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RECENTLY the issue of competency and proficiency has dominated discussions in our field (see Omaggio 22–31). Generally, however, the connection between “language proficiency” and proficiencies in upper-division work has been assumed rather than articulated. This paper explores three questions: Can the notion of competencies currently established for language learning be applied in upper-division programs, or “tracks,” in literature, language, and culture? Can any of the competencies defined for the lower-division aid us in establishing tracks that constitute upper-division majors? And, if so, what kinds of competencies in what kinds of tracks?
In competency discussions involving first- and second-year courses a debate recurs between those who find language skills a prerequisite to communicative abilities and those who find that language is best acquired through communicative practice. Do the arguments in this debate apply to third- and fourth-year work in college language courses?
English second language research has contributed data and ideas relevant to the question of advanced-level competency, since often foreign students in England and the United States need to know English well enough to use it for advanced study or graduate work in their fields. ESL studies indicate that correlatives between oral competency and reading ability in a particular discipline are very low. Thus even with advanced ESL students, it is difficult to establish whether problems in reading are rooted in inadequate language proficiency, inadequate knowledge of the field of study, or an inability to read well in any language. Experimental studies give no straightforward conclusions. In the postscript to an analysis of the problem, Alderson and Urquhart observe that the evidence suggests the following conclusions: (1) a general language proficiency or competency threshold is requisite for any foreign language reading; (2) oral language competency is no guarantee of reading competence; and (3) there seem to be “communication skills not specific to a particular language” (25–27).
The components of a competency threshold for upper-division work have yet to be determined. Most colleges and universities in the United States tacitly assume that such a threshold is established in the first two years of college language instruction. The evidence on reading comprehension suggests that, at advanced levels, background knowledge and higher-order reasoning play a larger role than they do in elementary classes. In third- and fourth-year work competencies are measured by communication of subject matter rather than by language proficiency per se. More important, concrete language skills don't automatically enable abstract problem solving at advanced levels. The student who can use the target language to get to an art museum doesn't necessarily apply the same words and structures to compare features of the impressionist and expressionist paintings exhibited there. Whereas the beginner must learn language skills (whether through explicit drill or contextual acquisition practice), the advanced learner must develop new ways of thinking. To talk about epochal features in a work of art, the student must use communicative schemata appropriate to that language and particular field. The concrete uses of field and ground have little in common with their function in art theory. At the advanced level the student's frame of reference must shift from the syntax and vocabulary of tangible situations to the syntax and vocabulary of abstract reasoning.
If this is true, an upper-division program must provide conceptual tools that enable students to apply their existing level of language mastery to the logical framework of specific disciplines. The first job of the department, then, is to establish those field-specific logical structures as a sequence of courses in a particular track.
How would such rethinking change a department's literature, language, and culture majors? At present, most department catalogs offer majors a sequence of courses: composition, stylistics, surveys of literary or cultural periods. These are the contexts of our students' learning, the raw materials of area studies. Yet in the individual course descriptions, virtually nothing is noted about what students do with these contexts, what logical or disciplinary speech patterns they are to learn. Consequently, we often train students who can define a genre but who can't apply the concept and generate an interpretation based on such principles as rising and falling action or closed structure. Such students are only competent in subject-matter replication. They lack practice in applying knowledge to generate new ideas. This problem is, then, not unlike the “competency as knowledge” versus “competency as problem solving” debate. But the parameters of the debate have changed when subject categories characterize the upper-division program.
The important difference is that, at the lower-division level, teaching language knowledge, no matter what method is used, can result in active as well as passive communication ability. At the beginning and intermediate levels, students communicate in established modes. Activities such as reading a timetable (answering questions about the latest train from Paris to Nice or what time one needs to leave to be in Valence by 1:30 p.m.) have their correlatives in American bus or airplane schedules.
These pragmatic bridges are lost at the upper-division courses, where both content and context are increasingly abstract. To discuss how genre affects text messages, students must apply knowledge of stylistic features to a specific text. They must make general inferences (the uses of enjambment in poetry) about concrete instances (how does that device affect Rilke's messages in “Das Karrusell”?). This level of problem solving demands abstract thinking in any language. Correlating the notions of internal rhyme, hesitation, and acoustic and visual imagery demands high-order mental activity. If a content-based curriculum only teaches students knowledge of their subject, it inadvertently promotes passive learning. Courses teaching students to define and describe content are teaching the established forms of objects of that field, not what the forms are good for. Students learn to analyze a problem only if they are equipped with the relevant inferential tools. They need a metastructure from which to generalize: guidelines to acceptable logical inferencing in a specialty.
Such a metastructure could, for example, pinpoint the ways that formal or genre features of literature constrain or affect literary messages. Unless students understand that genre has conventions of subject matter as well as form, the satirical implications of an ode written to a bill killed in Congress will be largely lost on them. The content of the discipline (the rules of odes, the language proficiency to decode the text) is inadequate for interpretive purposes. Data are not enough. Students who lack the conscious inferential premises of the discipline lack the framework with which to conceptualize and later to reapply the data of the discipline How does one go about identifying the metastructures that will aid students in schematizing their subject areas? What are the consistent tensions or conceptual syntaxes of particular fields of study? And how does a metastructure correlate with a departmental track?
The first track to address in these terms is the one with a formally established conceptual syntax: advanced language study. In this field, work in speech acts (intentionality) in conjunction with modern rhetoric and discourse theory (coherence and cohesion, register) has identified the logic systems of field-specific communication. They are taught as functions of advanced language competency and production. The work of linguists such as Dressler, Beauregard, Searle, and Widdowson has bridged the gap between communicative theory and classroom tasks. Claire Kramsch proposed a practical classroom model based on the rhetorical metasyntax suggested by such work: fundamental speaker conventions (interrupting, turn taking, conversational management) are correlated with speaker goals (using counterarguments, linking ideas, practicing avoidance techniques). These suggestions are more than classroom tactics because they ask students for situational performance ( parole ) rather than replication of language principles ( langue ). In such a discourse structure, a student's knowledge of language principles is subordinated to principles of rhetorical logic. The speaker reorganizes his or her language competency to meet a language-extrinsic communication goal. The distinction here is the difference between being able to change a sentence from active to passive voice (mastery of langue ) and knowing how to use the passive voice to achieve particular communicative goals (mastery of parole ).
Thus, we suggest, departmental faculties need to sit down together and specify the metastructures they want in different tracks. Such a project has pedagogical advantages and can help the department achieve a coherency between courses that, all too often, is lacking in a curriculum focused solely on mastery of material. Unless consciously presented in a series of growing complexity in both logical schemata and subject matter, students will probably perceive courses as disjointed, unrelated. Unless made aware of the underlying coherencies, students often fail to see connections among nineteenth-century French novels, the nouveau roman , and the French medieval epic. In a profession with proliferating critical modalities, is such unity a possible objective for a language faculty? Can such unity be established without critical consensus or methodological reductionism?
The answer is yes because we are not speaking here of the logic of a particular interpretive method or an exhaustively defined corpus of data. The issue is disciplinary boundaries. And, since the nineteenth century, thinkers in various disciplines have identified both a corpus of data and an epistemological theory with which to understand those boundaries. We in foreign languages have to adopt those precepts in our various tracks. In point of fact, we already do so, often without openly acknowledging this. In our discussions of culture courses, for example, we have been concerned with whether to teach history or sociology (see Lohnes and Nollendorfs's landmark volume on cultural studies in German programs). If we teach culture as “big C,” we teach historical events and monuments of the linguistic community. If we teach “little c,” students learn sociology—the contemporary mores and behaviors of the language group. This paper suggests that students need to be taught these conceptual frames in conjunction with the subject matter itself and that track sequences need not be predicated only on older competency criteria, such as the number of pages a student can read.
Most language departments are perforce interdisciplinary at the advanced level. We teach pieces of history, sociology, philosophy, business, art, and music in our literature and language courses. Frequently departments have English language courses in these adjunct fields. The concept “German studies” is emerging as a new umbrella for amalgamating our cross-disciplinary needs. One of the reservations about these programs concerns our expertise. We were not trained as social scientists or historians. Aside from a language background, do we need special qualifications to teach courses containing components ordinarily associated with other disciplines? The answer suggested in this paper is that our emphasis should be on knowing what we are looking for. We don't need to be historians to teach German history as long as we can agree on the frames of reference our students should uncover when learning about German history. Our own experience can illustrate the point.
The strategy we recommend in rethinking tracks in a department has already been developed in the discussion of the language sequence above. We must focus and develop tracks not only around questions of materials but on the grounds of the epistemological theories or logic structures with which certain bodies of knowledge are most straightforwardly treated.
In the most traditional track in language departments, a literature sequence, the established course types are about as familiar and well established as the desirable conceptual tools for language majors. Yet a rethinking could also be necessary for a literature track, since the consensus on sequencing (and the rationale behind it) is less clear than it is for language skills. Traditionally and typically, a “literature track” offers its students an introductory course focused on historical epochs, representative texts, or genres (or a combination). Then, a higher-level literary history course focuses on trends and the development of national identity and literary form. Specialty courses offer more detailed works on defined problems (The Concept of Classicism), themes (Alienation), genres, critical methods (Feminist Approaches to …), or periods (Literature in the Third Reich). In designing these courses, most departments agree that readings and lectures for the students should replicate aspects of the canon for the literature, especially in introductory, genre, and period courses; readings in specialty courses may have to range further afield in order to represent the problems adequately (in “feminist approaches” to periods, for instance, unfamiliar names must necessarily be included, since standard canons contain few women writers in certain centuries).
From the perspective of the metastructure of the logics behind these courses, each of these courses as presently conceived represents primarily contexts , flexible groupings of materials to some end, that tacitly assume distinctive epistemological constructs. Genre, for example, is a context of established formal and conventional definitions, but these definitions also rest on a set of unstated inferences about society, the reader, and subject matter. For a student interpreter to gain degrees of freedom using a genre approach, instead of remaining at the level of replicating identifications or definitions of genre, he or she must be consciously taught the expectation values of this inferential construct: formal definitions as behavioral rules; echoes and references to the tradition as conditioning audience reception; audience as a social or consumer structure; appropriateness and register criteria; and the materials, plots, or images expected by a contemporaneous audience. These organizing and evaluative criteria must be treated not only as data, as part of the course context on genre (i.e., as more things to memorize), but as variables controlling the interpreter's results and goals.
A historical approach opens up a different framework for inferencing options about canons, publishability, political tenor, and audience reception. If these variables are added to the historical context, they can yield meaningful interpretations. Problem approaches correlate data, method, and goal in interpretations. They yield elucidations of psychologically, sociologically, or historically predicated realities.
On a more pragmatic level, if a course doesn't “work” for the students, the problem may be not that the materials were too long, difficult, or obscure for the classes' language level but rather that the course presupposed inferencing abilities that proved alien to the audience. The students may have needed to be taught the valid correlations, or the logic structures, that inform the materials and the goals of the subject area. Sociological approaches can work well for students who are aware of the implications of class and finance; but students who are not aware may not happen on these patterns of explanation by themselves. They are, however, capable of learning the appropriate patterns of correlation and of seeing that in some interpretations it pays to take these variables into consideration. If a baroness steals money, largely predictable consequences will accrue, as they will for a thieving dairymaid. But the consequences will differ according to class structure. Students who learn such inferencing options are also taught the how and why of dealing with them.
For purposes of establishing a metastructure, culture tracks face a special obstacle: they are perceived as a nebulous (read “spurious”) area. Professors themselves tend to assume that adequate teaching of culture requires expert knowledge of the field, with “expert knowledge” meaning all the current research. From the perspective just outlined, however, expert knowledge can also be the knowledge possessed by the competent reader in the field: the knowledge of the correlations and patterns that render the materials of a field meaningful. If students assume that cultural competency requires competency both in materials and in approaches, two types of problem result: (1) a focus on the materials alone leaves the students with a sense that the course is off on its own, not correlated with the work in other major or minor courses (“Nazi Germany” does not fit well with a linguistics degree; as a way to correlate history and sociology, it can, however, apply to sociolinguistics); (2) students tend to self-select out of such courses or to find them “just entertaining.” In both cases, uncorrelated courses fail to draw “serious” students unless those students are aware that the method taught may be of use to them even if the materials are not.
These considerations all arose when, in 1985–86, the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin, decided to formalize a culture track for the undergraduate major. We were forced to devise a coherent organization of existing courses, together with requirements for specific courses, and a loose list of the kinds of courses that could in the future become part of such a track. We undertook this project for two reasons: (1) because such a track reflected faculty interests and teaching; and (2) because a survey of our undergraduate majors and nonmajors in upper-division courses indicated that students were looking for such a sequence, particularly to use as a “double major” along with disciplines like international business and history.
When we approached the formalization of the culture track from the logical framework outlined above, our first discovery was that we were working within a relatively limited number of frames. In our Deutsche Kulturgeschichte (German Cultural History), instead of stressing all the dates and battles making German history and cultural monuments, we used a sociological approach. We found that the texts presented information as a tension between conflicting social forces. The forces varied with time and place, but once students established the principle of an interaction between two opposing social orders, they found it relatively easy to frame readings and discussions around principles that remained linguistically constant, whether the conflict was between the Romans and the Germanic tribes, Germanic tribes and Christianizing forces, or emperors and princes. Usually the “big C,” or historical, account presented a particular series of events initiated by one group and the response of the opponents. In a “small c,” or sociological, depiction, authors tended to contrast features of the two factions.
Students who grasped these organizational principles could apply them as communicative strategies to decode reading assignments and to talk about these assignments in class. The format of written work reinforced the conceptual schema by asking students to do in writing precisely what was expected in oral response: (1) to identify the major forces discussed in the text, pinpointing the time and place, and (2) to identify the text's logical organization of information. We discovered that a student's choice of conceptual pattern was virtually extraneous to successful task completion. Students comprehend and retain essential textual information as long as they subordinate it to a conceptual schema. In other words, they perform well on tests about the Middle Ages whether they view the emperor as under attack by the princes or the princes as exploited by the emperor. These anecdotal conclusions are supported by a growing body of data suggesting that mental processing facilitates retention of material. Students who read from a particular point of view, whether in a foreign or their native language, remember significantly more than those who read solely to acquire textual information (Carrell and Eisterhold).
The analysis of this two-course sequence clarified what our culture track could do as a major for undergraduates. The materials were less important than the intellectual structure of the course, particularly in the course on the older historical epochs: students in the United States know little about German history, since World History emphasizes Great Britain and France, and students interested in the military and diplomatic history of Germany would rarely look for such a course taught in the German language To have the track cohere, we found ourselves focusing on methods of culture.
Majors in culture would still be required to take two courses in literature and two in language, aside from three more narrowly defined culture courses. Literature courses were included not only because they would tap the traditional strengths of the department but also because literary history is a typical supplement to historical approaches to culture and learning to read varied genres increases reader flexibility in general. More germane, literature courses lend a sense of the preferred style of thought of a period (novels in the nineteenth century in England; plays in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century). Similarly, language courses also facilitate communication about a culture. Our upper-division offerings include a grammar review, a conversation-composition course based on “readings in culture” (primarily newspapers and magazines), and a phonology-conversation course that concentrates on discourse management. From a metastructural perspective, these courses aid the culture student in acquiring methodological competencies, in recognizing and using social registers and social structures revealed in more cultivated and varied levels of language than are encountered in elementary language courses.
Senior seminars in the culture track follow the pattern of materials set out in the theme, problem, and epoch courses familiar from the literature track. Yet each attempts to present a different cultural method, with carry-overs to other disciplines. The most frequently offered of these seminars is a comparison between East Germany and West Germany from a sociological standpoint. Authentic materials issued by both governments present details of state structure and life situations; the classroom focus is on students' learning to re-create and validate different approaches to problem solving taken on both sides of the wall. The documents, then, are read and compared as examples of the mental processing patterns developed in the citizens of a Western democracy and in an East-bloc socialist state.
Another such advanced culture seminar traced German aesthetics through a combination of slides and essays on art; the aim was to teach students how Germans conceived of the place and purpose of the work of art and the artist in the societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eras in art were linked to cultural values and image building and to ramifications in history. Bauhaus affirming beauty in technologies, for example, was viewed in conjunction with democratizing impulses in the Weimar Republic. Similarly, the programs of the Vienna and Munich secessions attempted to prolong some values of the nineteenth century while using technology to gain wider distribution. Making another connection between art and society, Wagner's early newspaper essays on the Germans and history, when correlated with the rise of the bourgeoisie, present a key to his dramaturgy as conceived for this new audience. Students thus learned to link art forms with audiences, materials, and means of distribution in order to discover the self-concepts of emerging German language cultural and political identities.
As our exposition reveals, we feel that the success, coherency, or failure of undergraduate tracks depends on joint questions: materials and competencies in the broader sense developed in our examples. Diversifying offerings to make departments more attractive to students can often lead to the development of new courses of great local interest, but those courses may fail after the initial enthusiasm about their novelty wanes. If these new courses are anchored in a coherent rationale, however, novelty can be introduced even in a small department that lacks “expert competencies.” As language teachers we can't be expert in all things but we can recognize competent readers of culture. For language students, the competency required in business refers not to the business subject per se but to the language appropriate in a particular business context. Competency is defined here ethnographically as the ability to recognize and use suitable levels of social consciousness, protocol, and interaction.
This approach to innovation, renovation, and tracking can validate the existence of language departments as “interdisciplinary,” as specialists in the epistemological assumptions and discourses of a target country and language. Taking this approach, we feel, is more fruitful than styling ourselves purveyors of “expert knowledge” on materials duplicated in other departments. In foreign language departments we teach not only language but discourses as well.
The authors are, respectively, Associate Professor and Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin.
Alderson, J. Charles, and A. H. Urquhart, eds. Reading in a Foreign Language . London: Longman, 1984.
Carrell, Patricia, and Joan Eisterhold. “Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy.” TESOL Quarterly 17 (1983): 553–73.
Kramsch, Claire. Discourse Analysis and Second Language Teaching . Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1981.
Lohnes, Walter F. W., and Valters Nollendorfs, eds. German Studies in the United States: Assessment and Outlook . Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1976.
Omaggio, Alice C. Teaching Language in Context: Proficiency-Oriented Instruction . Boston: Heinle, 1986.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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