Flexible classes will require flexible materials. If textbooks are to remain viable options for courses where students work at varying paces, they will need to provide multiple points of access (text, computer, CD, video) as well as a broader range of topical material, including multiple types of activities and assessment instruments, to accommodate students with diverse learner styles and learning objectives. It is clear that Standards-educated students accustomed to working with a variety of authentic materials (films, TV and radio broadcasts, popular literature and school textbooks from the target cultures, Internet sites, etc.) will not be content to rely exclusively on pedagogically altered, semiauthentic written and oral materials.
In order to allow for flexible classes using multiple types of materials, we need to rethink the design of the spaces in which we work. Classrooms filled with rows of desks or bordered with rectangular sets of tables and chairs and separated from the technology labs serve as obstacles to what we will want to ask students to do. Assuming some continued need for shared space (rather than a move exclusively to "virtual" classrooms), we have to design integrated learning spaces (technology-supported classrooms) that allow students to move smoothly and quickly from a small-group practice session to an individual work session at a computer or a VCR to an assessment conference with the instructor to a large-group discussion or lecture or film presentation. At the same time, we must make clear to students that the "classroom" extends well beyond the walls of these new learning spaces. We will need to encourage students to use the language beyond the school setting by engaging directly (in nearby multilingual communities) or indirectly (letters, keypals, Internet chat groups) with speakers of the target language. In addition, we will have to continue to increase opportunities for study abroad (not just in language-based programs), internships, and other types of experiential education.
A quick glance at the catalogs of almost all colleges and universities reveals a section describing the major in terms of numbers of courses and/or credits. To accommodate the "new" student, we must recognize that education is not exclusively a function of seat time. We must accept the idea that students do not all need to take the same courses (many programs already allow some electives in the major) but also that students do not all need to take the same number of courses. One possible way of rethinking a language major is in terms of a combination (50%-50%? the percentages can be argued) of competencies and experiences. The competencies are not defined in terms of courses but rather of abilities. Students with a K-12 Standards experience may well be able to demonstrate some or all of the required competencies without taking any additional courses. Other students might need varying numbers of courses to arrive at a point where they can demonstrate these competencies. The experiences, on the other hand, would require students to devote additional time to the language, through courses as well as through a combination of activities such as research and teaching apprenticeships, study abroad, internships, work in a target language community, and collaborative research projects. A major conceived in this fashion has the advantage of maintaining (perhaps even increasing) the quality of language performance while also encouraging students to continue their language study. In addition, it opens up the option of creating new programs--for example, a three-two program (three years undergraduate, two years graduate) leading to the baccalaureate and the MA in a foreign language in five years.
Clearly, breaking down our traditional ways of thinking about courses and classes, materials, classrooms, and majors has definite implications for our roles as language educators. We will need to embrace the fact that we are not just providers of knowledge and evaluators of achievement but also organizers, facilitators, motivators, and guides. For many of us, this description of our function is quite different from the image we brought with us as we left graduate school. It is very possible, however, that the continued success of our enterprise at the college and university level will depend on how willingly and imaginatively we take on the challenge offered by the generations of new students directly or indirectly affected by the advent of the Standards.
Jeannette D. Brager
Pennsylvania State University
Donald B. Rice
Hamline University
Byrnes, Heidi. "Steps to an Ecology of Foreign Language Departments." Introduction. Learning Foreign and Second Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship. Ed. Byrnes. New York: MLA, 1998. 1-22.
James, Dorothy. "The Impact on Higher Education of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 11.1 (1998): 11-14.
HAVING studied the Standards for Foreign Language Learning, I have to place myself in the category of those expressing guarded or not-so-guarded skepticism as to its overall benefit to language teaching. There are several points that I need to make before I give you my modest assessment. I am familiar with language teaching at this level only through the second-hand experience of having children in elementary and high schools who, between the two of them, have had several years of French, Latin, and Spanish in both public and private schools. I myself rarely teach language, and, when I do, it is mostly to graduate students whose Russian is already quite fluent and whose pedagogical purposes are very different from the ones discussed in Standards. One other thing that could identify me as a somewhat biased reader of the present document is that I was very much against the strictly proficiency-based language teaching on a college level when it was introduced--and almost forced on us--years back (for reasons I explain below).
I believe that there is more than one way, always, to teach any subject and that language is no exception. A good instructor should trust his or her instincts and techniques when they are based on years of experience, even if they do not correspond to the system currently in vogue. One's teaching is 20% pedagogy and 80% personality and drive, and one should choose methods that are effective with individual students and suit one's own individuality.
I am somewhat leery of words like accountability and measured outcomes being thrown around too casually. I am aware of the outside pressure, coming mostly from state legislatures, for measures that they can somehow use to evaluate our usefulness to society. Yet, we should not be too eager to accommodate their wishes without first explaining to them why some of these demands are plain naive and unrealistic. Granted that the "outcomes" can perhaps be more easily measured in languages than, say, in literature or history, but even here, as we all know, the peril may lie in providing too much of a system for something that often--and at times splendidly so--resists one.
I am aware that language teaching in schools--and frequently in colleges as well--leaves a lot to be desired. But the main problem, it seems to me, is not how languages are taught but how little they are taught, and how few of them are taught. For me to discuss the application of the standards to K-12 Russian would be a purely academic exercise, since I can probably count on my fingers how many schools in the United States are offering Russian on a regular basis at the moment.
When the proficiency-based system of language teaching was first introduced back in the late 1970s to early 1980s, its proponents tended to be rather dogmatic, which led to much polarization and bad blood among equally serious and conscientious professionals who simply happened to hold different views on what constitutes effective language learning. Now I watch the best college language instructors incorporate the best techniques of that system, so I'd be the last person to suggest that this early struggle was a total waste of our time. I use some of the techniques myself when I teach graduate students.
Likewise, there are plenty of excellent ideas, targets, and techniques in Standards. It's the eventual call for their universal use that I fear. I believe equally in eclectic approaches to teaching literature and to teaching language. I would like the worst experience of the proficiency battles not to be lost on us as we are contemplating standardizing language teaching in K-12. One should encourage teachers to try out different techniques and see for themselves whether these will work in their classrooms, given their particular students and their own temperaments, personalities, and systems of pedagogical values--but forcing them to adopt this system is probably very unwise. At a time when we all need to be united in demanding more funds for education in general--and for the teaching of languages in particular--this will only divide people in the field, not make them speak in one voice. The Standards materials are thoughtful, helpful, and often fun. It is their implementation that really concerns me and overshadows for me everything else, including the practical usefulness of the materials themselves.
Galya Diment
University of Washington
FOR anyone with a commitment to the learning of languages as vibrant means of communication, as the linguistics codes of complex societies, and as one basis for extensive arrays of cultural productions, Standards comprises an exceptionally fine series of proposals for the recommitment of the language teaching programs to making a notable contribution to the educational well-being of this country. One may always wish to find details that are either incompletely elaborated (I find them too functionalist and insufficiently perceptive regarding the incommensurability of different cultures) or even distorted (there is an abiding assumption, particularly evident in the section on communities, that there is a homogeneous and seamless web of phenomena from one culture to another; in fact, access to the resources envisioned, such as the Internet, vary radically from one society to another). Nevertheless, the goal was to provide a cognitive and epistemological model of considerable complexity that would be intellectually compelling to sectors of the profession other than just the specialists in pedagogy, and it is my conviction that this document is able to do that and with considerable eloquence.
My concern, however, is not for details of the report or for the extent to which it will be adopted by the profession. Indeed, since there is no competing series of standards, aside from the rather chaotic ways in which we are now going about the teaching of languages (as instruments of social and cultural communication or as whatever else they might be), the Standards will be adopted in some form or another. Rather, my concern is both for how they will be adopted and--of even greater concern than how they will be adopted--for whether they can really be adopted at all in a way that will allow them to be tested empirically. To be sure, there may be programs that are essentially in compliance with these recommendations, whether they be small programs that present a minimum of logistical problems or large programs that have enough of a trained faculty-instructor-teaching assistant mix to carry out the recommendations in a programmatically meaningful way.
My concerns are as much logistical as they are pedagogical. Any program based on a set of overarching principles requires the participation of a significant portion of the teaching team, and it requires individuals who are both trained in the practices those principles take for granted and committed to the underlying conceptual propositions. For example, one abiding principle is that language is an instrument chiefly of sociocultural communication, that it should be taught as such (rather than as, say, an archive of the high culture of a society), and that students are enrolled in the program with, if only by implication, a similar set of beliefs and goals: similar with respect to each other and similar to those of the instruction team.
One of the ironies of modern language instruction in the United States is that a certain amount of homogeneity is likely to characterize the students enrolled in so-called lesser-taught languages, while it is not likely to characterize those enrolled in the most commonly taught ones. French may continue to enroll mostly students committed to the belief in the language as a cultural archive, while Spanish, because it is the default language, enrolls students for reasons that are too numerous to tabulate, although probably primarily because it continues to be reputed to be the "easiest" language (the compelling argument of racism for the choice for study of a language). Perhaps students take Korean or Portuguese for a multiplicity of reasons, but one doubts if they go much beyond a dominant trio: (1) they are heritage speakers of the language; (2) they are former Mormon missionaries; (3) they are business majors.
Since departments can hardly change their faculty en masse in order to comply with new proposals for language instruction, what usually happens is that commitment for implementation is made in terms of a junior-staff component and a mixed team of instructors and TAs. One would not want to reject out of hand the likelihood that language instruction is more effectively executed when it is in the hands of such a team. There are many reasons, however, why it cannot and should not be relegated to this level of staffing. Let's leave aside how awkward it is to have a language program in which senior faculty members, aside from not teaching a truly representative sampling of students on all levels, can be both ignorant and unconcerned about what is happening below the third-year level--or even the fourth-year and graduate levels. We all routinely decry this fact, but nothing much ever gets done about it.
More to the point is the way in which state legislators and boards of regents are demanding that "regular" faculty be involved in lower-division teaching--certainly for reasons that are driven more by politics than by a concern for the rational utilization of faculty resources. Institutions have often responded to the mantra of "regular faculty in the lower-division classroom" by hiring a second-class-citizen tier of instructors: they have little voice in the affairs of the department (they may often even suffer discrimination and outright hostility), but they do count as "ranked faculty."
If chairs are not disturbed at the idea of this act of camouflage and the internal and external political consequences it might have, they should be deeply concerned about putting a program that reaches so many students and involves, in the case of the Standards so many interlocking issues that will impact on the culture of language study at all levels in the hands of junior (which almost automatically means untenured) faculty members. My concern is not so much that such faculty members are vulnerable to the dissatisfaction of senior colleagues: indeed, what in effect happens with this staffing model is that senior faculty members are held hostage in a sense by the junior faculty member running the program: the defection of this individual can create chaos, with at least a two-year hiatus in getting proper supervision again for the program.
But even if there is stability in the lower-division language program and even if there is satisfaction, if not evidence to support it, with how the junior-level instructional team is working out, there can be little question that such a team is, to all intents and purposes, cut off from the rest of the faculty, which is, precisely, happy to have the team's members off doing their thing and leaving the "really substantive" courses to the senior faculty members. There is some rationale for this belief, if I may be permitted the heresy of stating so, in that in a more perfect world of academic study in the United States, lower-division language instruction would not be represented in the university, except perhaps for intensive courses in languages that are third and fourth ones for the student or languages that, practically speaking, there is no expectation could be studied at the preuniversity level. But since we do not live in anything like a perfect academic world, first- and second-year Spanish, French, and German are going to remain a part of college- and university-level language classrooms. The question is how integral a part.
This brings me to my principal concern over the Standards: whether there is any way to be hopeful that they will be part of an integrated language program at all levels, from first-year through doctoral studies. There once were integrated language programs, in some remote past when languages were taught as tools to access an elite institution of literature. In those days, fully ranked faculty members taught at all levels, and there was something like a continuity between lower-level language instruction, which was grounded in literary texts, and graduate study. Full professors were likely to teach lower-division language because they were participating in an integrated program, one in which they could make, in a simpler form, the same observations to their beginning language students that they could to their graduate ones. Perhaps this is an idealized picture, but it is worth recalling it because the teaching culture envisioned by Standards really represents the opportunity to return to such an integrated teaching and learning universe. The earlier forms of this universe were shattered by the deep divisions that emerged with the use of models grounded (often quite improperly) on modern linguistics for lower-division language teaching that presented a learning program that had little to do with what was being done either in the upper-division language courses (which remained pretty much a model of composition based on traditional grammar) or in parallel courses in literature and culture (that is, the narrow range before the growth of cultural studies).
It seems to many of us who have read Standards with some sort of attention to and agreement with its structural principles that the "weave" of the "five C's" is not going to mean very much if it is just a platform for first- and second-year instruction. Even if it is carried on into the third-year language classroom, that is simply not enough. I have become increasingly committed personally to models drawn from cultural studies for the teaching of (in my case) courses related to Latin America: I don't say "for the teaching of Latin American literature" because these models bring with them teaching about many other forms of cultural production than just literature, and often things (e.g., sociopolitical writing) that may seem to belong to the province of social science departments. Not only do these models require a far more advanced grasp of the language than traditional teaching provides--that is, viewing a film requires language skills much more honed than those needed for reading most contemporary novels--but they also require far more advanced knowledge about societies and their culture than is provided by the glossy colored pictures, often of tourist stereotypes, that accompany most beginning language "packages" (I have long objected strenuously to the dominance of peasant folklore and middle-class modernity these images rely on). Viewing a film, in fact, may require less linguistic knowledge than cultural knowledge.
In any event, the application of the Standards is going to require far more than an efficient lower-division teaching team, no matter how collegial that team's place in the department. If upper-division language courses, survey courses in literature and culture, and monographic courses at the highest graduate levels do not endorse their principles, they do not stand much of a chance in accomplishing their goal, which is to make United States students in the twenty-first century, as blocks of academic cohorts, truly learned in languages for the first time in the history of this country. Certainly, many of the principles will require "thickening" in order to satisfy the intellectual demands of graduate teaching and even the best of upper-division undergraduate teaching. But they are never going to be more than another task-force exercise if chairs, the governing committees of the faculty, and individual faculty members do not begin to explore how they can be used to underlie an entire curriculum of foreign language learning.
David William Foster
Arizona State University
THOUGHTS of a new millennium have evoked much excitement as the human race anticipates the potential challenges of life in a new era. Eager to march into the millennium is the foreign language profession, armed with new standards and a resolve to change the direction of language instruction and learning. This "grassroots" impetus for change in foreign language teaching, as Dorothy James refers to it, grew out of the disconcerting reality that programs across levels simply were not preparing learners to function as educated citizens in a multilingual and multicultural society. The growing consensus at the precollegiate level that a new path for language instruction needed to be paved, emerging national support for content standards across disciplines, and federal funding to subsidize the creation of national standards set the stage for the publication of the K-12 foreign language Standards (soon to be language-specific and expanded to K-16 levels). Leaders representing various languages and levels of instruction, including those from higher education, carved out a vision for the profession that drew on exciting new research in language learning and decades of experiences teaching learners from elementary school through the college years.
As elementary and secondary school teachers are embracing new ways of delivering language instruction to address Standards-based goals, language-specific professional organizations are putting the final touches to adapted versions of the K-12 Standards that exemplify language-specific learning scenarios and, in most cases, are expanded to include expectations for the four years of college language study. One might say that we are in the middle of much hubbub to create a "seamless" set of standards for K-16 at least in part because of the tireless work by a group of university language leaders and innovators who are helping us envision how the spirit of the Standards might continue from the high school curriculum through college language programs. The impact many are hoping for at the postsecondary level is the evidence of "continuity and coherence" of Standards-based instruction and goals from high school through the postsecondary years (Kramsch). History has taught us, however, that the quest for program continuity hasn't been a catalyst for much change at the university level. In fact, higher education faculty members feel that the experience students receive in college should be very different from their high school experience. Just ask one of many students who are entering college, having just completed a proficiency-based, communication-focused high school program. You won't hear much about continuity of their language experiences--on the contrary, you will hear that their first encounter with the language consisted of a discrete-point, multiple-choice college placement test in which they were expected to analyze segments of grammar in the absence of any meaningful context. If we are going to discuss the impact of the Standards on the college language curriculum, we cannot embark on the continuity-and-coherence ship alone, even if it makes perfect sense from an educational standpoint. We don't have to look far, however, to find other reasons why higher education should give the Standards some consideration.
Over the past year, I have entered into discussions about the Standards with faculty members at my own and other institutions of higher learning. Three recurring responses surfaced regarding the perceived impact of the Standards on the college foreign language curriculum (by the way--none of the responses had anything to do with the concern for continuity of instruction):
1. Communication Standards? We already do that; there's not much new there for us.
2. Why do we need to connect with other disciplines? That's for the elementary school curriculum folks to worry about.
3. A university course is designed to develop people who can function as educated adults, not to serve the needs of tourists. Our courses must have significant intellectual importance.
If we plan to dialogue with colleagues in higher education, we can count on being confronted with these types of reactions. They are the perfect entrée to exploring the impact of Standards by going beyond the issue of program continuity alone.
At first glance, the Communication Standards might lead higher education faculty members to the premature conclusion that they are already having their students engage in face-to-face conversations, listen to tapes, read literature, and make oral and written presentations in front of the class. Ergo, these Standards have no real implications for college language programs since they offer nothing new. But is this the case?
At the very least, there are three aspects of the Communication goal area that should have an impact on what goes on in college language class. First, the Standards define communication as it occurs in the world beyond the classroom: three communicative modes (interpersonal, interpretive, presentational) emphasize the context and purpose of the communication and depict the four skills as working in an integrated fashion. Hence, listening and reading are often catalysts for speaking or writing, conversation often leads to writing, and all these skills are used within a set of cultural perspectives that govern patterns of interaction among individuals (Shrum and Glisan). Much of what occurs in college language classes still consists of the use of skills in an isolated fashion. For example, students listen to a taped exercise to answer a few comprehension questions, and that's it--often there is no real exploration of content or cultural perspectives or no use of the context to share opinions and acquire new information.
Second, being engaged in interpersonal communication (e.g., face-to-face conversation) implies that "negotiation of meaning" must occur as conversants attempt to understand and convey meaning to each other. In the classroom, teachers and students and students with one another must seek clarification, check comprehension, and request confirmation that they have understood. This process is often difficult to achieve in the college classroom given the traditional roles between students and teachers. Since learners often hesitate to question or counterquestion the teacher, negotiations of meaning may often not occur. Although teachers often strive to provide comprehensible input through support from visuals and mime, this process does not necessarily lead to meaningful negotiation. For this type of interaction to happen, both interlocuters must have equal rights in asking for clarification and adjusting what they say (Shrum and Glisan). For the college classroom, this means a change from the teacher as the center to the students' accepting greater responsibility for interacting with others and making themselves understood.
Third, the interpretive mode of the Standards goes beyond the traditional idea of comprehension, since interpretation also involves the listener's or reader's ability to glean meaning "between the lines" and bring his or her background knowledge and ideas to the task (National Standards 22-33). College professors would benefit from learning more effective strategies for guiding learners though oral and written texts. It is no secret that upper-level literature courses often encourage students to translate written texts in a word-for-word fashion, only to have them return to class and discuss the texts in English! The Communication Standards offer many ideas grounded in current research on how learners can make sense of a text by using comprehension strategies and interacting with others in the foreign language.
Higher education faculty members may feel that the Connections Standards imply the teaching of content (i.e., technical vocabulary) rather than of languages and the need for teachers to become experts in interdisciplinary content. As Bragger and Rice explain, however, this is exactly what content-based instruction is not. In a Standards-based curriculum, content and culture are no longer ancillary. Rather they are the core, intertwined with language. The learner is given greater responsibility for using the foreign language to acquire new knowledge about topics of personal interest. The teacher assumes the role of a facilitator who guides instruction without being the sole source of knowledge. This approach dispels what Lee and VanPatten call the "Atlas Complex," through which the teacher provides all information and students receive it. Unfortunately, the Atlas Complex prevails in the college curriculum. Further, one has only to examine the list of course offerings to see the division between "skills courses" and "content courses"; connections are virtually absent. College language courses might be a lot more appealing and worthwhile if skills and content were brought closer together and if students were given greater opportunities to acquire new knowledge in areas that interested them. This means, however, that professors need to know how to help students find appropriate sources of information and to give them strategies for using their linguistic skills to make sense of the texts they encounter.
It seems surprising that some may have difficulty seeing the impact of the Standards on developing the intellect of a college-level learner. To many in higher education, courses that have "significant intellectual importance" (1) present students with texts written in the foreign language without giving them strategies for interpreting them, (2) feature lecturing by the professor with little if any check on learners' comprehension of what they hear or few opportunities to discuss or to ask questions, (3) assess student performance by requiring regurgitation of memorized facts, often in English. Under such circumstances, one might question to what degree, if any, intellect is being developed. Let's think about the Standards and what they imply about the pursuit of intellectual well-being:
The ideas presented here reflect only a few ways in which the Standards should impact the college language curriculum. Our students coming from high school deserve and expect continuity as they continue their language study at the university. The Standards have much more to say, however, to the college language curriculum. The current research and instructional practices that form the foundation of the Standards have important implications for postsecondary language curricula and instruction. We should be prepared to convey these thoughts to colleagues in higher education and they should be willing to consider making some changes--not only for the sake of program continuity and coherence but, more important, for the sake of the effectiveness and intellectual vigor of their own programs.
Eileen W. Glisan
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Bragger, Jeannette D., and Donald B. Rice. "Connections: The National Standards and a New Paradigm for Content-Oriented Materials and Instruction." The Coming of Age of the Profession: Issues and Emerging Ideas for the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Ed. Jane Harper, Madeleine Lively, and Mary Williams. Boston: Heinle, 1998. 191-217.
James, Dorothy. "The Impact on Higher Education of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 11.1 (1998): 11-14.
Kramsch, Claire. "Building Trust: Who Articulates with Whom and How?" The MLA's Articulation Initiative: High School to College in Foreign Language Programs. 1998. ADFL. 9 June 1999. <http://www.adfl.org/projects/index.htm>.
Lee, J. F., and B. VanPatten. Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen. New York: McGraw, 1995.
Shrum, J. L., and Eileen W. Glisan. Teacher's Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction. 2nd ed. Boston: Heinle, forthcoming.
THE importance of Standards for Foreign Language Learning is obvious to those of us who have been working with it at the local, state, and national levels. On several occasions, however, colleagues have commented to me that they view the Standards as primarily of concern to elementary and secondary language programs, not to universities. Their dismissal of the Standards may be attributed to their unfamiliarity with them or to their reluctance to jump on what they see as yet another bandwagon. Additionally, many specialists in pedagogy and second language acquisition have taught in the elementary and secondary schools and, thus, are able to see clearly their connections with university language programs. Unfortunately, very few linguists and literature or culture specialists have firsthand knowledge about language instruction at these levels and are unable to conceptualize any impact that the Standards might have on their own instruction. As Dorothy James points out, however, "while large numbers of university professors of language and literature were paying little if any attention to what was going on, a relative consensus was emerging among the leaders in the pre-college sphere. [. . .] When the groundswell fully hits the postsecondary level, it will rock the boat" (11).
Since its publication in 1996, the relation of the Standards to higher education has been emphasized in the professional literature. Emily Spinelli, for example, focuses on state initiatives in Standards implementation: "First and foremost, a commitment to K-12 foreign language instruction implies that the entire curriculum will change. Curriculum really bubbles up; it does not get directed from the highest level down" (11). Eileen W. Glisan and June K. Phillips stress the need for reform in language teacher education with particular attention to the Standards: "All faculty should be familiar with the National Standards and current research in second-language acquisition. Students should experience highly interactive classrooms in which student involvement is at the center, whether the course be focused on language, literature, or culture studies" (14). As Elizabeth Welles points out in her ACTFL White Paper, "the importance of Standards to the higher education community is in providing an understanding of the goals and practices of the teachers of incoming students" (7). Janet Swaffar also takes aim at university departments of languages and literatures, emphasizing the need to train students "in the skills it takes to become knowledgeable, to make sense of exploding, often inchoate cultural input. Foreign language departments must teach processes, not products. [. . .] Using Standards and its institutional mission as guides, faculty members must spiral these topics, learner strategies, and articulatory roles, repeating them at different levels across the curriculum" (36-37).
The foregoing attempts to capture the attention of university language departments are not the only harbingers of change. During the past two decades, the profile of the typical language learner entering college has changed significantly. In the early 1980s, most of these learners were not proficient in communicative language use. As a result, they had to start their university-level instruction in the beginning course, perpetuating what James refers to as "the foolish phenomenon of American students repeating the same two beginning years of a language at various levels of the educational system instead of building on what they have learned and moving on" (11). In the 1990s, however, the profile has changed. Some learners have had the opportunity to begin their language study in elementary school, afterschool programs, bilingual education programs, language camps, or the home or community environment. Others have been taught by middle school and high school teachers who have enhanced their own linguistic proficiency and teaching skills through teacher-education programs, study-abroad opportunities, and professional workshops and institutes. At my university, the French, German, and Spanish language programs have benefited from a long-term articulation program with Ohio secondary schools, the Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project, or CAAP (Birckbichler). Longer, better-articulated sequences of instruction and high-quality teaching enable most Ohio State language learners to begin their study not in the first course but in the third or fourth course. A noticeable number of students are able to move directly into advanced-level courses on the strength of high school Advanced Placement, advance enrollment in college courses, and student-exchange and study-abroad programs. We are already seeing the effects produced by applying several of the principles engendered in Standards. We can expect an even greater impact when more institutions subscribe to Standards-oriented language instruction (see Klee; Phillips).
Standards for Foreign Language Learning comprises visionary statements. Instead of reflecting the current state of affairs, they offer a glimpse of the future, when long sequences of instruction and integration of the "five C's" (Communication, Culture, Connections, Comparisons, Communities) into the instructional environment are the norm. That time is not so far off. The Center for Applied Linguistics (ERIC/CLL, 1998) finds that language instruction is now offered in 31% of all elementary schools (National Survey). Several states have adopted models for Standards implementation (Sandrock), and they are already being integrated into many programs of instruction at the elementary and secondary levels. We are now seeing the vanguard of the next generation of language learners; within the next decade, they will be the norm in our university programs.
University professors who dismiss Standards as irrelevant to their domains also ignore the reality of today's students. No longer do most undergraduate language majors intend to teach or pursue scholarly research. In my own department, over half our Spanish majors are double majors with primary specialization in such diverse fields as international studies, premedicine, and business. Although they must complete core courses in literature and cultural studies, many of these students choose to concentrate their electives in advanced language courses, experiential or service learning, or internships, which they perceive as being more relevant to their career goals.
To exploit the full potential of Standards in higher education, we must begin by raising the consciousness of our university colleagues. By providing a forum for this discussion, ADFL has given the issue a place of importance on the professional agenda. Next, department chairs, deans, and other administrators must initiate a dialogue on the home front. This could be accomplished by dedicating a faculty meeting to viewing and discussing the thirty-minute video The Five Cs produced by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. After all members of the faculty have become informed, traditional differences between "theorists" and "practitioners" can start to be broken down through collaborative activities. These might involve development of scenarios for use in specific courses, projects that stress connections across areas, partnerships with local elementary and secondary schools, and outreach activities to the community. Ultimately, such collaboration could lead to an effective revision and revitalization of major and minor curricula.
If language department followed Standards as an organizing principle for instruction, the inherent "weave" of curricular elements would become more evident, and collaboration and cooperation could eventually displace defensiveness and segregation. What is most critical is that all members of the profession realize that the future is now. If those of us in higher education are to meet the challenges of a changing profession, we must begin by dropping old prejudices and starting the integration process.
Donna Reseigh Long
Ohio State University
Birckbichler, Diane W. "Ohio's Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project." ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 44-45. [Show Article]
Glisan, Eileen W., and June K. Phillips. "Making the Standards Happen: A New Vision for Foreign Language Teacher Preparation." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 10.4 (1998): 7-14.
James, Dorothy. "The Impact on Higher Education of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 11.1 (1998): 11-14.
Klee, Carol. "Communication as an Organizing Principle in the National Standards: Sociolinguistic Aspects of Spanish Language Teaching." Hispania 81.2 (1998): 339-51.
A National Survey of K-12 Foreign Language Education. ERIC/CLL News Bulletin 22.1 (1998): 5.
Phillips, June K. "Standards for World Languages--On a Firm Foundation." Introduction. Foreign Language Standards: Linking Research, Theories, and Practices. Ed. Phillips and Robert M. Terry. ACTFL Foreign Lang. Educ. Ser. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1999. 1-14.
Spinelli, Emily. "State Standards: Connecting a National Vision to Local Implementation." ACTFL Newsletter 9.2 (1997): 7-13.
Swaffar, Janet. "Major Changes: The Standards Projects and the New Foreign Languages Curriculum." ADFL Bulletin 30.1 (1998): 34-37. [Show Article]
Welles, Elizabeth. "Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Implications and Perceptions." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 11.1 (1998): 7-9.
FOR anybody who has been following the foreign language teaching profession throughout the past two decades, it is clear that the controversy regarding Standards is for the 1990s what proficiency was for the 1980s. There are some interesting parallels between the two "movements." Both owe their high level of national visibility in large part to the work of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Both arose to some extent from federal government influence, in the form either of existing metrics (for proficiency, the long-established levels designed for use by the Foreign Service Institute) or impending pressures (for standards, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act). And perhaps in part because of that connection to the United States government, both have proven to be a source of tremendous controversy within the language teaching profession at the tertiary level. What I am suggesting is that, consistent with the higher educational community's often passionately expressed desire to be intellectually and politically free from any and all ties to either the state or the national government (except, of course, where those ties translate into funding for state universities and federal grants), any form of performance assessment that might in some way be interpreted as a reflection of governmental intervention is often viewed as tantamount to a surrender of some sort of academic freedom.
I have always found it both ironic and somewhat unsettling that those of us engaged in teaching at the highest level of the American academic system are in fact the least bound by--or even cognizant of--something that we may call "standards." I do not mean to minimize the value of our advanced degree work, which has enabled us to find work as college teachers in the first place, as well as (where relevant) our postgraduate research, which provides an ongoing enhancement of expertise in our chosen academic fields. Those sorts of standards of knowledge are indeed vital. The standards I refer to here are those by which we may assess the effectiveness of our teaching--in simplest terms, how well do our students learn.
I do not think it an overstatement to assert that whatever system of standardized curriculum may exist within our department, colleges, or universities as a whole, the fact remains that we can pretty much teach, assess, and otherwise carry out our institutional duties as we please. Most readers will agree that any sort of level descriptions or performance outcomes for language curricula are the exception rather than the rule for foreign language departments in the United States. No national or local authority comes in to evaluate the excellence of our teaching--and even more important, the learning of our students--on anything approaching a systemic level of assessment. And while we are subject to both internal and external reviews of our programs and departments on at least a semiregular basis, those reviews tend to focus on issues of perceived scholarly excellence and administrative efficiency.
In contrast, our instructional colleagues within the primary and secondary schools are constantly subject to some sort of governmental "interference," ranging from basic teacher-certification requirements for all those who wish to teach within the public school system to regular reviews of teacher-preparation programs by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Precollegiate teachers are simply more used to attending to the sorts of standards included within the Standards. Equally important, they are cognizant of the teacher training, both preservice and in-service, necessary for their students to achieve those proposed standards.
What I would suggest is that we look on the Standards not as a threat to our freedom but as a challenge to our sense of professionalism. In a recent ACTFL White Paper, Dorothy James of Hunter College frames that challenge in very compelling terms: "Instead of worrying patronizingly about whether Standards-educated students will be adequately prepared to take our college-level courses, we would be better advised for our own sakes to worry about how to prepare ourselves to teach Standards-educated students" (13). Eileen W. Glisan and June K. Phillips are even more explicit in setting forth a "Professional Development Continuum," with a multistrand program of both preservice and in-service training in areas including language and cultural proficiency as well as more purely pedagogical preparation (13). Such an approach is fully consistent with the analysis by Galal Walker and me, which emphasizes that, like learners, "language teachers range from novice to expert in their general understanding and practice of teaching. [. . .] The movement from novice to expert is a deliberate and demanding process; it does not happen by accident, by virtue of native abilities, or by simply repeating novice behavior and exercising novice knowledge" (2).
With specific reference to my own field, the challenge facing those of us involved in teaching Chinese in American colleges and universities is particularly serious given the tremendous changes, both quantitative and qualitative, that are ongoing in the demographic profile of our learners. In 1995, when the MLA last released its figures on college and university foreign language enrollments, Chinese stood at 26,471. At the same time, a survey conducted by the Secondary School Chinese Language Center (SSCLC) at Princeton University reported a total K-12 enrollment of 8,622 students, including those in FLES programs. We can probably safely estimate that in the four years since the MLA's figures came out, tertiary enrollments in Chinese language courses have risen to at least 28,000. But in that same four-year period, Chinese enrollments at the precollegiate level have more than doubled to 19,852, again based on a survey conducted by the SSCLC in the fall of 1998. What is as striking as the overall growth is that at the K-6 level. Assisted in large part by an initiative in New Jersey by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation--the same organization that jump-started secondary school Chinese language instruction in the United States in the 1980s--as well as a number of locally developed projects in states such as Maryland, K-6 enrollments have more than tripled (from 2,248 to 6,852) since 1995. These students will truly be the first products of Standards-driven education. One both suspects and hopes that at least some of them will be sitting in our college classrooms in a little over a decade.
Perhaps even more compelling is the tremendous pool of linguistic and cultural talent emerging from the growth of the Chinese-heritage school community. James notes that, while the Standards explicitly focus on the compulsory school system, "the national Standards provide a vision of long, coordinated sequences of language study, of interactive, interdisciplinary language programs, of programs to take heritage learners as well as learners of second languages to a high level of literacy. Such a vision, if realized, will finally raise foreign language teaching at the colleges to a genuine 'college-level'" (14; emphasis mine). The outgoing director of the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), David Maxwell, describes this genuine resource base of learners as, "potentially, the most productive source of true bilingual, bicultural competence in English and the many languages crucial to our national interests" (Wang ix). And with a total enrollment of well over 120,000 students in various weekend schools throughout the United States, the case is clear: American colleges and universities are the minority providers for Chinese language education in this country.
If we are to be the minority providers, then what must we know to provide the high quality of language education to which many of us devote such energy and in which we take such pride? In part what we must know is to what levels of competence students in the K-12 sector can be taken before they arrive on our college and university doorsteps. No one in our field has any illusions (or delusions) that the merely voluntary adoption, or even the imposition, of Standards-based educational models will lead to certain achievement of those levels. Indeed, at a summit of the leadership of the Chinese Language Teachers Association and the Chinese Language Association of Secondary-Elementary Schools convened at the NFLC in February 1999, the joint working document produced by the participants identified standards as one of five principal priorities for the Chinese language pedagogical field as a whole, albeit noting the need for "[s]tandards that are genuinely real and relevant for the unique conditions of teaching and learning Chinese, as well as being more supportive of the development of K-12 Chinese language instruction." In other words, while standards were commonly viewed by the summit participants as central to the development of the field, the Standards are still, at best, problematic.
What I hope is that our whole Chinese language teaching profession, from kindergarten through college, in compulsory and heritage schools alike, comes to look on the Standards not as a straitjacket inhibiting our instructional inspiration and expertise but rather as a framework on which we may build a genuine sense of understanding as to what students can and will be able to do in linguistic, communicative, and cultural terms at a number of steps along their lifelong language-learning way. The Standards may well serve as the means by which we may truly build our field. We attend to them for the better development of that field. We ignore them at our professional peril.
Scott McGinnis
National Foreign Language Center
Glisan, Eileen W., and June K. Phillips. "Making the Standards Happen: A New Vision for Foreign Language Teacher Preparation." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 10.4 (1998): 7-14.
James, Dorothy. "The Impact on Higher Education of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 11.1 (1998): 11-14.
Walker, Galal, and Scott McGinnis. Learning Less Commonly Taught Languages: An Agreement on the Bases for the Training of Teachers. Columbus: Foreign Lang., 1995.
Wang, Xueying, ed. A View from Within: A Case Study of Chinese Heritage Community Language Schools in the United States. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1996.
THE single most stubborn obstacle to improvement of the way we teach foreign languages in the United States remains the transition between secondary and postsecondary instruction. The debate about the Standards during their development and since their publication in 1996 underscores the problem.
The initial reception of drafts of the Standards among college and university language professors was chilly. Not surprisingly, the primary objection to the document lay in its apparent neglect of attention to the development of linguistic competence that fosters the critical appreciation of literary texts. With the addition of Cultures as one of the interlinked, "five C's" governing the Standards--along with Communication, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities--and the inclusion of some literature-based learning scenarios that are to serve as models for curriculum development, opposition to the Standards mellowed. Even the MLA Executive Council, a body not known for its involvement in language teaching in K-12, gave the Standards its endorsement, and the MLA is listed among the four dozen or so "endorsing organizations" in the published document, where it stands out as one of the few professional organizations that does not include the "teaching" of languages in its name.
Despite general acceptance of the Standards among language teachers at all levels, and despite a plethora of conference sessions, workshops, institutes, and publications dealing with them, little visible progress has been made in bridging the gap between language teaching in high schools and language teaching in colleges, junior colleges, community colleges, and universities. This is not because postsecondary language professionals have not been involved in the project. On the contrary, a glance at the long list of names in appendix B of Standards, "Project Personnel," reveals that a considerable number of college and university teachers were involved in the development and testing of the Standards. The project director, June K. Phillips, is herself a distinguished professor at Weber State University. And judging by the lists of participants on panels at national and regional conferences such as those of ACTFL, SWCOLT, and PNCFL, devoted to implementation of the Standards, there is no lack of interest among postsecondary language professionals in promoting what must be viewed as a vital cause: the creation of nationwide consensus on how most efficiently and beneficially to teach young Americans a language other than English.
Not all university professors care about the Standards, of course. There are still plenty of literary scholars around who live for their graduate seminars in baroque poetry and teach second- or third-year language courses without a clue as to the Standards. Their number is decreasing, however, and it is to be hoped that search committees filling openings in foreign language departments these days are asking candidates about their views on the Standards. If they are not, they should be.
The problem is not the absence of postsecondary teachers of language and culture who are committed to using the Standards as a means of improving the articulation between high school and college. Nor is it the absence of engaged professional teachers in the high schools who are eager to interact with their colleagues at the postsecondary level. The problem lies in the clash of cultures between the two levels. Simply put, must professors have absolutely no idea what goes on in the high school language classroom. They know nothing about the professional life of a high school language teacher. They do not understand the difference between teaching high school and university students.
The author of this contribution can illustrate the problem with reference to German, although the situation is similar in all languages taught at both levels and probably more extreme for languages that are more difficult to master, such as Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Ki-Swahili. In 1997, the Center for Language Education and Research at Michigan State University sponsored a two-week institute devoted solely to the Standards. Called TILT (Taos Institute for Language Teachers), the institute consisted of morning presentations held in English by experts in linguistics, pedagogy, methodology, and technology and afternoon language-specific sessions conducted in the target languages. Close to forty secondary teachers of Spanish, French, and German interacted intensively with one another and with a number of distinguished presenters from Tufts, San Diego State, Louisiana State, and Michigan State. June Phillips herself convincingly explained how the Standards can be used as a springboard for improving language teaching at all levels. Judging by the enthusiasm during the Taos institute and by the written evaluations of participants, TILT was a success. Teachers developed innovative and creative learning scenarios that incorporate the principles of the Standards. They found the university presenters largely stimulating and helpful. They left Taos excited and motivated to promote use of the Standards among their colleagues at home schools from Maine to California.
The second phase of TILT was the possibility for participants to receive a summer fellowship in 1998 to pursue a Standards-related project abroad with the assistance of a faculty member from Michigan State leading a study-abroad program. Over half the participants at TILT expressed strong interest in applying for a fellowship. By the time the deadline for application arrived, however, even after an extension, only one person submitted a realistic proposal. Projected learning scenarios were not completed. Plans for publishing the scenarios on the World Wide Web fell through.
What happened? Undoubtedly, the lack of a strong follow-up effort on the part of the TILT directors played a role. The single most inhibiting factor to a more successful result for the project, however, lies in the realities of the day-to-day professional lives of high school teachers. Again, simply put, teachers have little or no time during their workweek to devote to innovative curriculum development or to fruitful collaboration with their fellow language teachers, not to mention their colleagues in related fields such as history, literature, or social studies. They are restricted by a host of factors in their freedom to experiment with the type of learning scenarios suggested by the Standards:
The problems go deeper, however. High school teachers, particularly those in the public school systems, must deal with a host of factors unknown to their postsecondary colleagues. Here are just some of them:
All the above contribute to a single, overwhelming problem: mental and physical fatigue. Summer "vacations," which some nonteachers view with suspicion, are thoroughly necessary periods for teachers to devote to their families and to nonprofessional interests, though many still attend summer classes and workshops.
There are many, many outstanding language teachers in the high schools in the United States. Every language coordinator in every college or university program in the country is undoubtedly able to name the handful of teachers in his or her region who have the most dynamic programs, the most students, and the students best prepared for "advanced" work at the university. These are the teachers who come to state foreign language conferences and to ACTFL and who are most eager to implement the Standards. Those same language coordinators, however, will confirm that most students with two or even three years of a language in high school will place--where? in German or French or Spanish 101 at the university. As has often been noted, this is a tragic waste of time and effort on the part of all concerned.
Hence a modest proposal. To come to grips with the problem of articulation between secondary and postsecondary levels of language instruction, professors must understand where their students are coming from. Literally. For many years high school teachers have been coming to the universities--for course work, weekend and summer workshops, institutes, and immersion experiences. But it has been a one-way street. To be sure, enlightened language departments send representatives to "language days" at the local schools. Few (younger) professors these days would refuse to visit a high school German class to talk about the advantages of language study and to encourage students to continue the language in college. Even the MLA has recently published a glossy brochure promoting the study of foreign languages in the schools.
This is not enough, however. When a college professor visits a high school class, he or she already experiences the beginning of that miraculous transformation that takes place when a high school senior becomes a college freshman. The students tend to be polite; they listen; they ask questions. This is not a typical classroom situation. To gain true insight into the problems of the secondary teachers, the professor must take over the class, must spend extended time at the high school, must interact with students, colleagues, and administrators.
How can this be achieved? It would take a rare kind of cooperation between secondary and postsecondary institutions, but a program of mutual benefit could certainly be put in place. Here is one possible scenario:
A pipe dream? Perhaps. The barriers to realization of such an idea loom large. After all, how would such a semester "off" count on the tenure clock, assuming a tenure-stream appointment would even consider it? And would not high school teachers resent the presence of a "professor" in their midst? And could your average professor work out a usable seating chart, not to mention an acceptable grade book? And does not the very idea run counter to an American system that has established high school graduation as a caesura in the educational process?
As an increasing number of Americans seeks postsecondary education, however, and as the concepts of globalization and internationalization finally impress the importance of foreign language and culture study on the American mind, improving the level of language competence among our students is imperative. This modest proposal would seem worth a try.
George F. Peters
Michigan State University
IT IS certainly within the range of human emotions to resist, view with skepticism, or welcome change. Rarely, however, are agents of change unaccompanied by some sort of fanfare. Universities and colleges, institutions consumed with bureaucracy and external and internal pressures and dependent on predictably resistant, questioning (after all, this is what many of us are paid to do), skeptical, and welcoming beings, always seem to be the slowest--and admittedly the clumsiest because of their sheer size--to adapt without herculean efforts to change. Such realities have led many critics of higher education to characterize us as not responsive to students' academic needs and as further indicative of the disconnection between the "real world" that our students will eventually inhabit and academe.
The publication of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century--a veritable change agent if ever there was one--and its adoption or adaptation by states and local districts importantly compels us in universities and colleges to rethink our approaches to foreign language education. Indeed, before the national document's publication, many states, like Indiana, had already had goals similar to those outlined in Standards. Anecdotal evidence culled from colleagues in at least one postsecondary institution in the state seems to suggest that students who were involved in K-12 Standards-oriented curricula perform better at the postsecondary level than those who were not. The other side of this interesting phenomenon is that, more often than not, many students educated in Standards-like courses of study test into the beginning four-semester FL sequence, finding themselves figuratively bored to tears, for they are repeating materials learned in high school.
Dependably, every third or fourth week into the academic semester of every year, department chairs encounter anxious students in their offices explaining that they have had so many years of such and such language only to have tested into perhaps the second-semester second-year grammar sequence and find the work too easy, too familiar. More vexing then is the student's lack of preparedness for the next sequence of courses, which generally introduce college, culture, and civilization. Certainly, the rather archaic grammar-first, literature-civilization-culture-second curriculum model is not to be found across the board at colleges and universities. But the configuration still serves to capture a fair number of collegiate foreign language curricula. The fact of the matter is that Standards with its "weave of curricular elements"--Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities--emphasizes gaping curricular, assessment, and instructional holes in many of our foreign language programs. Its publication and influence will only further demonstrate the divide between how, why, and what we teach in FL programs in colleges and universities and what and how our students have learned foreign languages in elementary and secondary institutions.
Tinkering with college placement tests and pointing fingers of blame at our colleagues in the latter institutions will simply not do. What is needed now is genuine dialogue between K-12 foreign language educators and university and college specialists. The goals and outcomes in college and university instruction, assessment, and curricula must be calibrated to build on and expand in measurable and productive ways the elementary and high school foreign language experience to effectively transition students. The implications of Standards for higher education should not be underestimated. K-12 educators are well positioned to generate much-needed interest in the languages at the collegiate level. In mulling over strategies to rescue the languages from the "dustbin" of university majors, the Standards provide a pivotal point for dialogue and collaboration. But more important, K-12 educators and the culture-based communicative competence model Standards promulgates will become even more crucial to a revival in FL study and to our survival as more than service departments at institutions of higher learning where budgets are often tied to the number of majors, where majoring in languages is viewed as only viable with respect to the teaching profession, and where the ever-pragmatic student majoring in business and FL--a staple in a number of foreign language programs--may view Romance languages in particular as dispensable in the light of market forces such as the European Economic Community's adoption of English as the language of business.
There will, of course, always be those colleagues who bemoan the "scant" attention paid to the subject of grammar in Standards as at least one of the roots of evil that foretell our impending reduction to a primarily service mission. To such misgivings I defer to the document:
In the past, classroom instruction was often focused on the memorization of words and grammar rules. The standards for foreign language learning require a much broader definition of the content of the foreign language classroom. Students should be given ample opportunities to explore, develop, and use communication strategies, learning strategies, critical thinking skills, and skills in technology, as well as the appropriate elements of the language system and culture. The exact form and content of each of these elements is not prescribed in the present document. Instead, the standards provide a background, a framework for the reflective teacher to use in weaving these rich curricular experiences into the fabric of language learning. (23)
Grammar, in effect, can be taught through a myriad of ways. The "reflective" teacher, ever cognizant of the weave, will introduce grammar through context. Standards offers sample learning scenarios that are adaptable at various levels, listing beside the scenarios the targeted Standards. It is precisely the flexibility of the Standards, providing objectives rather than rigidly defined pathways with respect to instruction, curriculum, development, and assessment that makes them so irresistibly user-friendly and adaptable even at the collegiate level. Moreover, such concerns about grammar should foster rather than foreclose dialogue.
The carping over grammar leads one down the equally murky and contentious path regarding the Standards and the role of literature. Literature scholars have, perhaps deservedly, been painted with the brush of resistance, portrayed as somehow experiencing pangs of looming displacement over the position of literature in the pecking order of foreign language study and as viewing the Standards as the "death of literature" or, at the very least, the democratization of what is considered literary. Without entering into the debate over "high" and "low" culture and the Standards' inclusion of sundry literary-cultural productions as learning tools, I would again evoke the role of the Standards as providing objectives rather than fixed prescriptions for foreign language educators. Viewing literature on a continuum of sociocultural productions allows for its study in the even broader context of interdisciplinarity, where literature meets, say, history, where, in the college classroom, Prosper Mérimée's Tamango meets discussions of the French slave trade and French democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity versus United States slavery and the United States Constitution. Here the targeted Standards emphasized are Interpersonal Communication (1.1), Interpretive Communication (1.2), Practices of Culture (2.1), Products of Culture (2.2), Making Connections (3.1), and Cultural Comparisons (4.2).
As for those who may bristle at the idea of high school teachers dictating foreign language education at the postsecondary level, I would recommend that one view Standards in the collaborative spirit in which it was conceived by K-12 teachers and higher education faculty: as an opportunity to improve and make invaluable foreign language education nationally and as an effective pedagogical mechanism for articulation between and within elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational levels.
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Purdue University, West Lafayette
AT A recent division meeting, the chair raised the topic of the national Standards. He was greeted immediately with a chorus of cynicism: "I've been doing that since the sixties." "It's the same old thing with a new name." The chair and I exchanged conspiratorial smiles. Clearly it would be up to us, the administrator and the pedagogue, to show the flock how they had erred and to shepherd them gently to the way to salvation.
This was not the first time I had heard these objections to perceived innovation. At a recent conference presentation, the speaker boasted, "[I] have been creating communicative methodology long before it was a professional standard" (Hobson-Robinson 1). Other educators claim to have addressed issues such as integrative testing, oral interviews, the affective domain, comprehensible input, and functional language well before they became "fashionable." (A well-publicized example of this discourse may be found in the polemic between Rebecca Valette and Heidi Byrnes, specifically Valette 379-80.) Should this discourse be understood as a defensive posture by which conservative instructors justify their long-standing pedagogical practice and dismiss change? Or are these assertions valid at a certain level?
In this brief reflection, I do not dispute the merit of the national Standards. Rather, I identify the Standards as signifiers of innovation, within a larger discourse of change that drives the profession--and disenfranchises many practitioners.
A number of researchers have despaired over the lack of historical depth in pedagogical research. Diane Musumeci, citing H. H. Stern, notes that "language teaching theory has a short memory" (5). L. G. Kelly worries that "nobody really knows what is new or old in present-day language teaching procedures. There has been a vague feeling that modern experts have spent their time in discovering what other men have forgotten" (ix).
Such amnesia disempowers the teachers in at least two ways. As Musumeci points out, "Language professionals [, who are] equipped with only a sketchy understanding of the history of language teaching, are at a distinct disadvantage. They are limited in their ability to critically assess theory, research findings, or methodologic approaches because they can neither evaluate the 'state-of-the-art' outside the present nor envision its place in the larger historical context" (4).
J. Caravolas highlights the political and economic interests of this process of forgetting: "It should be recognized that this forgetfulness is not always innocent. These days language teaching has become a colossal enterprise which, like any other industry, defends both its overt and covert interests by any means possible, in the name of profit and glory" (qtd. in Pennycook 600).
Furthermore, Alastair Pennycook warns that "[t]he knowledge produced in the central academic institutions is legitimated through a series of political relationships that privileges it over other possible forms of knowledge" (596). To sum up, the "forgetful" language professional who assumes an uncritical attitude toward innovation and invests in the commodity of change, either as a consumer or as a producer, becomes a complicit agent in the commerce of knowledge production and dissemination. This new knowledge, to the extent that it serves the advancement of academic careers and sell materials (Pennycook 609) is exclusionary by nature, establishing a power differential between knowers/believers and the unenlightened.
It is in this light, then, that I examine the Standards. Like the methods, movements, and approaches that appear periodically--Pennycook, citing H. D. Brown, suggests that there has been a new (Kuhnian) paradigm every twenty-five years of this century--the Standards have been hailed using the hyperbolic discourse of innovation: "The development of standards has galvanized the field of foreign language education. The degree of involvement, and of consensus, among educators at all levels has been unprecedented. [. . .] National standards establish a new context that defines the central role of foreign language in the learning career of every student" (National Standards 15; emphasis mine).
Dorothy James reports on the impact of the Standards on higher education: "The publication of Standards for Foreign Language Learning signals the end of business as usual in departments of national languages and literatures in our colleges and universities--not so much because of the content of the document per se--but because this content has grown out of a grassroots desire for change in the foreign language teaching profession across the country" (11).
Despite an insistence on consensus among educators at all levels, the Standards literature already reveals fissuring. Should curriculum--and, by implication, curricular change--be a bottom-up or a top-down process? Paul Sandrock argues that "[c]urriculum really bubbles up: it does not get directed from the highest level down" (qtd. in James 5). Claire Kramsch, on the other hand, advocates "build[ing] the curriculum not piece by piece from the bottom up, but from the top down" (qtd. in James 12).
James concludes that Kramsch is "giving voice to a sentiment that is widespread at the university level but that flies flat in the face of national reality" (12). Her ultimatum: "Either we look seriously at the curriculum 'bubbling up' from the lower levels in the system, and consider how to work with it, or we continue blithely and on the whole blindly to set roadblocks in its way and in the way of the students who bubble up with it" (12).
Such rhetoric hardly reflects the much-vaunted consensus; rather it exposes a power struggle between K-12 and university pedagogical practice. Later in her article, James refers to another locus of dissent: "The gap in mutual understanding that marks language and literature departments at the college level is reflected in the way critics of the Standards in the literary segment of the profession tend simplistically to view the document as a product of the 'proficiency people.' [. . .] All this shows that, while individual professors may buy in to the Standards in various ways, the universities have a long way to go before they can hope to contribute coherent components to the K-16 curriculum" (12).
That the Standards represent interested knowledge, knowledge reflecting the interests of certain individuals or groups and informing power differentials (Pennycook 612) is betrayed by Dale Lange's privileging of the national Standards over the AATF Culture Commission culture standards: "The AATF standards and their described levels for cultural empathy, analysis, and specific culture knowledge lack certain credibility and applicability to the classroom. They also appear to be highly complex, and the means of assessment appear to be extremely difficult. None of the thirty-three states had incorporated these standards into a set of state standards. [. . .] The National Standards for culture have been used as a major model in the development of state standards for culture. The National Standards are credible, flexible, and useful. They project high expectations" (70). Although Lange admits that the national Standards are problematic in some respects, it is clear from his comments who has won and who has lost, who possesses gnosis and who is groping in darkness.
Returning to the comments cited in the first paragraph, I might attribute them to a number of motivations. Perhaps, as June Phillips suggests, they reflect a misplaced emphasis on what the teacher does rather than on learner outcomes; perhaps they represent intellectual laziness, an excuse not to reconsider practice: but they may just as well signify an angry or resigned reaction to "new knowledge" that is closely identified with power and exclusion.
Finally, it just may be possible that these assertions are propositionally true! Pennycook notes that "much is not as new as is claimed" (600). Indeed, in researching this contribution, I stumbled on Wilga Rivers's 1985 article "A New Curriculum for New Purposes." In it, she outlines "five directions a modern curriculum for language study can take" (39). I list these below, along with excerpts that echo the language of the Standards:
1. Linking foreign languages with international studies. This involves what the profession has been advocating for at least forty years--the integration of foreign language with other subject-matter areas [Standards 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2].
2. Language for specific purposes. [. . .] We must provide choice at the upper levels if students are to remain in our courses long enough to gain that control of language which will remain with them and on which they can build later in life [Standard 5.2].
3. Language and intercommunity understanding. [. . .] Surely the best way to do this is to take the language out of the classroom and send the students into the community that speaks the language [Standard 5.1].
4. Understanding the process of communication. [. . .] Levels of language in relation to the hierarchal structure of societies and the variety of human relationships constitute another area where students can learn much about their own language and society from engaging in a cross-cultural examination across several languages [Standard 4.1].
5. Language as the key to humanistic experiences. [. . .] Foreign language study has a solid role to play in developing educated individuals who can examine issues, discuss viewpoints, and enjoy the aesthetic stimulation of a good book, a good play, a good poem, or a good film [Standards 1.1, 1.2, 1.3].
Of course, the Standards did not develop out of thin air, so it is not surprising to see similar ideas presented in earlier works. And, of course, the Standards are stated in the form of outcomes and are complemented by assessment protocols. Nevertheless, the work of Rivers and others may account for a nagging feeling of familiarity. Were we to emphasize this continuity with the past instead of succumbing to the cult of innovation, we might turn skeptics into true believers.
H. Jay Siskin
Cabrillo College
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Hobson-Robinson, Allye. Untitled presentation. Emerging Technologies in Teaching Languages and Cultures. Conf. at California State U, Monterey Bay. Mar. 1999.
James, Dorothy. "The Impact on Higher Education of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." ACTFL White Paper. ACTFL Newsletter 11.1 (1998): 11-14.
Kelly, L. G. Twenty-Five Centuries of Language Teaching. Rowley: Newbury, 1969.
Lange, Dale L. "Planning for and Using the New National Culture Standards." Foreign Language Standards: Linking Research, Theories, and Practices. Ed. June Phillips and Robert M. Terry. ACTFL Foreign Lang. Educ. Ser. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1999. 57-135.
Musumeci, Diane. Breaking Tradition: An Exploration of the Historical Relationship between Theory and Practice in Second Language Teaching. New York: McGraw, 1997.
Pennycook, Alastair. "The Concept of Method, Interested Knowledge, and the Politics of Language Teaching." TESOL Quarterly 23.4 (1989): 589-618.
Phillips, June K. "Standards for World Languages--On a Firm Foundation." Introduction. Foreign Language Standards: Linking Research, Theories, and Practices. Ed. Phillips and Robert M. Terry. ACTFL Foreign Lang. Educ. Ser. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1999. 1-14.
Rivers, Wilga M. "A New Curriculum for New Purposes." Foreign Language Annals 18.1 (1985): 37-43.
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© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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