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ALTHOUGH the University of Georgia may be one of the few research universities with large foreign language programs to make a serious and systematic attempt to revise its curriculum along the lines prescribed by the national Standards for foreign language learning, its proactive, forward-thinking initiative is largely a function of circumstances. We happen to have a number of faculty members who are interested in issues relating to foreign language education, including officers of the AATSP and AATF, the authors of a leading textbook, and several applied and theoretical linguists. Another important circumstance is that in 1994 we were fortunate enough to be the recipients of a major grant from the NEH to support a project that consisted of attempting to integrate language, literature, and culture in all our courses. The grant funded seminars held in the summer and fall in which we read extensively about a variety of new developments in literary theory, cultural studies, linguistics, foreign language pedagogy, and other areas. Incentives were available to every faculty member in the form of either a summer stipend or a course release unit to participate in the seminars: all but three of twenty-seven faculty members chose to avail themselves of those incentives. I mention these circumstances because one of my main points in this essay is that we need incentives to combat the resistance or indifference regarding implementation of the national Standards at the university level, especially in upper-division courses and especially at large research universities. In the Fall 1998 ADFL Bulletin, Janet Swaffar writes, "To develop a coherent and accountable program, FL faculties must work together, exchanging and sharing ideas about subject matter, pedagogical strategies, and assessment." But she also goes on to observe, "The notion of any FL department pooling its resources to build a coherent language program challenges deeply held beliefs and feelings about such sensitive issues as academic freedom, classroom autonomy, individual scholarship, and the nature of humanist learning" (35).
Before offering some suggestions for facing the challenges that Swaffar identifies I touch very briefly on a few published articles that treat the application of the Standards to the college curriculum. That there are so few such articles is in itself an indication of how little attention college professors have paid to the Standards at all. But even these few articles are valuable if for no other reason than that they remind us of the pedagogical, academic, social, and political complexities that implementation of the Standards in the college curriculum will entail.
In "Educational Reform and the Babel (Babble) of Culture: Prospects for the Standards for Foreign Language Learning," James N. Davis summarizes the background of how Standards for Foreign Language Learning was drafted, revised, and published in the 1990s. As he points out, the chief participants in the process were elementary and secondary classroom teachers, state and local foreign language supervisory personnel, university faculty in such fields as teacher preparation, bilingual education, and cross-cultural training. And although he notes that the major foreign language teaching organizations and diverse groups of foreign language professionals were involved in providing input for the final version, his description of the process confirms my own experience that the involvement of professors who teach upper-division college courses was not substantial. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that today many professors know nothing about the Standards and have little interest in learning about them. Davis also discusses the political dimensions of the Standards, contrasting the top-down model of other countries such as Japan, where changes are dictated by a federal ministry of education, with the American system, in which implementation has devolved to the states for a bottom-up approach that is problematic at best. Although his focus is on power relations among state departments of education and local school districts, similar relations pertain at the college level. If the Standards are to be applied to the college curriculum, the approach will have to be a bottom-up approach. But, since colleges and universities are typically resistant to change, what will be the motivation for wanting to implement such an approach?
One answer is provided by Wolff von Schmidt in "German Studies: A Paradigm of Change. Comments on Standards, Curriculum, and Testing." Von Schmidt begins by directing attention to what he calls the "alarming phenomenon" of the "huge declines" in foreign language enrollments in the first half of the nineties: especially in German, but also in French and Russian, all of which had "dramatically lower" enrollment in 1995 than in 1990. He observes, "This resulted in downsizing of departments, incorporation of departments into language centers or even the outright elimination of departments" (2). He looks to the Standards as a way to stem this tide based on the premise that if we make language learning better and more relevant--with a greater emphasis, for example, on culture and on more practical applications of language for future careers--we will have higher enrollment. As he concludes, "the days of a so-called traditional German curriculum, largely predicated on pedagogical principles and goals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are over" (6). I certainly hope that von Schmidt is right that updating foreign language programs will increase enrollment in less popular languages, and I thoroughly approve of the kinds of changes that he proposes. Even if he is right, however, enrollment pressures often are not enough to motivate departments to implement change, either because there is too little consensus among faculty members to change (even when their own fate hangs in the balance) or, as in large research universities such as my own, because there is ample enrollment, the declines notwithstanding. Since research universities prepare the next generation of college teachers, those universities are the ones that should be promoting change and setting a positive example in response to current pedagogical developments such as the Standards. Unfortunately this is often not the case.
A second answer to the question of what might motivate colleges to implement the Standards has to do with teacher preparation. Judy Liskin-Gasparro reports that "the standards for Spanish introduced in the Texas Oral Proficiency Test (TOPT) have revealed that traditional preparation in the third and fourth years does not necessarily prepare non-Hispanic college Spanish majors adequately. About half of all non-Hispanic students who wish to qualify by achieving the advanced ranking fail to do so" (Swaffar 34). I've been told that in my own state of Georgia, which requires prospective teachers to pass the Educational Testing Service-administered Praxis exam, significant numbers of college graduates are now reported to be failing the exam. While this situation is truly alarming, I must again observe that it may not provide the necessary motivation to implement change. For one thing, most undergraduate language programs are not taken exclusively or predominantly by future teachers; thus it is hard to convince faculty to target the need to pass the teacher proficiency test. For another thing, in our university as in many others, although the foreign language department provides content and skill courses in the language, it does not itself provide teacher training or certification. There is a strong if regrettable perception, accordingly, that any problems in teacher preparation are the responsibility of the college of education. It, in turn, tends to lay the blame at our feet because we are the ones who fail to provide the linguistic and cultural command that tests like the TOPT require. To the extent that many literature professors lose sight of the fact that all those who teach a foreign language at any level must strive to enhance and further the linguistic mastery of non-native-speaking students, we deserve that blame.
If my remarks seem unduly pessimistic, it is because I feel that our profession has been downright lethargic at this important juncture when energetic and imaginative responses are called for. Students have changed, the importance of literature to most students has diminished, the need for persons possessing high levels of linguistic and cultural competence has increased, enrollments have changed and shifted, and many other societal and academic changes have occurred. Meanwhile many professors simply continue to teach their area of specialization and pursue narrow research and career goals. But to shift to a more constructive tone, let me look at some possible solutions to implementation of the Standards in the college curriculum.
It is important to acknowledge first the extent to which many programs have already adopted the spirit and the goals of the Standards. The application of a communicative approach goes a long way toward meeting the standard of communication; the study of fields such as Francophone literature helps in achieving the standard of cultures; the use of e-mail and Web resources constitutes significant progress toward realizing the standard of connections; offerings in multicultural studies often provide a vehicle for accomplishing the standard of comparisons; and study abroad contributes significantly to furthering the standard of communities. Much remains to be done, however.
For those cohesive departments that are not beset by indifference or resistance and are ready and willing to implement the Standards, information about how to implement a revised curriculum is becoming increasingly available. The professional organizations in French and Spanish are in the process of issuing documents geared to their particular language areas. Those documents give sample progress indicators in each of the five standards--communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities--for grade levels up to and including grade 16. Here are some examples from the Standards for learning Spanish: for communication, students present a play; for cultures, they interpret cultural patterns such as the Evita phenomenon in Argentina and the United States; for connections, they obtain information through electronic means related to their field of study; for comparisons they compare and contrast original texts and their English translations; for communities they continue to read popular literature from the Spanish-speaking world in the original. Now, I have specifically selected indicators that have or could have a literary component--and many do not--to make the point that although literature is not and should not be excluded in a curriculum based on the Standards, literature needs to be treated as a means of achieving communicative and cultural competence. One might go as far as to say that in a revised curriculum literature needs to be recast as "applied literature": that is, literature taught as a means rather than an end in itself. In applied literature classes, the standards that one is trying to achieve would be clear to the teacher and the students, and those standards would include communicative and cultural competence, as opposed to many programs today that relegate "language" to the first years of study and "culture" to civilization classes.
What exactly would a revised curriculum look like? Although we revised our curriculum at the University of Georgia before the national discussion and implementation of the Standards were under way, it is a curriculum that attempts to achieve similar goals. Now, if you go to our Web page (www.rom.uga.edu) and look at our curriculum, you'll find that in some ways it does not differ from a traditional curriculum. Students move first through lower-division courses that use a communicative approach; next to composition and conversation courses that include diverse cultural, literary, electronic, and other materials; and finally to upper-division courses in literature, linguistics, and business. The way in which we differ is that the department as a whole has committed itself to integrating literature, language, and culture into all those courses. Literature surveys are intended not only to cover literary materials but to increase cultural and communicative competence as well. We do not have tracks or specialized courses in culture because we assume that culture will be an integral part of all the courses. A course in the introduction to linguistics is required along with a course in the introduction to literature because both language and literature will be integral parts of all subsequent upper-division courses.
What about departments that are beset by indifference or resistance to the Standards? As noted earlier, college professors in the foreign languages, most of whom have been trained in literature, were not the driving forces in the development of the Standards. And in follow-up documents or articles about implementation, the language being spoken is that used by secondary classroom teachers or faculty in such fields as teacher preparation. Rather than evoke the Standards as a general principle, then, I propose a more indirect approach in which not only authors of documents related to the Standards but also those of us, as individual professors, who are knowledgeable about or interested in their implementation would address our colleagues in terms they understand. An example would be sharing information about strategies and texts to use in upper-division courses (levels 15 and 16), which is where many of the problems achieving the goals of the Standards are most pronounced. Whereas professors in lower-division courses are guided by authors and publishers of introductory and intermediate textbooks, who are well aware of the Standards and other pedagogical developments in foreign language teaching, professors in upper-division courses are typically left to their own resources in the selection of materials. Not surprisingly, often their solution is to select works they knew from graduate school or works related to their current area of research. I thought of this the other day in reading a current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education in which the writer Julia Alvarez recalls John Ciardi's well-known comment that "a university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students." Focusing on the students and their needs in the selection of upper-division language materials is at the heart of the Standards, and one indirect way of implementing them in college courses is by nudging ourselves and our colleagues in the right direction--that is, toward identifying materials that meet the Standards of communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. In my own field of nineteenth-century French literature, I have been involved for several years in introducing panels on teaching literature and choosing texts at the NCFS Colloquium, a large yearly conference that has traditionally been devoted exclusively to the presentation of scholarly papers. Although much of the informal talk in the halls has been about texts, as the participants scurry around to pick materials for their next course, an applied subject such as the selection of materials was considered an afterthought, not a legitimate topic of scholarly discussion. I believe that such applied subjects merit a place in our profession as a way to generate academic discussions about how and what we teach. Such discussions can be a first step toward the further dialogue about the Standards that needs to take place among professors in foreign language departments.
There also needs to be an effort on the part of administrators to speak to college professors in ways that they understand and value. An example can be drawn from my experience as the head of a large department and the director of the NEH seminars that, as mentioned earlier, were held at the University of Georgia in the summer and fall of 1994. In subsequent evaluations of the project and discussions with faculty, I was struck by the fact that it was the intellectual content of the material studied that was the key to the success of our project. Faculty had the opportunity to upgrade their own command of literary theory, cultural studies, and other areas, which, as many have told me, enhanced their own professional development and scholarship. One thing that I believe gets lost in the push to implement the Standards is the gap between the intellectual aspirations and inclinations of faculty on the one hand and the far more mundane, pragmatic realities and needs of foreign language classrooms on the other. If we can show faculty members whose main interests are in literature that they can have an intellectual stake in the implementation of the Standards by bringing discussions in line with current literary and theoretical trends in their fields, we can perhaps begin to bridge the gap between the language and literature components of foreign language departments.
One final suggestion for dealing with the indifference or resistance of faculty to implementation of the Standards involves efforts that are external to individual faculty members and foreign language departments. Ultimately, all our current efforts notwithstanding, without incentives from professional organizations and funding agencies the progress toward implementation of the Standards will be halting and spotty at best, occurring sporadically as a result of good will, individual initiative, local conditions, and other factors. As noted earlier, the large research universities are producing most of the new members of our profession; and at those universities especially, but in other institutions as well, college professors must pass through a series of arduous steps in order to reach tenure, promotion, adequate salary, and professional recognition. Perceiving themselves to be overworked, underpaid, and often undervalued, they are unlikely to want to assume the new set of imperatives involved in understanding and implementing the Standards. What would be most helpful in this regard is that professional organizations such as the MLA and funding agencies such as the NEH develop incentives and rewards for schools, departments, or individuals who take a leadership role. A faculty member who learns that a summer stipend could be awarded to implement the Standards might be less resistant and might drum up some support from colleagues to bring about change. Someone who is working toward tenure or promotion might be motivated by official, national recognition: for example, recognition for creating some of the current Web sites that provide a wealth of texts and other information that help facilitate implementation of the Standards. A research university that could receive a major NEH grant for integrating the Standards into the college curriculum, such as the one our university received in 1994, might see this as a way to gain both prestige and resources for faculty members and departments and enhance its reputation in the profession. A faculty member who is interested in interdisciplinary approaches might welcome an initiative for team teaching. Currently at the University of Georgia it is possible to apply to the Center for the Humanities and Arts for a small grant to compensate an academic department for releasing a faculty member to team-teach with someone in another department. This incentive for fostering interdisciplinarity furthers several of the goals of the Standards: cultures, connections, and comparisons. In short, what we need from the profession now is the recognition that implementation of the Standards is important and that it is not likely to occur unless faculty members are given the kinds of incentives and rewards that count for them in their professional development.
Davis, James N. "Educational Reform and the Babel (Babble) of Culture: Prospects for the Standards for Foreign Language Learning." Modern Language Journal 81.2 (1997): 151-63.
Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. Yonkers: Natl. Standards in Foreign Lang. Educ. Project, 1996.
Swaffar, Janet. "Major Changes: The Standards Project and the New Foreign Language Curriculum." ADFL Bulletin 30.1 (1998): 34-37. [Show Article]
von Schmidt, Wolff. "German Studies: A Paradigm of Change. Comments on Standards, Curriculum, and Testing." ERIC 18 April 1997: 1-9.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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