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THE two divisions of academe most responsible for the preparation of foreign language teachers-colleges of education and foreign language departments-often seem to represent two separate cultures, each with a different worldview, a different set of heroes, and enough differences in tribal rites to generate authentic culture shock in a visitor from the other culture. Certainly the folklore of each of these cultures reflects the in-group and out-group stereotypes, and indeed the intercultural hostilities, that have evolved. On the one hand, the “folk” in education colleges-struggling to keep abreast of ever-changing theory, method, and practice-are envious of professors in language departments who spend their entire careers burrowing into the work of individual authors who died ages ago and haven't changed a single word of their texts since. Disgruntled educators feel that professors in language departments put their own research interests ahead of their students' needs, that they scratch and claw to get out of supervising the undergraduate language sequence, and that they show sublime disdain for teaching anything other than graduate seminars with eight students. On the other hand, the “folk” in language departments look across the border into the wasteland of education with undisguised scorn. As they perceive it, courses in education are unashamedly “Mickey Mouse”- notorious for busy work that is guaranteed content-free. Education courses, everyone knows, are taken only by students who aren't smart enough to make it as language majors in a real department, and the classes are taught by profs who tried a literary specialty twenty years ago and flunked out. In fact, the limits of education professors' academic potential are to write behavioral objectives, to think up bulletin boards, and to teach students how to make and break a piñata.
Our ability to make fun of these stereotypes is an encouraging sign that they are losing their vitality. It is time to dispel the misperceptions that have divided our profession; we have more important things to attend to. Recent commissions on excellence and task forces ad infinitum have harshly criticized education in American public schools. When someone on the other side of the campus is being rebuked, it is tempting to twitch aside the hem of one's academic robe and try not to get contaminated. But the education of foreign language teachers is not the responsibility of any one segment of academe. Rather, their education typically includes four components: (1) required language courses, where future language teachers are frequently recruited; (2) courses in the content area, where future teachers are prepared as specialists in a foreign language, literature, and culture; (3) courses in pedagogy, where future teachers receive professional training; and (4) in-school experience, where future teachers are treated as practitioners. Completing and uniting these components is the all-important context of general liberal arts study, where future teachers receive the broadest and deepest possible training in the humanistic tradition. Both the members of foreign language departments and the members of departments of education have an interest in making sure that future teachers receive the best preparation in all these categories.
All would agree, I believe, that a strong liberal arts background-including the experience of learning a second language-is a must for anyone who is going to be teaching anything to anybody. With today's world so geographically small and so intellectually large, future teachers, as well as future school administrators, must themselves have experience as students in classes that provide opportunities for intercultural communication and interdisciplinary linkage and that require both high-level cognitive skills and emotional sensitivity. Because foreign language departments provide a segment of the liberal arts education for students destined to be teachers in many disciplines, we must be sure that courses in those departments offer these liberalizing experiences.
In our preoccupation with moving large numbers of often unwilling students through required language sequences as efficiently as possible, it is easy to forget that future language majors are-or are not-being recruited during the process and that the quality of the experience in these required courses leaves every student with an outlook on foreign languages and foreign language study that can have far-reaching consequences. We contribute to the long-term benefit of our profession by ensuring that the best teachers in the department, whether graduate assistants or full professors, come into contact with students studying languages, and provide them with positive language-learning opportunities.
Department heads must remind their faculty members that the locus for recruitment of future teachers is the language department. It seems to me that, contrary to one piece of folklore, students do not enroll in a college of education and then start looking for something to teach. They are first challenged by an academic area and then become immersed in it, and finally they decide to spend their lives helping others understand and appreciate that subject. Foreign language faculty members who are aware of their role in preparing teachers must be on the lookout for students who are excited about language learning. Encouraging an interested student to take courses beyond the required sequence may spark the student's interest in becoming a language major, and certainly one career option that should be put forward in a positive light is teaching.
In the next stage, one even more critical to this discussion, language departments provide the content courses that are supposed to turn the prospective foreign language teacher into a culturally aware language specialist. But do these courses give both the wide range of language skills and the extensive knowledge of culture that future teachers need?
Although campus folklore may hold that teachers-to-be smother under courses in education and take only a skimpy few courses in the language department, the facts often suggest otherwise. At the University of Georgia, for example, an undergraduate foreign language education major takes six courses in education -three of which are devoted to the teaching of foreign language and culture-and thirteen courses in the language of specialization.
But the problem is that the number of courses taken has no predictable correlation to the linguistic and cultural proficiency attained by the takers. Those shabby but endearing old curricular pals-grammar and composition, phonetics, the history of the language, and conversation-are not producing students who are linguistically proficient. And the venerable civilization course, even when cut in two at the chronological waist and offered in expanded segments, often fails to include the sociolinguistic components that future teachers need to help their students link life to language.
It is time, perhaps, for some creative carving up of the curriculum. There is no rule that says a course must last a whole quarter or an entire semester. Two colleagues could split a semester-one teaching the sociopolitical scene, for example, and the other following with a half course on contemporary media and their portrayal of the sociopolitical scene. A semester could be similarly split between a half course on folklore and another on humor. Although some kind of link between the two halves would be desirable, students might occasionally relish a complete switch in midstream-say, from an intensive study of ecology to a bright treatment of the lively arts. Aspects of culture not traditionally available to students could in this way be presented, with opportunities for gaining sociolinguistic insights, oral language development, and creative writing practice. And teaching a half course might even prove a source of delight to the colleague steeped in medieval literature who harbors a secret bent toward science fiction or gastronomy.
Surely there are faculty members who are interested in developing imaginative new courses, half courses, or course segments that expand the students' confidence in handling both oral and written forms. We need, for instance, a course designed to increase skills in oral narration (the art of storytelling, if you will)-recounting a humorous anecdote, spinning a good yarn- skills that are prized by members of conversation groups in every culture but never included in our sterile designs for increasing oral fluency. What better way is there to encourage students to move beyond the one-sentence utterance and into real discourse competence than to train them in the storyteller's craft? The student who has once mesmerized a cluster of listeners with a compelling tale may become hooked on the power of the spoken word.
Another suggestion is a course or course segment in role playing and dramatics, a natural way for students to participate in conversational dialogue at varying levels of discourse and the best way to practice using verbal and nonverbal language to express the gamut of emotions, from pleasure to pain. It is impossible to be an effective communicator if one lacks either the vocabulary for emotive expression or experience in using the emotive words.
Our students could also profit from a concentration on techniques of discussion and persuasion. The French train their children in the art of verbal combat; by the time the children are adults, they are masters at argumentation and debate. Pity American schoolteachers, exploring France with fragile linguistic egos, who are drawn naively into these intellectual duels. Americans' foreign language preparation has not taught them how to structure a defense, how to organize and develop points, or even how to break into a conversation to begin making their points. Humiliated-and not sure why-they learn to avoid any hint of verbal confrontation, helping to strengthen the stereotype that Americans feel strongly, not about ideas, but only about material things. For the sake of our students, a course in effective persuasion would be a rich linguistic investment for any department.
Whatever courses are designed to enrich the experience of language learning, a fair share of them must be offered at the graduate level and taught when teachers already in the field can take them-in early evenings, on weekends, and in the summertime-though it may be difficult to get language department faculty members to teach at these unsavory times. Our colleagues in elementary and secondary schools, many with families, cannot leave the country to spend a year in the culture of their specialization to upgrade their language proficiency. They rely on colleges and universities to provide the courses they need at times that do not conflict with the school day. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages states: “It is incumbent on foreign language teacher education programs to provide the kinds of experiences, both in and out of the classroom, which will permit the candidate to develop functional performance in the language at a level equivalent to the Advanced Plus level on the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines in Listening, Speaking, and Reading, and at the Advanced level in writing.” The American Association of Teachers of French Syllabus of Competence is even more demanding where proficiency levels are concerned (Murphy).
Jarvis recommends holding language departments accountable for the proficiency of their students. In contradiction to the plea for expanded course offerings outlined above, Jarvis would decrease the number of foreign language content courses required for future teachers by ten percent, believing that if language departments provided courses that really developed language knowledge and skills to high levels, prospective teachers could take these courses and not enroll in esoteric literature courses that only marginally relate to the needs of public school teachers (236). Jarvis pulls no punches. “The climate is ideal,” he says, “for institutions to sort themselves into those that are truly committed to the preparation of teachers and those that are committed to other activities. There is no place in teacher education today for the institution, or department, that is not willing to invest in it (or that tries to be everything to all people)” (241).
In effect, this approach says to language departments: “You claim to give students the knowledge of language they need to function in the real world. Prove it. Demonstrate accountability by testing your graduating majors in the four skills.” Such a stand is attractive to language education specialists who are weary of being reproached because the student teachers they place in the schools lack language facility, despite having attained the required grade point average in the content area. It seems logical that language departments, which provide the coursework for the language specialty, should demonstrate that the students emerging from their programs have attained reasonable levels of competence. For prospective teachers, for example, it could then be stipulated that only those who meet the proficiency ratings approved by ACTFL or the AATs would be eligible to enter the student-teaching program.
If language departments are to be held accountable for the language component of teacher preparation, then certainly departments of education should be held accountable for the pedagogical component. The problem is that courses in general methods, educational psychology, and the history of education-those much maligned requirements for certification that often perpetuate the “Mickey Mouse” myth- are not designed to meet the specialized needs of foreign language teachers. We know that second-language acquisition is an extremely complex process, but this awareness is seldom shared by those outside our field. Education generalists have not traditionally recognized that to help students learn a foreign language, teachers must be well grounded in the theory of second- language acquisition. Without theory, teachers are unable to evaluate the effectiveness of a new technique, are unable to judge new teaching materials, and are likely either to become mindlessly methodless or to adhere slavishly to a single method that may be ill suited to their students' learning styles.
The foreign language education specialist is aware of developments in the field and of procedures to help fledgling teachers move from theory to practice. Andrews sees the new focus on communicative language teaching as requiring more sophisticated methodological skills on the part of the teacher than did more traditional approaches. For example, techniques calling for paired or small-group work require specific managerial skills. A teacher must be conscious of, and confident about, when to provide assistance and when to withdraw. The preferred teacher role for much of the class period is now defined as “nonfrontal” (Andrews 134). That is, while seeming to remain behind the scenes, the teacher is responsible for maintaining a warm and supportive classroom atmosphere and for planning to make sure that something positive happens.
The communicative approach has introduced another problem-the treatment of errors. The old knee-jerk correction of all student mistakes is no longer acceptable. Teachers must know the balance between desired fluency and necessary accuracy. Any error might be deliberately overlooked in one situation and corrected ten minutes later, depending on the goals that are governing at the moment. Such flexibility requires decisions that are not easy for the novice teacher.
Some of these demanding new communicative techniques have been lumped together as “deep-end strategies” (Johnson 53). They may be unsettling to teachers because they represent a reversal of the usual sequence of classroom activities. In the old approach, the teacher presented vocabulary and structure, drilled the students to give them confidence, and then set up exercises where students could use new words and structures in some kind of context. In the intermediate-level communicative classroom, the students first get into and out of a communicative situation with whatever grace they can muster, since they lack the linguistic skills to handle the situation with finesse. The teacher then presents the vocabulary and grammar that the students were groping for and, finally, sets up some drills to reinforce the new learning. The unpredictability of this approach, which pushes students off the deep end and forces the teacher to judge just when to throw them the rope, requires new, sophisticated teaching skills.
This specialized body of knowledge cannot be included in generic education courses. It is best presented by a specialist in foreign language education, not by generalists in education or, to give credence to the stereotype, by someone in a language department who drifted into pedagogy by default or landed there as punishment for departmental sins. Jarvis recommends that any institution preparing foreign language teachers be required to have a foreign language education specialist on the faculty (240).
We at the college level who share in preparing public school language teachers should make the effort to understand our task. The first step is to spend a day or two in the halls and classrooms of a school where our language students go to teach. It will become apparent that the kind of nurturing in-school experience we covet for our future teachers is not easily obtained there. This observation is not a criticism of the foreign language teachers in public schools; it is a criticism of the climate in which many have to teach. The schools have changed in the last two decades, just as society has changed. Often, students' motivation to learn has changed; students' attitudes about how much of the responsibility for learning is theirs and how much is the teacher's have changed; students' expectations regarding the style and format in which information is delivered have changed. Today's students have high-tech attention spans.
The foreign language teacher who is well trained in contemporary methodology and theory may encounter professional isolation, often in the form of misunderstanding by administrators and colleagues in other disciplines. In Georgia, for example, there is a new state-mandated policy under which every classroom teacher must undergo four surprise observations during the school year-every year. The observer-evaluator slips in unannounced for fifteen minutes and in that brief interval assesses the teacher's competence in a variety of skills. Unfortunately, the special strategies employed by good foreign language teachers are often baffling to observers familiar only with generic methods. An experienced teacher who believes in sustained use of the foreign language shared with me a negative evaluation she had received from a “helpful” administrator. The gist of the critique was this: “I could tell that the students didn't understand a lot of your remarks in the foreign language. You had to say the same thing several times in different ways to get it across. In the future, follow this procedure: say a sentence in German, then repeat it in English; next write the sentence on the board in German, and under it write the translation in English. The next time I drop in to evaluate you, I will expect to see you following this plan.”
Such lack of sensitivity to the special requirements of our field is reflected in other practices in public schools, such as administrators coercing English and history teachers whose college transcripts show a three-course language sequence to switch to the foreign language classroom and administrators hiring unprepared foreign language majors-those who didn't land the jobs at the United Nations they had vaguely anticipated during college-to guide the language learning of 125 students and to “pick up” learning theory, methods, and classroom management strategies on the job.
Of the four areas involved in the preparation of foreign language teachers, the in-school experience is farthest from our control. The amount and kind of in-school experience that is available to our students depends to a large extent on the learning climate in the schools and on the willingness of the schools to accept student interns. What, then, can we do to improve this vital element of teacher preparation? Our best hope lies, it seems to me, in strengthening ties with the foreign language teachers already in the public schools. Public school teachers are often the first contacts students have with foreign languages; they establish the mind-set of students toward foreign language study, toward the people who speak the language, and toward the countries where the language is spoken. Public school teachers hold unparalleled power over the future of foreign language study. Their good teaching challenges students, giving students a feeling of pride in new skills attained and fostering openness toward other cultures. Their bad teaching creates indifferent or hostile students, whose negative outlook on language learning comes back to haunt us all: departmentally, in lowered enrollments and fewer majors electing to become teachers, and publicly, in xenophobia and political isolationism. Seen from this perspective, foreign language teachers in the schools are the crucial members of our profession. Those of us in higher education must rethink our professional relationship with our public school colleagues. In the past our tendency has been to look down benignly from the ivory tower and offer suggestions on topics like What Colleges Expect from the Schools and What High School Students Need to Know. The real issue is what college professors need to know.
We need to know what obstacles to good foreign language teaching the learning climate of the schools imposes; what administrative policies hamper the development of longer language sequences and affect articulation with colleges and universities; and what courses, workshops, and seminars we should make available to help teachers upgrade their skills and obtain the knowledge of language, culture, and methodology they seek. Not until we know these things can we provide the kind of constructive support that will, in the long run, strengthen the in-school experiences of our future teachers.
The most direct route to this information is through membership in an Academic Alliance-one of the school-college faculty collaboratives through which local foreign language teachers from all levels meet to share information, to understand one another's problems, and to work out solutions. Most alliances have now passed through the timorous let's-you-and-I-get-to-know-each-other stage and are ready for a more challenging agenda. Powerful alliances can educate administrators and can, gradually but unmistakably, strengthen the preparation of foreign language teachers. The result will be the improvement of language learning at every level.
The author is Aderhold Distinguished Professor of Language Education at the University of Georgia. This article is based on a paper presented at ADFL Seminar East, 1–3 June 1989, in Athens, Georgia.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Hastings-on-Hudson: ACTFL, 1986.
Andrews, S. “Communicative Language Teaching-Some Implications for Teacher Education.” Perspectives in Communicative Language Teaching. Ed. K. Johnson and D. Porter. London: Academic, 1983. 127–39.
Jarvis, G. A. “Pedagogical Knowledge for the Second Language Teacher.” Applied Linguistics and the Preparation of Second Language Teachers. Ed. J. E. Alatis, H. H. Stern, and P. Stevens. Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1983. 234–41.
Johnson, K. “Syllabus Design: Possible Future Trends.” Perspectives in Communicative Language Teaching. Ed. K. Johnson and D. Porter. London: Academic, 1983. 47–58.
Murphy, J. A. (chair). The Teaching of French: A Syllabus of Competence. Spec. issue of AATF National Bulletin 13 (1987).
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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