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MUCH of the recent discussion regarding the future of foreign language instruction in the United States has focused on the various curricular dichotomies that characterize our discipline: language versus content, lower division versus upper division, form versus meaning, spoken versus written language, cultural fact versus cultural inquiry, simplified versus authentic texts. One consequence of this dichotomous curriculum is that students end up being exposed to two different views of culture. In lower-division language study, culture is typically presented as a quantifiable subject, a fifth skill that can be learned through culture capsules or experienced through culture days. In upper-division courses, however, where analysis and interpretation play a much greater role, cultural and critical theory are drawn on to provide a more critical framework for viewing culture. The significant distinction here is the difference between teaching cultural content and learning how to read authentic materials as documents that reveal cultural difference. Students at beginning levels can thus identify cultural products but lack practice in identifying how language use in an authentic text indicates cultural significance.
To address this discrepancy, several important and coherent curricular models have been proposed, and we can hope that these calls for reform will begin to resonate throughout the field. The Standards for Foreign Language Learning, for example, provide a practical model for developing coherence across all levels and institutions of language learning. Applying the standards to the university curriculum, Janet Swaffar proposes moving foreign language departments beyond their specific subfields and unifying them around principles common to our discipline.1 As a case in point, Heidi Byrnes presents a curricular model that integrates the German curriculum vertically across all learning levels at Georgetown University. Offering theoretical frameworks, Jeffrey Peck and Russell Berman ("Reform") both draw on their work in cultural studies and apply it to establish a coherent teaching program with literacy in a foreign culture as its primary objective.
Drawing on successful programs that merge foreign language study with content-based instruction, a feasible step for foreign language departments would be to apply these existing proposals consistent with the needs of their particular institution. Therein, however, lies the potential stumbling block. While the theoretical premise of a coherent curriculum appears to have few detractors, its actual implementation, especially at the beginning levels of instruction, raises some concerns among language practitioners. Most notably, there is the perception that the materials needed to develop foreign cultural literacy would be too difficult for beginning language students. After all, to conduct cultural inquiry for the purposes of fostering foreign cultural literacy, students must be exposed to the target culture through culturally authentic texts--that is, materials written to be read by native speakers of the language rather than materials written only to teach language. However, the perceived inherent difficulty of authentic texts causes instructors to hesitate in including them as a central component of beginning language instruction. Such hesitation manifests itself in the tendency of departments to delay extensive use of authentic materials until the third year of instruction after the basic language sequence has been completed and after many students have completed their institution's language requirement and stopped studying the language.
In the place of authentic texts in the first two years one typically finds culture notes or capsules and reading passages edited by textbook authors and editors. To be sure, this material provides students with cultural content, but the texts' lack of cultural authenticity greatly diminishes their value as objects of cultural inquiry, unless, of course, the purpose is to inquire about the culture of the American foreign language textbook industry or the culture of foreign language teaching in this country (see Kramsch, "Cultural Discourse"). Considering the textbook publishing industry's role in foreign language instruction, such inquiry would certainly be a valuable endeavor but is perhaps beyond the scope of the current curricular reform efforts. For the purposes of inquiring about the target culture, however, culture notes and capsules provide students with little material. Even when culturally authentic materials are implemented in beginning instruction, they typically appear only on the periphery and are rarely used to reveal significant features of the target culture.
While the implementation of authentic texts in beginning classes has its critics, that criticism seems to focus on language competence as a prerequisite to engaging in learning processes at a later point in the curriculum. Thus, Julian Bamford and Richard Day lament "the ongoing cult of authenticity in L2 instruction" (748) and call for reading material that is tailored to the students' proficiency level. H. G. Widdowson argues against using authentic language because the classroom cannot approximate the context that made the language authentic in the first place, a position that denies the possibility of a hermeneutic or phenomenological reading of the other. Both arguments ignore the different goals implied by today's expanded view of language instruction--that the language skills to be acquired must be linked to particular cognitive objectives such as comparing L1 and L2 language use to identify different discursive strategies or using the language of authentic materials as the basis for one's own articulation. In addition, they overlook the work by researchers and practitioners, as exemplified by Claire Kramsch (Context), that has stressed language's inextricable connection to culture. In doing so, they are able to justify the profession's reliance on culturally sanitized texts that reflect more of our own culture than they do the target culture. If, however, language is to be viewed as a carrier of cultural meaning and since one of the goals of language instruction is to study another culture, then students need to be exposed to artifacts from that culture.
Another reason for conducting cultural inquiry with authentic materials right away in the first semester is the often overlooked fact that the first-year classes have the highest enrollments of any level. Delaying cultural inquiry until the third year denies the many students who stop studying a foreign language after a year or two the important experience of being exposed to notions of alterity. Moreover, these students are arguably the ones who could benefit the most from confronting a foreign culture. As Russell Berman ("Cultural Studies") has suggested, foreign language departments are one of the few places on campus where students are confronted with concepts, practices, and perspectives different from their own. In other words, if we do not address this issue in our classes, it is possible that no one on campus will.
How then to use authentic materials to conduct cultural inquiry with beginning language students? The remaining discussion here focuses on a reading pedagogy that has been successfully implemented in first-year German classes and that is designed to help beginning students read authentic discourse and identify how textual language signals cultural meaning. Central to this pedagogy is the procedural model for reading outlined by Janet Swaffar, Katherine Arens, and Heidi Byrnes. In this model, students first preview the text to establish its major events and characters. Next, they focus on the text's macrosyntax by identifying its episodic structure as different events and their consequences. Third, students select language that exemplifies major events and the way characters respond to these events. Fourth, they reproduce this language to make statements about the text verbally and in writing. Last, students move toward more active language generation and production by applying their real-world knowledge to textual information in order to assess the text's cultural implications.
Before we discuss this procedural approach to reading and cultural inquiry in more detail, we should note several important considerations for implementing this approach in the beginning classroom, considerations that have been supported in L2 research. First, reading of authentic texts needs to begin as soon as possible in the first semester of instruction. By confronting authentic materials early in their language learning, students can develop right from the beginning the skills that they will need to read for as long as they study a foreign language. By waiting until the third year, however, students have time to become used to other approaches to L2 reading that do not necessarily prepare them adequately to deal with more challenging texts. In particular, if the goal of L2 reading instruction is to develop independent readers, then that objective should be pursued as soon as possible. Moreover, true beginners who have no or negligible prior experience learning the language can be surprisingly open and willing to tackle challenging texts since they have relatively low expectations about what they can comprehend. The reward and satisfaction are then amplified when the students see that they are able to understand the gist of a German newspaper article in their first semester with the help of peers and the instructor.
Second, developing independent L2 readers takes time (see Bernhardt). Students needs to be exposed to reading early and often to acquire the abilities necessary to process an L2 text on their own. Third, students' comprehension of the text needs to precede active verbal production. Asking anything else of beginning language students will place too great a cognitive load on their nascent language skills.
Fourth, the reading materials selected for implementation in a first-year course should be age-appropriate and present beginning students with the fewest cognitive and affective burdens. Specifically, texts with a high degree of familiarity, coherence, redundancy, concreteness, and consistency of point of view typically reduce the incidence of cognitive dissonance among first-year students (see Carrell). Students also typically respond more positively and successfully to texts that interest them, relate to their cultural background, and appeal to their demographics (see Mohammed and Swales; Lee). On the basis of these factors, two types of texts have proved particularly successful with novice learners: texts that discuss American culture and texts that contain formulaic, predictable content. For example, recent articles in German periodicals on Barbara Walters's interview with Monica Lewinsky or the execution of a German citizen in Arizona resonated with American university students learning German. Equally successful have been Harlequin-type German popular novels, for they present content that is accessible to American university students who are familiar with soap operas, romance films, and TV movies of the week. Although such texts would be considered difficult by more traditional readability formulas that rely on word count and sentence length, their familiar content serves as a major asset for beginning L2 readers. Students are able to anticipate ideas and action and do not have to rely so heavily on the language of the text. Of course, if students read popular novels that present a more general, Westernized rather than a specifically German perspective, they are not being exposed to German culture per se. Nevertheless, they are developing their ability to recognize and identify the behaviors, perspectives, and values inherent in any cultural artifact, regardless of its origin or perspective.
Fifth, several times during the semester teachers should engage students in an open discussion in English about their notion of reading comprehension. The objective of such an exercise is to confront students with what they feel it means to comprehend a text. Students typically have not seriously considered these questions before, but such discussions are an essential part of a reading pedagogy if students are going to relinquish deeply rooted misconceptions about L2 reading, such as the belief that every word on the page needs to be understood to guarantee comprehension. Usually, these discussions need to be repeated a few times during the semester to overcome existing biases regarding L2 reading.
Sixth, the vast majority of the reading needs to take place in class. Countering the tendency in research and practice to treat reading as a single, solitary exercise performed outside class, this pedagogy relies extensively on the in-class network of peers and instructors to provide beginning students with support and assistance as they read authentic materials for the first time. Any misreadings as well as lexical or linguistic difficulties that arise can be dealt with immediately either through pair-work reading, teacher assistance during pair work, or the following class discussions. By bringing different reading styles together and pooling background knowledge, reading with a partner often initiates a candid discussion about the events of a particular passage and what that might imply for future events. Students working in pairs or groups typically check their partners' comprehension, a process that often results in extraneous or wrong information being omitted from their discussion (see Doughty and Pica; Pica). At times, of course, when groups of students cannot agree on their findings or rely too heavily on one reader, faulty information is accepted as valid.
In such cases, the ensuing class discussion would serve to correct any misreadings. Important also in guiding students' reading is making sure that students are aware of how they misconstrued information in the text. Especially for nonintegrative readers who, as characterized by Ellen Block, are prone to make unfounded extrapolations about the text by focusing on their own prior knowledge and failing to attend to textual data, class time has to be spent pointing out the specific places in the text where their reading went awry. Misreadings typically surface when students do not integrate the newly read material into the preceding events and behaviors. They view an event as being singular or independent of prior actions and do not attempt to make any connections between events within a particular text segment.
Over the course of a semester, students become very familiar with collaborative reading and form effective teams for reading the text together. In fact, the constant in-class pair reading and ensuing class discussions in which each group shares its findings with the rest of the class create the sense that reading the text is a shared and collective effort. As a result, a positive classroom dynamic develops, especially as students begin to realize that they are reading and comprehending authentic texts.
To implement this pedagogy in beginning classes, instructors need to guide students in following the five steps of the procedural model above: (1) preview the text to locate its macrotopics; (2) focus on the macrosyntax by identifying the text's episodic structure; (3) attend to the textual language used to convey textual information; (4) reproduce this language to make statements about the text; and (5) synthesize the behaviors, actions, and characters in the text in order to assess their cultural implications.
In concrete terms, this approach begins by asking students to identify what the text is about.2 Initially this process can be set up so that students only have to select an appropriate answer from multiple choices or identify a statement about the text as true or false. Very soon into the first semester, however, the instructor can direct students to work with a partner in class to find the answers to the who, what, when, and where of a particular text segment--that is, the people, events, time, and location. At this very early stage of reading, the main goal is to familiarize students with the characters, the setting, and the general premise of the text.
A central component behind this initial exercise is to direct students to begin associating specific language use with certain events and people in the text. Students are therefore reading to access both textual information and the lexical and linguistic components necessary to describe their newly found information. Instead of having to come up with language on their own to discuss the text, students are trained to use the text language itself as the key to their lexical and linguistic expression.
After articulating textual information in writing in in-class group work, the same information is then shared orally during the class discussion of the text segment. The students' various answers can be written on the board to create a comprehensive summary encompassing all possible answers. This exercise serves several functions. First, it allows students to see the variety of answers that are possible for each scenario and thus dismiss the misconception that there is only one correct answer. It also forces students to pay more attention to form because, as they announce their pairings, they often have to transform their answers from the original version. For example, instead of using the first-person form of "I like you, Wolf, but I don't love you," some students report this information in the third person. By no means always accurate in their transformation, students are nevertheless beginning to focus more on the role form plays in meaningful communication.
Important to the students' identification of textual information is their ability to link events and behaviors by drawing causal and chronological connections within each segment. This technique is then applied on a larger scale to make connections between segments as well. The central approach behind the attempt to have students read for events or ideas and then look for their logical consequence is Russell Stauffer's Directed Reading, Directed Thinking activity (DRDT). In this approach students read a segment, report which events, people, and locations they noted, and then predict logical, potential outcomes from what they just read. The students who are able to integrate their real-world knowledge into new textual information, characterized by Block as integrative readers, adapt very easily to this approach. Others, however, make far more subjective predictions that stray greatly from what the text says. Thus this initial stage is characterized by a recurring need to remind students to refer to the language describing events and people in the text in order to forestall any illogical predictions.
Making coherent, text-based inferences is not the only difficulty that students encounter. Because the texts are presented in their unedited form without any marginal glosses or vocabulary lists, students are faced, especially initially, with a considerable amount of unfamiliar vocabulary. The class discussions about comprehension serve as a first step toward helping students overcome this potential lexical overload. Effectively reinforcing these discussions is the procedure students follow when reading the text. By being directed first to identify the text's macrotopics rather than more specific information, students do not feel the need to know the meanings of many unfamiliar words. Instead, they rely on their ability to piece together information based on their own prior knowledge and previous events in the text.
Another potential problem for students is the syntactical and morphological complexity of authentic texts. Students in the first semester typically have been exposed to only the nominative and accusative case and simple, declarative sentences when they begin reading authentic texts, but the procedure students follow when reading the text, combined with teacher guidance, helps readers overcome most of the linguistic difficulties they encounter. By having to read initially only for the macrotopics, students do not need to attend to morphosyntactic features that they have not yet learned. If a particularly important text segment contains a form that is new to students, the teacher can ask the class as a whole to estimate what that form might mean and what its function in the sentence is. They are not yet in the position to produce this form accurately on their own, but they are developing the ability to comprehend the meaning and purpose of the new structures. Especially at the start of the semester, teachers would be wise to spend class time highlighting key sentences and asking students to examine the syntactic variation that the language allows.
To help guide students' reading instructors can display overhead transparencies of the text, adopt the persona and proficiency level of a first-year student, and then conduct for the class a think-aloud protocol of their own reading of the text. This way, students begin to see how best to take advantage of any information that resonates with them and to see how events in the novel are interrelated. This technique can also be used to help students see how to deal with unfamiliar morphosyntactical structures or lexical items. Thus, the language classroom with its peer readers and facilitating instructors becomes a vital resource for students as they work through an authentic text.
An additional component of the procedural model can be a one-paragraph summary of the text that students write outside class. As part of their summary students have to use five different phrases or expressions from the text. This assignment follows Bill VanPatten's suggestion that efforts to develop students' fluency should be based on improving their ability to access and use "chunks of language" rather than forms or rules (122). The summaries are then graded on a five-point scale with two points awarded for sufficient summarization of the chapter's key events, one point for incorporating five expressions from the text, one point for using those expressions correctly, and one point for grammatical accuracy in the rest of the summary.3
Since they are required to use expressions from the novel, students have to reread the text for phrases that suit their summary and then examine how these phrases function so that they can be incorporated effectively and correctly into their paragraph. To assist them in working toward a literacy that incorporates the language of the text, instructors can encourage students to borrow or "poach" textual language on the basis of those expressions' meaningfulness to them. As this procedural model is recycled with each new text, the students become more familiar with the classroom pedagogy and begin to achieve independence in their reading and writing.
Once students have demonstrated facility in locating the text's major events, identifying its macrosyntax, and accessing textual language to talk about the novel, they are ready to embark on discussing the text's cultural implications and significance. Guided by a series of questions, students are asked to consider which characters and behaviors achieve prominence, what men and women are allowed to do, and who the winners and losers are in the text. As students note the answers to these questions, they are in effect identifying how characters and behaviors are assembled and weighted in the text and which ones have the most social and political capital. Those with the most capital enjoy a certain legitimization, an authorized position that grants them what Pierre Bourdieu calls "symbolic power." By starting to recognize the utterances, characters, and behaviors that exercise symbolic power, students begin to gain access to the underlying system of thought within the text.
It is entirely possible that students will express some initial confusion in responding to these issues in the text. They have not necessarily considered such questions before and might therefore be unsure about how to proceed. To remedy this situation, teachers can focus first on having students list what the men and women do in the novel. Then, these activities for men and women can be characterized as being what either the working or the leisure classes perform. Last, the students can be asked to identify which activities are granted the most prominence. By breaking down the events, characters, and behaviors into these categories, the students begin to see that not all characters are portrayed equally. In a popular novel, for example, students might note that all the leading characters are members of a privileged class, that they all appear to have unlimited disposable income and free time, that they all are instinctually able to recognize good from evil, and that they all have servants who perform the menial daily chores.
Through such analysis, students uncover characters and behaviors that exercise symbolic power within the novel, and they begin to see the system of thought that such a text perpetuates. As mentioned earlier, this analysis of the popular novel does not focus on unveiling German culture; rather, it aims to develop students' ability to recognize and identify the symbolic power inherent in any cultural artifact.
Central to these discussions should be an emphasis on having students use text-based references to support any inferences they make about the novel's take on reality and truth. By requiring text-specific inferences, this approach serves to prevent students from making claims that are based on their own presuppositions about the value system presented in the text. Thus students must always focus first and foremost on how a text signals cultural features.
The next step in the students' cultural inquiry is to integrate their preceding analysis of the text's symbolic power with their own opinion of which behaviors enjoy symbolic power in their own world in order to draw conclusions about how the text's reality differs from their own. This "reading for difference" can be prompted by asking students how the text differs from an American equivalent. Often this involves asking what the text defers--that is, what it does not discuss that an American equivalent might. Ultimately, students gain insight into the values, practices, and priorities that are privileged in the text, and through repeated exposure to a diverse, yet thematically related, set of authentic texts, they can begin to extrapolate this analysis onto a larger plane and assess the broader culture out of which the texts arose.
A potential concern about implementing this pedagogy is that by focusing its attention on cultural inquiry, it neglects the language skills typically emphasized in beginning language instruction. A brief review of the pedagogy reveals, however, that all language skills are stressed and practiced. Students develop their speaking skills through group readings and class discussions, their writing through the one-paragraph summaries, their listening through the group and class discussions, their vocabulary through the summaries, and their grammar through the summaries and their attention to textual details.
In fact, as part of a larger study that examined the feasibility and effects of reading an extended authentic text in first-semester German, the language abilities of students who followed the inquiry-based pedagogy were compared with those of students who adhered to the standard first-semester syllabus (see Maxim). The key pedagogical difference between the two groups was that the treatment group spent the first half of each class hour practicing the assigned material in the textbook and the second half of the hour reading a popular novel following the inquiry-based pedagogy. The comparison group, meanwhile, spent the entire hour practicing the grammar and vocabulary in the textbook. By the end of the semester, this different classroom treatment meant that the comparison group spent fourteen more class hours on the textbook material than the treatment group did, yet the treatment group performed just as well as the comparison group on the two standardized departmental language exams that tested the material in the textbook. In other words, time taken away from more traditional language practice for the purpose of engaging in cultural inquiry did not appear to disadvantage students on standardized language exams.
Integrating language learning and cultural inquiry through reading not only does not appear to impede the L2 acquisition process, it also presents possible pedagogical advantages that potentially remedy some of the curricular dichotomies facing our profession. First, it dispels the notion that the lower level has to be reserved for language instruction. Beginning language instruction can now also include training students to become cultural critics. Second, by including critical analysis of cultural artifacts, the lower level can now serve as a more logical bridge to upper-level study, thereby addressing the problems of attrition and difficult transition so widely mentioned in the scholarship. Third, an inquiry-based approach to beginning language instruction exposes students who are just in our classes to fulfill graduation requirements to notions of alterity and otherness that they may not otherwise get in their education. Last, this approach, in contrast with a strict language-oriented curriculum, corresponds more effectively with the intellectual curiosity and maturity of university students and has the potential to transform beginning language instruction into the intellectually exciting endeavor it can be.
2For detailed daily lesson plans that outline the implementation of an authentic popular novel in a first-semester German class, see Maxim.
3This activity was developed in consultation with Katherine Arens and Janet Swaffar at the University of Texas, Austin.
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© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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