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THE current situation in foreign language teaching is marked by a feeling of new beginnings and by visions of growth and opportunity. In one way this opening up is the culmination of long-term developments inside the profession that have taught us to distrust single-perspective exclusionary approaches to language analysis and, by extension, to language teaching and have encouraged us to consider a diversity of options. In another way it is tied to recent considerations outside our profession that have hastened the process and, to some extent, provided specific direction. Thus an endeavor that might otherwise have been a primarily theoretical search for encompassing answers has been influenced by starkly practical demands. These demands require the foreign language profession to deliver the best possible product to a society increasingly aware of its crucial dependence on that product for maximum effectiveness. To foster truth in advertising, as it were, the profession should furthermore devise a standard whose terms readily translate into a range of real-world demands for language use.
In response to these internal and external challenges a wealth of changes is currently being contemplated, affecting not only all levels of instruction but all major areas, from teacher training and certification to curriculum, syllabus, methodology, classroom practices, and materials. How these proposals will fare has yet to be determined. Nevertheless, it must be clear even now that ultimately their conceptual appropriateness and practical success depend on two related issues: first, on the degree to which they support what we consider desirable goals and learner outcomes for our programs, and, second, on the extent to which the formulation of such program goals, irrespective of our preferences, is motivated by and grounded in pervasive insights about second language acquisition.
The following discussion focuses on the potential ways that second language acquisition (SLA) research can contribute to the formulation of program goals. The specific topic I address, then, is whether SLA research can suggest program goals or, put another way, whether it can identify some goals as less felicitous than others. To provide a framework for subsequent statements, I begin with some disclaimers.
1. It is important to be aware that individual instances of SLA research, even in their best manifestations, cannot and should not be taken as directly translatable into second language teaching practice, into statements on curriculum and materials, and into the development of program goals. The reasons, though obvious, are frequently overlooked.
First, we cannot logically expect components of specific research designs or results of specific research projects to give us blueprints on how to proceed with the complex business of foreign language teaching. At best such research gives us insights into closely delimited learner behaviors manifested in dealing with specific aspects of a second language under highly controlled circumstances. Because second language teaching takes place in an infinite variety of settings and addresses a diversity of learners, only widely replicable research evidence is likely to offer generalizable statements about effective teaching methods or methodologies. We would have to ascertain precisely such generalizability before we could and should consider a given approach appropriate for the bulk of teacher education or in-service training. Nevertheless, entire theoretical models for second language acquisition, such as Krashen's Monitor Model, have been posited on the basis of research in a very limited area and have led in turn to the subsequent advocacy of a narrowly prescribed methodological stance.
Second, the question of how much a teaching methodology arising from a given SLA model ultimately enhances or hinders second language learning has scarcely been addressed in a responsible fashion. We know from experience that our capacity for second language acquisition is limited. But we need to determine the extent to which less than optimal second language acquisition results, not from the inherent characteristics of the process, but from facile generalizations of research into teaching practice. The issue is difficult, since irrefutable causality is hard to come by in human activity. Nevertheless, the matter deserves to be addressed with great honesty if divergent theoretical models of second language acquisition and their concomitant methodological preferences are to be weighed against each other.
Third, while SLA research has generally not directly defined program outcomes, it has played an indirect role by seeming to favor certain methods. Specific methods (i.e., the audio-lingual method, the grammar translation method, the communicative approach) are often likely to produce a certain kind and level of language competency. This degree of achievement generally falls considerably short of a balanced language ability and often below expectations even in the area that it specifically addresses (i.e., speaking ability). Consequently, the overall program becomes entrapped in a dangerous deception. Left to deal with it are the practitioners, who have learned to adjust, that is, to lower their requirements despite all the promises made, even while the official goals continue to resemble a dreamworld. This deception is possible because, strictly speaking, we know far too little about language learning and are thus prone to accept the accidental results of a given method as though they were the unavoidable results of our limited capacity for second language learning. We are only now beginning to realize that this course of action is unsatisfactory.
What, then, are we to make of SLA research evidence? Serious professionals, whether in theoretical or applied linguistics, continually remind us that direct transfer of their statements into teaching practice is exceedingly risky. In the end, it seems, it is not individual research that can suggest a course of action but broad generalizations, achieved by abstracting from individual cases and delicately filtering their implications through the constraints and the opportunities that are operational in the classroom. We should caution ourselves not to expect such a procedure to produce results identical with what we take to be conventional wisdom, either in teaching practice or in the establishment of program goals. Indeed, as we shall see, the cumulative research evidence often questions the received practice in noteworthy aspects and should cause us to look again at our program goals and ultimately to state more realistic ones.
2. In no way does this singling out of SLA research imply a priority status among the numerous factors influencing the definition of program goals and likely learner outcomes. On the contrary, we must also respect the input of such considerations as student population, teaching force, program scope, and, taken in appropriate measure, our desires for the outcomes of foreign language programs. Student populations will continue to vary in age, interests, backgrounds, expectations, motivations, and learning styles; teachers will continue to be more or less suited to the task; programs will continue to differ in intensiveness, length, and resources; and goals will continue to emphasize different aspects of language use and reflect different reasons for studying a foreign language. Only within these parameters can specific program goals be articulated and realized. Thus research results are far from singularly conclusive. Instead, while certainly possessing a validity of their own, they will always have to be considered in conjunction with other relevant factors if viable and sensible program goals are to be established.
In sum, then, the relation between research results and appropriate program goals is not merely one of ancillary input after the big decisions have been made. Rather, I suggest that broadly interpreted research results can circumscribe the decision-making space and thus significantly enhance the validity of program goals and, ultimately, the success of programs. Out of a variety of factors I single out four for consideration here: the nature of language, the sequencing of skills, attainment and ultimate attainment, and attrition.
The first consideration, the nature of language, relates to program goals only indirectly, having its greatest implications for methodology, classroom teaching practice, and materials development. Nevertheless, it does affect program goals, not necessarily what they are or should be but how they are stated. Recent SLA research places increasing emphasis on language as a negotiative, interactive process that draws not only on automatized responses but on all the cognitive resources of individuals. It also stresses the appropriateness of language for facilitating or, indeed, making possible a wide range of tasks, from the most mundane activities of our daily lives to highly complex deliberations of abstract issues. Thus, if language use cannot be divorced from social action and cultural boundedness, then language learning and, by implication, the goals of a program of language learning will have to reflect these qualities. No longer will it suffice to enumerate the structural points the students were exposed to, nor will it be satisfactory to list formal aspects of the language that the students have supposedly mastered and can recall out of context. Instead, program goals, as differentiated from individual course goals, should be articulated as the tasks learners can be expected to negotiate through the use of language; the linguistic and nonlinguistic resources they will probably resort to; the provenience of those resources, language one or language two; the strategies and processes they are likely to employ in performing these tasks and drawing on these resources; and, finally, the linguistic and cultural appropriateness of these strategies and processes for the tasks to be performed.
Such a statement of program goals does not invalidate or replace more discrete, additive, nondynamic descriptions of learner outcomes at different intermediary stages, as long as those stages are postulated to contribute to the kind of language use just characterized. But it does offer, for both learners and the public at large, a means of getting away from the false front of metalinguistic descriptors, such as “the student knows how to form three kinds of past tenses with regular and irregular verbs.” Instead, it demands the honesty of stating the uses to which one can put the language skills acquired, that is, “the student can narrate past events orally but has difficulty handling this task in writing.” Perhaps more important, such an approach provides a meaningful basis of comparison between programs. Whether we like it or not, that opportunity should be made available, particularly since the approach also offers the opportunity for reducing some of the false hopes and expectations and consequently some of the severe condemnations, both within and outside the profession, that have perennially plagued foreign language learning and teaching.
While the foregoing discussion pertains to how program goals should be stated, this section and the next two more closely concern what they are. Recent research has shown special interest in the ways that we comprehend and produce text, both in our native language and in the target language. Among its implications for program goals are considerations arising from the offset relation between the so-called receptive skills of listening and reading comprehension and the productive skills of speaking and writing. A feature known to any language student, the so-called comprehension advantage, at least for most Indo-European languages, is only now beginning to find entry into statements of program goals.
We do not need a complete explication of the relation between the receptive and the productive skills to acknowledge that, with proper instruction in strategies for listening and reading comprehension, students can handle comprehension tasks significantly more complex than the production tasks they can perform. Acknowledgement of this offset relation in no way means that the relatively more difficult development of speaking ability in the foreign language should not and cannot be the primary goal of a foreign language program. Indeed, it is the goal students most frequently rank first. Nor does it imply a return to the silent classroom, where struggling with the reading and possibly the translation of foreign language texts was the dominant activity.
But it does mean that, whatever skill modality an individual program espouses as its central concern—and this will greatly depend on the other factors mentioned earlier—there must be a well-articulated differentiated set of expectations that relates all modalities to one another in the kinds of communicative tasks each requires of learners, rather than a statement of goals that treats the modalities as though they all addressed essentially the same kinds of communicative tasks and progressed in lockstep fashion. This approach is necessary not only for optimal-goals statements but also for an optimal learning environment. Far too little has been done to tap the motivational force that arises when students have the opportunity to work with texts in the target language whose intellectual level is more nearly that of texts in their native language. Or, conversely, far too many false hopes have been raised that students will be able to speak like natives after two years of instruction. As a result, program goals reflect the paradox of being, at the same time, overstated and understated.
Differentiating program goals by skill modality relates closely to setting realistic levels for any skill to be attained during a given program. It is no news that the length and intensity of a program affect those levels. But what research seems to be saying more and more is that the well-articulatedness of the various curricular phases that make up a program also enters into the determination of ultimate attainment. In other words, length and intensity in themselves do not directly translate into ultimate attainment.
A further corollary of this realization is that we need to look much more carefully at the learner's contribution to the process of learning, a fact given increasing weight by evidence obtained in the so-called interlanguage studies. Understanding learners as participating in the creative construction of ever more appropriate approximations of the target language system should disabuse us of the notion that learning involves no more than responding to the materials one has been exposed to.
Similarly, instead of assuming a linear progression, where a longer program is essentially a continuation of the same kinds of activities, we may have to become accustomed to understanding language learning as consisting of phases and cycles with shifting emphases. We may have to learn to observe it and then guide it in consolidating levels and traversing turbulent thresholds that open to new levels. Depending on where in this progression of cycles a program terminates, it may distinguish itself from others not so much by what the students can do comfortably and well but rather by what higher-level tasks the students cannot yet do to their and our satisfaction. Goals statements would have to reflect this phenomenon of creative, potentially uneven learner progress.
Even more important, we may find that the ultimate attainment of a higher level presupposes and depends on the learner's having traversed certain earlier phases. In other words, while a learner may attain certain levels of performance in a given period, their very attainment, if not delicately balanced with the development of other skills, may work against the learner's making further progress should additional formal training later become available. At present our evidence to that effect pertains particularly to the growth of speaking ability, but very likely the same phenomenon applies across the skills, especially when we speak of academic competence in a foreign language. Unfortunately, this extremely sensitive issue is frequently reduced to a simplistic debate over the merits of communicative competence versus those of grammatical competence. This dichotomy is clearly far too facile, since communicative competence presupposes a certain level of grammatical competence, which, in turn, is utterly useless if it does not serve to communicate meanings.
In formulating program goals, then, we must be aware that they should ideally not jeopardize growth in other areas of language development. This admonition would seem singularly relevant for the required sequences now in place in many college settings. There the temptation is great to accept easy solutions rather than to consider long-term prospects for additional skill development. To some degree making less than well-considered decisions about the required sequence often seems justified, since we cannot know whether any additional language learning will ever take place. But it is precisely for that reason, I would argue, that we should take a responsible stance, one that would forgo the presumed expedience of the current program's scope and goals to stress the long-term implications for language growth should additional exposure, formal or informal, become available to the learner. While we still lack sufficient evidence to draw confident conclusions about how to weight communicative and norm-oriented program goals, and thus teaching, it would nevertheless seem appropriate to strive for balanced development, whatever the focus of a specific program.
Even if we should gain a broader perspective on what required sequences of language study realistically can and should achieve, we should not allow ourselves to be lulled into false security. The low level of language performance generally attained in the short required sequences cannot have actual societal value. Truly usable and useful language ability is of an entirely different quality and can only be obtained with a much higher investment of time and effort and the aid of proficient instructors with well-considered teaching strategies and access to highly versatile materials. Our programs have scarcely begun to reflect this basic fact, even though, ultimately, society at large will judge our efforts by the number and quality of people we bring to the high end of the spectrum of language usage and not by the limited things we do for the masses of college students enduring required language study.
Looking beyond ultimate achievement I come to my final concern, language maintenance and, related to that, attrition. A recent document on research design for the language attrition component under the CLEAR project, 1 funded by the Department of Education to look into a host of language-related issues, included this statement:
In a very real sense, the true measure of the societally useful “output” of the language teaching process should not be the end-of-course or end-of-program testing results, but rather, the amount of real-life usable language skill that is retained over some reasonable period of time once the formal training process has been completed. (Oxford)
The implication here is that we desperately need to know whether there is a level of attained language proficiency at or beyond which the learner is relatively “safe” from appreciable posttraining skills loss. If we do not want the vast amounts of time, effort, and financial resources that are devoted to foreign language instruction to be all for naught, then we must have two types of evidence. (1) We must have much more precise information on the nature or the amount of pragmatically useful competence in the language that learners have acquired by the end of instruction, at time A. (2) We need additional information on the competence they have retained at time B, the end of a specified period during which, having completed their formal training, they have had no further opportunities of continuing instruction and/or maintenance.
Should such research, in fact, indicate that a certain “watershed” level of attainment exists beyond which students' skills are relatively safe from attrition—and there is certainly anecdotal evidence to that effect—then the implications would be enormous. These would pertain not only to the development of program goals but necessarily to the articulation of programs that can validly claim to give students the opportunity to acquire pragmatically useful degrees of language competence and to maintain them over some reasonable time.
Throughout this paper I have emphasized the need for assessment, particularly as it is implied in any research activity, here SLA research. However, assessment is equally imperative within foreign language programs. All too often we have identified evaluation as a burden and as a threat to our settled ways of conducting business. Instead—and this is where I see the tremendous potential of the so-called proficiency movement—we should learn to see evaluation as an opportunity, allowing us first to formulate comprehensible, comprehensive, and compatible statements about the goals of foreign language teaching in general and our programs in particular and then enabling us to back them up with replicable studies. That those studies would in turn provide input for SLA theory and practice is only one of the many benefits to be derived from giving assessment its legitimate role in our formulation of program goals.
The author is Associate Professor of German at Georgetown University. This article is based on a paper presented at the ADFL Seminar West, 26–29June 1986, in Monterey, California.
1 This is a project undertaken by the Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR), a consortium representing the University of California, Los Angeles; the Center for Applied Linguistics; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Harvard University; and Yale University.
Oxford, Rebecca. “Extent and Nature of Language Skill Loss Following Intensive Training Program.” Year II Work Plan . Ed. Amado M. Padilla. Los Angeles: Center for Bilingual Research and Second Language Education, U of California, Los Angeles, 1986. Ch. 7, pp. 8–18.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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