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IN HIS 1994 paper “Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula, Culture,” Russell Berman takes the stance that cultural studies, in contrast with so much recent literary theory that is based on deconstruction, “de facto preserves the prominence of language, given the focus on specific geographical areas” (8). Despite depicting the intellectual landscape regarding the relation between language and culture in a generally favorable light, he concludes with a recommendation that attenuates any optimism one might have read into his assessment. According to Berman, we should ask ourselves “why we think language, literature, and culture ought to be taught at all and whether they belong together for other than merely conventional reasons” (11).
Seven years later we have few substantive answers to Berman’s appropriately probing question. In fact, it is difficult to discern any real interest in its deliberation. If a recent set of papers on the state of the discipline by leading Germanists can at all serve as an indication of larger trends (“Colloquium”), then the notion that cultural studies can and should provide an encompassing intellectual umbrella for all the activities housed in foreign language departments seems largely to have vanished, overtaken by all too familiar debates about which literary-cultural content areas should be added, reduced, or foregrounded in the wake of the replacement of canonical literature by previously marginalized materials and authors.
In recognition of this trend, the ADFL Executive Committee, at the 2000 MLA convention in Washington, sponsored the three-session forum Foreign Languages, Foreign Cultures, the context in which I originally offered these remarks. The forum proposal had noted that the discourse of cultural studies seems, in the last decade or so, to have paid only scant attention to the intersection of language and culture, indeed is largely ignoring linguistic multiplicity because of a strong anglophone influence. It is easy to agree with the sentiment of the proposal that, as Russell Berman writes in this issue, the field “promote a systematic inquiry into the theoretical underpinnings of the study of culture as pertinent to the foreign languages areas.”
But another analysis of the current state of cultural studies in foreign language departments, an analysis that the proposal also offered, strikes me as less convincing or at least as considerably less straightforward. It is the assessment that the foreign language community, departing from its earlier ways of constituting itself, now appears to be embracing culture with open arms. While there is certainly much rhetorical and documentary evidence to that effect, I suggest that a careful look at the nature of that cultural turn in foreign language teaching might lead to a less sanguine interpretation. At the very least, we might conclude that the proposal’s suggestion that the field can benefit from an awareness of “the multiplicity of pedagogic practices in order to foster further innovation” may be premature. Unless it is framed by critical analysis, espousing a multiplicity of practices may be detrimental both to our understanding of the challenges facing the entire foreign language field and to our ability to meet them in a substantive way.
Given that conflicted scenario, in this paper I deal with three broad issues. I first address foundational concerns that pertain to the existing configuration for language and literary-cultural studies in collegiate foreign language departments. My critique leads to an outlining of two areas in need of attention: creation of an intellectual foundation that can truly accommodate all aspects of a department’s work and determination of a suitable goal for collegiate foreign language departments. On that basis I proceed to the final point, issues of implementation. Here my focus is on imagining a programmatic context that could support such an endeavor and on pedagogical approaches that through teaching and learning would fill such a framework with life. As I present my argument in this limited space, I am reminded that these matters did not come about overnight and that they will also not be solved overnight. Yet, as it has in our past, an honest discussion might be a useful contribution.
Beginning with foundational matters, I find that the stances toward culture that literature and language professionals have taken as well as their divergent forms of incorporation require careful examination. Specifically, we need to know why the much hailed cultural turn, in cultural studies and in language teaching and learning, has largely failed to address Berman’s earlier challenging of what foreign language departments do and how they do it. I suggest that the foreign language field, unlike other disciplinary areas that are also interested in culture, has to provide thoughtful answers to the following interrelated questions:
In the following I elaborate the concerns raised by these questions from two perspectives, that of language and language learning and that of cultural studies research and teaching. I do so from the position of an interested outsider to the literature-culture field and of a passionate insider in the fields of language acquisition and use in society and of instructed language acquisition by adults.
The cultural turn in what were previously nearly exclusive national canonical foreign language departments responded to and manifested deep intellectual, demographic, sociopolitical, and administrative shifts in United States society and higher education, not to mention major intellectual shifts in Europe. The interdisciplinarity that shift entailed and the diversity of texts it sought under the concepts of “culture” and “cultural studies” seemed to breathe new life into foreign language departments, yet these umbrella terms do not inherently provide a way for studying culture in relation to language that is theoretically better grounded than it was in the more narrowly defined national literature department. In other words, the new cultural studies was not so much a way of renewing an emphasis on culture—a way of recovering, as it were, what was lost over the course of the twentieth century when the influence of the earlier philological tradition in literature departments gradually receded under the power of increasingly more formalized literary theorizing—as it was a shift in theoretical and scholarly approaches to the notion of culture itself, ironically already laden with an elaborate theoretical apparatus.
Indeed, it was a sociologically and anthropologically oriented version of culture that came to be privileged in this new cultural studies enterprise, an unsurprising development given the dominance of deconstruction and given the massive reconstitution of the nation-state. As a consequence foreign language professionals needed to familiarize themselves with new forms of theorizing about culture that were largely derived from the social sciences. Extraordinarily rich insights regarding language notwithstanding (see Bourdieu), such theorizing does not primarily concern itself with language. Where it deals with language, it does so in relation to broadly conceived social realities, as an abstract system of human semiosis, focusing particularly on notions of power and identity through social practices of language use. It does not focus on the specifics of a particular language. That would seemingly be the task of foreign language professionals.
Enormous intellectual energies were expended on a massive retooling of scholars in foreign language departments so that they might acquire this new theoretical and methodological understanding and expertise. The result was a faculty development effort, research engagement, and publication opportunity bonanza that made many a career in cultural studies departments even as the change was not welcomed by some cultural anthropologists and sociologists, who did not see it as sufficiently informed or scholarly.
More important, as a nearly all-consuming preoccupation the new cultural studies left little intellectual space and time for the task of considering what an explicit, substantive, and viable link between this new intellectual orientation and a department’s long-standing foreign language acquisition charge might look like and how departments would have to change. As a result, the link between language and culture or knowledge in traditional literature departments, already tenuous, became an even more conflicted site. Though the cultural studies route was explicitly put forward as a way of attracting a greater number of students, that hoped-for enrollment surge by and large did not materialize—not least because the new intellectual paradigm did not attend to a simultaneous development, an increase in students’ interest to learn another language. We have created, then, extraordinarily jarring interests and forces—an almost sure-fire recipe for more neglect of the link between language learning and culture and also for ill-considered attempts to fix matters while not addressing the underlying issues (Gilman). Just how ambivalent was the response even by leaders in the profession can be seen by Peter Hohendahl’s comment:
As much as I would emphasize the teaching of the German language as a vital part of the German department, my advice would be not to rely exclusively on the traditional structure in which language instruction serves as the basis for all other departmental activities. I believe that we have to reconceptualize the relation between language instruction and the teaching of culture. In view of the recent enrollment losses that I mentioned, it might be judicious to develop a program that does not depend entirely on the use of the German language as a medium. (88)
On the other side of our divided house, the area of teaching and learning a foreign language, language acquisition is presumably a central concern, leaving us free to investigate the more recent incorporation of culture. Much as the cultural turn in literary scholarship has had numerous motivations and also numerous, even unintended, consequences, so the foreign language side too has a complex relation to the notion of culture. In particular, I interpret a renewed interest in culture primarily as furthering the agenda that the communicative turn already set in motion in the early to mid-eighties, namely, to continue to work on overcoming a long-standing formalist tradition in language teaching and learning.
While recent evidence about adult instructed foreign language learning strongly supports that interest in culture, the extent to which nearly all institutionalized and proceduralized manifestations of foreign language learning and teaching are intricately enmeshed in and dependent on the validity of formalist approaches has not yet been fully grasped. Inasmuch as pursuing a nonformalist agenda necessitates a comprehensive and potentially deeply unsettling analysis of all structures and practices in language teaching in learning, the foreign language teaching profession has yet to come to grips with the required changes and to chart a new course of action.
For example, at present the Standards document is probably the best-known attempt to elevate these matters to a profession-wide agenda (Standards). But even there culture ultimately remains additive, considered only when the language component of our work has been completed. Higher education might feel it is not culpable, since by and large it has not participated in the Standards efforts. But in those rare instances when it has attempted to link content to a variety of disciplinary contexts and language acquisition, the results have not been successful. As the new guidelines for curricular organization by German studies (New Guidelines) indicate, the field all too often confines itself to ritual assertions of the importance of a foreign language, for the need for individual faculty members to place greater value on teaching, or for the administration to create different reward structures (see also “Response [. . .] Part 1” and “Response [. . .] Part 2”). Only rarely are these matters seen, first and foremost, as an intellectual challenge, having real repercussions for entire programs and for all faculty members of a department. Even less likely are they to be understood as a long overdue instance of social accountability by an entire faculty group in foreign language departments and by the foreign language profession as a whole vis-à-vis broader educational and societal concerns (Byrnes, “Reconsidering” and “Abilities”). Just in case we missed the long-standing and deeply troubling consequences of inattentiveness and inaction, the recent events at Drake University provided a most sobering reminder (Schneider).
In other words, as a field we have yet to find an intellectual framework capable of addressing at the departmental level, the site where our work is performed, all the components and aspects of this work. To be suitable for our field, that framework must begin with what distinguishes us from others who are dealing in culture, namely, the aspect of foreign language use as part of our foreign culture orientation, a characteristic that in the American educational context is inextricably intertwined with ensuring that students acquire a foreign language to competent levels of performance. We will therefore need to develop a principled and coherent understanding of the relation among language, language use, and socioculturally and linguistically constructed knowledge, and particularly the role in that understanding of both the L1 and the L2 for adult second language learners. Given the educational position of the foreign language field, our proposal must lay out in detail how these matters are to be understood so as to lead to efficient and effective practice that fosters second language learning toward high levels of performance. Only when broad principles of adult L2 learning have been clarified can we then proceed to determining the knowledge or content areas that a foreign language department with a cultural studies orientation might wish to pursue. We need to reverse the order of consideration: instead of beginning with an isolated reflection of content or knowledge areas that should be included in our instructional programs, we need to link that reflection to language-acquisitional issues, a connection that would result in our selecting, from among the many possibilities, those content features that are most suitable for adult language teaching and learning.
The much-needed exploration of the relation between language and knowledge and its implications for foreign language programs by definition must involve scholars in both literary cultural studies and language learning (see Byrnes and Kord). Whether that involvement is best captured by the term interdisciplinarity is perhaps less certain than common parlance suggests, particularly in the light of what James Martin refers to as the unsatisfactory accomplishments of interdisciplinarity in the past (“Design”). Translating his insights from the Australian experience of the link between linguistics and education to the American foreign language department, our efforts will succeed not to the extent that professionals from each field separately speak about a certain phenomenon but to the extent that professionals in literary cultural studies can learn about language acquisition and language teaching specialists can develop rich understandings of issues in literary cultural studies. Martin refers to this project as transdisciplinarity. Shall ever the twain meet in foreign language departments?
To begin to answer that question I explore some of the changes that such a project might involve, limiting myself to my side of the house, as it were, both because I am more familiar with it and because I am more comfortable with critiquing the omissions that I see in language teaching and learning. The field of linguistics in particular has a long history of separating knowledge and intellectual skills from “the language patterns in which they have their being” (Christie 152). The result has been an instrumentalist approach that accords to language no other role than to express in a seemingly straightforward manner previously existing knowledge. As a consequence issues of formal properness, what Frances Christie calls a kind of etiquette, tend to take on prominence.
By contrast, a functional approach to language, associated with the British Australian linguist M. A. K. Halliday and his followers, emphasizes a symbiotic relation between human activity and language, in which, as Ruqaiya Hasan puts it, “the very existence of one [is] the condition for the existence of the other” (“Conception” 184). By investigating key constructs of systemic-functional linguistics—namely, context of situation, register, text, and text structure—we can create a conceptual framework that substantiates this claim. Halliday turns on their head the notions of language and grammar that prevail in language-instructional contexts. He considers language to be not “a system of forms, to which meanings are then attached” but “a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized” (Introduction xiv). This kind of grammar aims to account for how language is used, how language, which has evolved biologically and culturally in order to satisfy human needs, accomplishes this task. Here he identifies two central ways of meaning making that are addressed by language, “(i) to understand the environment (ideational), and (ii) to act on the others in it (interpersonal). Combined with these is a third metafunctional component, the ‘textual,’ which breathes relevance into the other two” (xiii).
Dramatically different from the typical structuralist grammar, which is one of syntagmatic linearity, often with roots in logic and philosophy, this is a grammar of choices and relations, where “the grammatical system as a whole represents the semantic code of a language” and “the context of culture determines the nature of the code” (xxxii). Regarding child language learning Halliday says, “As a language is manifested through its texts, a culture is manifested through its situations; so by attending to text-in-situation a child construes the code, and by using the code to interpret the text he construes the culture” (xxxii).
A key extension of the functionalist approach that further elucidates the relation between socially situated knowledge and language is the notion of genre, an area that has seen important applications in both L1 and L2 education (Jones et al.; Rothery). Among numerous and nuanced interpretations of genre, Martin’s approach is particularly accessible. To Martin, “Genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them. They range from literary to far from literary forms: poems, narratives, expositions, lectures, seminars, recipes, manuals, appointment making, service encounters, news broadcasts and so on” (“Process” 250). Their connection to cultural contexts of situation has been analytically exemplified extensively; they have been considered in terms of the dimensions of field, tenor, and mode, first introduced by Halliday. Janet Jones and others define these dimensions in the following fashion:
FIELD refers to the social activity that is taking place as well as the institutional setting in which a piece of language occurs;
TENOR refers to the nature of the relationship between the participants and includes an understanding of their roles and statuses within the social and linguistic context;
MODE refers to what part the language is playing in the situation and includes the channel selected—spoken or written. Two important variables here are the distance between participants in the interaction (e.g., face to face vs. letter writing) and the distance of the speaker or the writer from the events that the language is talking about, that is, language in action versus language as reflection (e.g., TV commentary vs. newspaper report). (258)
To sum up, the notion of culture that both a functionalist and a genre-based approach to language foreground is that “language as social semiotic praxis [. . .] should be seen unequivocally as a construer of reality, not just as its representer [. . . language] does not represent reality; it simply construes a model of reality” (Hasan, “Disempowerment” 53). As a consequence, while language as a system may be considered arbitrary with regard to the species-specific potentialities of the human language-making capacity, the relation between meaning and that level of the language code that Halliday refers to as its lexicogrammar is far from arbitrary; it is, instead, constitutive. Hasan describes this issue:
The social context within which acts of meaning are embedded is an occasion for carrying out some social action, by co-actants in some social relation, placed in some semiotic contact. The meaning potential of language and its lexicogrammatical resources must be such as to enable its speakers to construe these important aspects of their social experience. [. . .] For this reason, the principle of linguistic functionality resonates through the elements of social contexts to meanings and wordings.
(62)
I have elaborated this approach to language and knowledge not only because it understands language use and, by implication, language learning in ways that differ noticeably from the treatment these phenomena generally receive by FL professionals in the United States but also because I want to show that its treatment of language, knowledge, and culture readily accommodate and expansively support the central concerns of literary-cultural studies. This approach offers a crucial benefit over much of current cultural studies practice in FL departments in that it is exquisitely language-based at the same time that it is culture-based. Thus Jay Lemke, probably the genre theorist best known to scholars in literary-cultural studies, states what differentiates Halliday from Mikhail Bakhtin: “Halliday had at his command a very powerful semantic analysis of the grammar of his own language (English),” which allowed him to develop “his now well-known theory of registers: the functional varieties of language, characteristic of particular activities in which language is used, defined by systematic differences in the probabilities of various grammatical and semantic features in the texts of each register” (26). As mentioned above, registers were analyzed in terms of field, tenor, and mode. Another link is Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of synoptic and participatory views of human activity, where Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics finds not only an interesting conceptual parallel but also incontrovertible linguistic evidence in the two major forms of semiosis in grammar, the congruent grammar of everyday experience, which foregrounds function and flow, and the synoptic grammar of what Bourdieu calls the ‘thinginess’ of experience, which foregrounds stasis and product (cf. Halliday, “Theory”). Grammatical Metaphor, the notion’s central consequence, makes possible the public discourses that characterize the Western languages and is thus vital to any understanding we wish to convey to our students as they negotiate the genres that characterize the language and cultural areas in which we and they work.
Such a more expansive basis for understanding the relation among language, culture, and knowledge makes possible my next point, the need to create a new goal for foreign language departments. As I have stated elsewhere (“Languages,” “Reconsidering”), I take the notion of literacy—more precisely, of multiple literacies—to be a particularly suitable goal for collegiate FL departments (see also Kern). Much as the investigation of genre is a felicitous extension of the underlying assumptions of functional grammar into the realm of situated social action (Miller; Rothery), so the notion of literacy well describes the challenges and opportunities in adult instructed FL learning (Jones et al). Following James Gee’s terminology, we come to understand the real nature of the task that collegiate FL programs face: attempting to help their students acquire, in a foreign language, both the primary discourses of personal life in families and among friends and acquaintances and the public discourses of the L2 societies in education, research, and scholarship; in the workplace and the professions; in the arts; and in civil society with its range of forums—all in a very short period of time. The key help they receive is one that has hardly been used: the availability, in a more or less elaborated form, of students’ literacy in the L1, literacy understood as a metacognitive awareness of the connections among language, language use, and socioculturally mediated knowledge of the world.
Stating our goal in this fashion accommodates and recognizes some of the most dynamic insights that recent scholarship has highlighted both in native language and in instructed adult foreign language development. Among them are notions of multiliteracies as the New London Group has explicated them, which focus on “modes of representation much broader than language alone [. . . and create] a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources” (64). Brian Street also emphasizes the importance of a resource orientation in his “social literacies perspective,” which he believes corresponds to the new work order with its emphasis on flexibility and change and its much “wider range of semiotic systems that cut across reading, writing, and speech.” At the same time this orientation refutes what he calls an “abstract grammatical universalism, with pressures towards a ‘common unitary language as a system of linguistic norms,’” and encourages learners “to learn how to not take things at face value, to recognize when people are ‘not talking straight’; to see grammar as a ‘means of representing patterns of experience’ and as helping them ‘to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around them and inside them” (3, 9, 10, 22). Hasan refers to literacy as using language that has two simultaneous lines of development: one in the context of mundane or quotidian activities and one in the specialized context of official pedagogy. “It is in the uneasy co-existence of these two lines of literacy development that the secret of the complexity of the notion of literacy lies” (“Literacy” 386). In the end, knowing about language is important “only if and in as much as it contributes to a conscious understanding of the resources of one’s language for acting with it. [. . .] Literacy is not simply a semantically saturated term; what it refers to is a socially powerful process, which can be used in different ways—some perhaps more beneficial to a society, some to only some persons in it!” (417).
To return to explicitly second language learning issues, invoking the notion of multiliteracies accords as well with Vivian Cook’s idea that our goal in foreign language education is to produce a multicompetent speaker, not a defective native speaker, or, as Claire Kramsch puts it, an intercultural speaker who has been taught culture “as it is mediated through language, not as it is studied by social scientists and anthropologists” (31). Finally, the notion recognizes that none of the elaborated forms of an education-oriented literacy develop naturally; they must, instead, be nurtured explicitly through carefully considered pedagogies that extend over many years of schooling, hardly a luxury foreign language departments have but an opportunity nonetheless that we have scarcely used (Hasan, “Literacy,” “Disempowerment”; Martin, “Mentoring,” “Process”; Wells).
Two aspects are all too rarely mentioned and even more rarely practiced in FL departments, but they are crucial if the project of connecting language and literary-cultural studies is to have more than ideational merit but is to have practical consequences for departments as academic units, for faculty members who bear the responsibility for educational quality, and for students and their learning. I am referring to both the medium, an integrated curriculum, and the approach, a pedagogy that links content via genre to pedagogical tasks that are designed to ensure that foreign language use at a time can turn into balanced foreign language development toward advanced levels of performance over time. Referring back once more to the centrality of attending to issues of knowledge and language, Martin notes that the Australian project of a genre-based pedagogy, in stark contrast to what he calls “the hegemony of American formalism” with its idealizing reductivity, understands “linguistics as social action [. . .] whereby theory informs practice which, in turn, rebounds on theory, recursively, as more effective ways of intervening in various processes of semogenesis are designed” (“Design” 116). Importantly, the effort of finding a way of enhancing students’ literacy required that the project “develop a linguistic theory of learning (genre-based pedagogy) and a linguistic theory of knowledge (genre-based curriculum); or, turning this around, we had to reconceive language development as pedagogy and social context as curriculum for purposes of institutionalized learning” (121).
As for curricular work that builds on some of the notions I have presented here, my home department, the German Department at Georgetown University, has from February 1997 to the summer of 2000 instituted an integrated content-oriented and task-based curriculum that overcomes the split between language courses that have no discernible content and content courses that have no discernible interest in language acquisition (Developing). In shorthand fashion this project has been described as attempting to deliver content from the beginning of language acquisition until the end of the undergraduate sequence. But this linkage of content via genre to language learning is done on the basis of very general insights into the processing characteristics of adult second language learning with a clear eye to efficiency and effectiveness. Thus the program carefully integrates primary and secondary discourses in all modalities right from the beginning—particularly in reading and writing, which indicates its strong literacy orientation—to ensure continued balanced interlanguage development in accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language use toward academic performance levels. Among the more unexpected consequences is that our graduate students who were active creators in this project recently indicated that they would like the faculty to explore the possibility of extending this approach into our graduate courses, thereby giving an additional dimension to upper levels of language use, an experience that some of them have had already in their undergraduate teaching (Byrnes, Crane, and Sprang).
Another consequence of this curricular implementation was that we were freed from all commercial textbooks, except at the beginning level, having to create new materials in line with a theme-, genre-, and task-based approach. With the help of an expert in task-based assessment who was available to us for three semesters, we learned to rethink not only our assessment practices but also, more important, a good bit of our pedagogy.
Teaching, pedagogical innovations that attempt to link language use and language acquisition, and literary-cultural studies in a foreign language department were the focus of the session in which I first offered these remarks. It is impossible for me to provide details regarding the many curricular and pedagogical actions we have taken at Georgetown, though the description on our Web site might be helpful (see Developing). In any case what is of interest goes beyond our local considerations. The most important insights I have gained from our experience are these:
First, I know of no more effective way to engage an entire faculty, no matter what the disciplinary allegiances or interests or the seniority of its members, and all teaching graduate students in the rethinking of a program and its pedagogical practices than reconceptualizing an entire undergraduate curriculum in this fashion.
Second, along with the materials that needed to be jointly developed our pedagogical practices became public property rather than a carefully guarded private possession, discursively shaped and created in an extraordinarily expansive faculty development effort that of necessity had to accompany this project (Byrnes, “Reconsidering”; Byrnes and Kord).
Third, the knowledge we gain is always a mixture of our local situation and the best though yet untested ideas in the field. For example, if the profession is serious about helping students attain the kind of upper-level discursive abilities that a cultural studies program requires, then individual teacher excellence in individual courses, the building block that we relied on in the past, is by definition insufficient to the task of fostering students’ long-term interlanguage development. Indispensable, instead, are consensus building on a jointly constructed knowledge base and carefully coordinated joint pedagogical action that motivates individual teacher decision making in a well-considered framework.
Finally, curriculum development is always a way of becoming, not of finished being; it is a process rather than a product—and that is good. For example, as a graduate department at Georgetown we face the task of acculturating each new class of incoming graduate students to our curriculum, which requires occasions for dialogue in order that the understanding keeps evolving of how to relate language and content knowledge. Since we are now able to ask questions that none of us would even have dreamed of asking three years ago, one need not fear a shortage of issues to address. At present a Spencer Foundation grant enables two teacher research groups to explore further the impact of genre on our curriculum and, in particular, the possibility of influencing materials development for very advanced content courses by characterizing advanced levels of language learning as involving the teacher’s acquisition of a kind of heteroglossia. By heteroglossia I mean the ability on the part of the nonnative user to deploy both interactive resources that help guide the reader-hearer through a written or oral text and interactional resources that involve the reader-hearer in the development of the text. Both abilities require the stage-managed use of modality and evaluation and the learners’ ability to assign, at various levels of implicitness and explicitness, roles to themselves as authors and to others as potential hearers-readers (Thompson). In this fashion learners come to construct what Thompson calls a “reader-in-the-text,” a way of creating involvement, identity, and voice for both author and reader that is characteristic of culturally appropriate, cognitively fluent, public language use, no matter what the subject matter.
We documented our project extensively to understand what we were doing; why we were doing it; the intellectual, personnel, practical, and administrative resources we drew on; what was involved in terms of faculty and materials development; the iterative processes that were required until we were reasonably satisfied with the results; and where we found our greatest gains or most surprising insights, where we succeeded, and where much work remains to be done. Beyond the need to create our own narratives, such a documentation recognizes a reality in our profession that is generally not dealt with: the reason second language learning is such a negligible component in the cultural studies discussion is not for lack of interest but because most faculty members, educated as literary researchers and raised in a language learning and teaching paradigm of severely restricted vision, have great difficulty imagining how to enact that kind of linkage in their departments and in their pedagogies. Inasmuch as our documentation provides preliminary answers to that question, it might be a source of hope in the face of daunting expectations, frustration, and much inaction. The field is indeed dealing with extraordinarily complex issues that as yet await fully articulated answers in the practice of foreign language departments in American higher education. Collaboration and dialogue are needed as we rethink the relations among language, culture, and adult language acquisition.
Beyond the intellectual demand to rethink long-held beliefs lies another, perhaps even more formidable task: given our preference for talk over action, indeed our privileging of pristine thinking over messy action, the decision to engage in joint curricular and pedagogical initiatives because such work lies at the heart of our scholarship would be the kind of meeting of the minds that we need in order to understand our life world of language and culture.
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