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…mutuo metu aut montibus…
SOMETIMES it seems as if the components of the foreign language profession are separated, like Tacitus's ancient European tribes, “by mutual mistrust or mountains.” Those who manage to eliminate pockets of mistrust here and there find when they seek to apply their goodwill on a wider scale that they are trying to move mountains. This issue of the Bulletin is largely devoted to individual attempts to bring together some of the separate pieces of the profession: literature and language, language and culture, research and teaching, teaching and testing, to name some of the broader categories under discussion.
“We must talk to one another,” writes Marva Barnett, and this would seem, by any standard, to be a necessary first step. But how do we bring this about? As Barnett implies, “literature people” do not go to language conferences, and “language people” do not go to literature conferences. One might add that linguists do not read literary journals, literary scholars do not read linguistics journals, and they are none of them necessarily interested in reading about pedagogy. Research scholars and theorists of most kinds do not attend meetings of teachers, certainly not of secondary school teachers, and, conversely, professional classroom teachers at all levels often shy away from theorists altogether. Teachers and scholars of all kinds tend to see testing as little more than a necessary evil, so that although testing has become one of the most hotly contested issues of recent years, many active innovators in testing have little contact with large contingents of the profession, particularly the upper reaches. And so one might go on—more mountains, more mutual mistrust.
But read our writers in the pages that follow! “False dichotomies, real allies” (Barnett on language and literature). “Teaching and research are, in effect, the same thing” (Mancing). “Good teaching and good testing are, or ought to be, nearly indistinguishable” (Oller). Argument after argument is adduced here for viewing the diverse activities of the foreign language profession as essentially interconnected and interdependent. And all these arguments have common sense on their side. Surely, the mystified common man or woman might ask, you have to learn a language in order to study the literature? Or, surely teaching is important to the teaching profession? Or, surely you have to agree on ways to test what you teach and teach what you test? But we who are in the know understand that things are not that simple. Common sense cannot be decreed. A climate has to be created in which it can be applied without destroying the many illusions and dreams and self-images by which we all live. The profession of teaching foreign languages, of teaching about and in foreign languages, is very complicated in this country.
Haunting our whole enterprise is the traditional self-image of the professor. We professors, not unreasonably, want to see ourselves as professors. We want to sit in libraries and read books and do difficult and absorbing research and impart our knowledge to our students and argue with our peers and pass on our wisdom to posterity through our books. If we had not wanted to do such things, we would hardly have chosen to be professors. In the field of foreign languages, there is one major complication that detracts from our desired self-image and makes our situation different from that of our colleagues in other fields: many of our students come to us without a trace of the languages we profess . They begin their work with us in college without even the language skills of tiny children. They are not ready for “professors,” and we are not ready for them. Learning a foreign language from the elementary to the most advanced stages is an immensely complicated and time-consuming endeavor. Teaching it is similarly complicated and time-consuming, but although high-level teaching (“professing”) of foreign literature, culture, and civilization depends absolutely on good language teaching at all levels, being a good language teacher is not generally a part of the desired self-image of the university professor. “Well, yes, I do teach language courses, but my real interest is…#148; is a disclaimer with which we ourselves routinely separate this vital area of professional work from the “real” work of the profession. Administrators institutionalize this separation when they say, as they frequently do, “Well, yes, you must teach language courses, but we expect you to publish in your real field.”
Behind these habitual comments lies one automatic assumption about language courses. In the traditional American university setting, the term language course more or less means a lower-division course. This in itself runs counter to common sense. It is a manifest absurdity to suggest that someone who has been learning a language for only two years no longer needs language instruction but may be launched into upper-division courses dealing with “college-level” materials in a “college-level” way, all in the newly acquired foreign tongue. This practice involves varying degrees of pretense, perhaps thought necessary in order to persuade colleagues in other disciplines to take seriously what we do. It is similarly absurd to suggest that someone who has been learning a foreign language for only four years no longer needs language instruction but may be launched straight into graduate work. This particular absurdity has been upheld in the United States not only by the need for foreign language professors to sustain their self-images as professors of something other than language but also by the steady flow of native speakers of the target languages into graduate programs and the professoriat. This has tended to disguise the tremendous systemic difficulties that Americans, in particular those without the means to study abroad, encounter in raising their levels of foreign language proficiency to a point where they can begin to aspire to the professoriat themselves.
In recent years, controversy has surrounded the use of the ACTFL scale and the testing procedures based on it, but the scale, flawed or not, has at least brought into the open for discussion the extreme difficulties of the student who begins a foreign language in college (novice level on the ACTFL scale) and hopes to reach in four years the level required to do graduate work in the language (superior level on the ACTFL scale). A lot of testing has been done in the last decade, and a lot is still under way, such as the study reported by Margo Milleret in this issue. So far no one has been able to point to classes of students who, with or without studying abroad, accomplish the feat on which the American system theoretically rests—that is, who emerge from undergraduate programs at the superior level of language proficiency.
If we are serious, then, not just about being professors but also about enabling large numbers of Americans to study foreign languages at the highest levels, the levels at which we would like to operate as professors, then either we have to carry language instruction all through college and into graduate school or we have to insist that students receive it for years before they enter college. To take the first steps in either of these honest directions, we have to do a lot more talking across the levels of instruction—precollege, college, and graduate—and particularly, as Barnett suggests, across the artificial language-literature divide.
One of the Bulletin writers doing this in a quite explicit and down-to-earth way is Gerard Westhoff, who completes his essay on increasing the effectiveness of foreign language reading instruction. The first part of this essay, in the last issue, points out an obvious but little-discussed fact: the curricula of foreign language departments depend absolutely on students' ability to read, yet many professors of foreign literature have given little serious thought to how they can help either elementary or advanced students to read better. In this issue, Westhoff describes some basic classroom exercises that require conscious changes in the self-image of the teacher, even at elementary levels of instruction. That literature professors at the upper levels remain largely unaware of the thought and effort devoted in recent years to how people learn to read in a foreign language seems particularly unfortunate at a time when, as Donald Rice states in this issue, the role of the reader has gained prominence in literary-critical thinking. Would this gap be so hard to close?
Rice indicates the benefits that students may enjoy when their teachers are versed in both modern critical theory and contemporary ideas on language instruction. Of course, not everyone will agree with Rice that the ACTFL proficiency guidelines in themselves have improved language teaching, but probably no one will deny that they have, at the very least, generated vast amounts of energy in the theory and practice of pedagogy—energy both to support and to use the guidelines and to oppose and disprove them. This energy, however, is not being channeled throughout the system; there are still great reaches of our profession where neither the contentions nor the controversies have even made a dent in people's thinking, and these are largely the upper reaches, the “literature establishment” where much of the power of the profession still lies. Susan Rava, who describes in this issue an excellent plan for mentoring graduate students in the teaching of upper-level language and literature courses, mentions that her approach depends on the availability of senior professors committed to teaching. There are, of course, many such professors, but they are not necessarily aware of the kind of teaching that their own graduate students may be learning and practicing at the lower levels of the curriculum.
The communication gap between researchers in language and researchers in literature is not just an academic question. It translates in practice into a massive gap in the curriculum that the student has to face. This is again largely because people interested in new theories and ideas about language teaching are often clustered in practice at the lowest levels of the college curriculum. What shall we have gained as a profession if advances in language-acquisition theory and language pedagogy bring about a recasting of the lower-division curriculum of our universities but leave the upper-level curriculum untouched? Many students who do not intend to go on with the language will have gained, since they will function better at the intermediate level of the language. But, paradoxically, our overall professional problems may increase if teaching at the lower level is made better and more realistic—in isolation.
At the University of Minnesota, comprehensive proficiency-based entrance standards and graduation requirements have been introduced, and some comments by Dale Lange illustrate precisely how a well organized and sequenced lower-level program with realistic goals actually widens rather than narrows the already yawning gap in the curriculum. In an illuminating report on the Minnesota experiences in developing and implementing proficiency tests based on the ACTFL-ETS-ILR guidelines, he writes:
Senior professorial staff are interested in literary and linguistic research, thereby effectively removing themselves from issues of language learning and teaching. They have relegated their responsibility to the “language coordinator.” But the expectations of this senior staff for language competence in the four modalities in the upper division language courses is at the Superior level of the guidelines, creating tension between attention to language development and an ideal but unrealizable competence. The implementation of the guidelines in lower division courses makes that tension grow because some instructors will probably pay more attention to the development of language competence in students and less to the outrageous expectations of senior faculty. This tension needs to be resolved if the guidelines are to be implemented at all. (284)
Lange uses the word “tension” advisedly. We cannot easily solve the problem by matching the exit level of lower-division courses with the entry level of upper-division courses if the staffs' expectations at these two levels grow so far apart that “mutual mistrust” militates against practical cooperation. It will be a travesty of good intentions if all the energy put lately into improving foreign language teaching in this country by paying attention to realistic goals for raising proficiency levels should end up further polarizing segments of the profession and indeed antagonizing precisely those professors whose quality of work stands to gain most from a genuine raising of proficiency levels— namely, the professors of literature.
Somehow or other, we have to ward off this most painful eventuality, but I can see no simple way of doing it. I have spent some time in recent months in the office of the director of foreign languages at the Modern Language Association, helping out in a transition period, and I have had several calls from bewildered deans asking for help and information because their foreign language departments seemed to be divided, for and against the ACTFL proficiency guidelines or for and against oral-proficiency testing. What are these guidelines, they ask, and why are some very good and dedicated people so much in favor of them and other very good and dedicated people so much against them? Isn't proficiency something everybody wants? In a half hour on the telephone, it is possible to explain the nature of the controversies to a well-meaning outsider, but it will take infinitely longer to persuade the insiders really to talk and listen to each other on this issue across all the levels of the curriculum.
There are at least welcome signs of late that ACTFL itself is opening up the whole matter of oral-proficiency testing to the academic community in a manner that its network of workshops alone could not achieve. An advisory committee on oral-proficiency testing has been formed, one of whose charges is to represent the testing program in the profession at large. One of the committee's provisions enables “educators to conduct in-house training, in the form of a course, for example, for TAs or other like audiences” and “to petition the Committee to obtain training materials.” This is a small step in the right direction, since there is nothing more off-putting to the academic community than the sense of a closed shop of knowledge, only made available at a price and in a prescribed way. If the insights of testing on the ACTFL scale are to be seriously examined, to say nothing of accepted, by the whole profession, then they have to be understood by senior professors as well as by TAs. Most senior professors of literature will never attend ACTFL workshops, and it is partly for this reason that some of the fiercest campus controversies about the ACTFL scale are not informed ones, such as professional journals publish, but are arguments between people who have worked with the scale and others who have never looked at it. Professors who have spent their lives in graduate school, of course, not only are not arguing about the scale but have probably never even heard of it.
A small but telling paradox characterizes the situation: in some published debates on the issue, the ACTFL scale is attacked as elitist because it has the language of an educated native speaker at the top; within departments, in unpublished but often forceful, not to say vitriolic, debates, it is by contrast attacked from the top as a threat to high standards because its advocates are perceived as reducing the departmental mission to the teaching of skills. This is another of those arcane and convoluted debates that would confound the common man or woman—and indeed, as I know from my phone calls, has already confounded not a few deans of divisions. Mountains or mutual mistrust….
How can we hope to move all these mountains? Writers in this issue are whittling away at some of them, looking for connections, for ways to unite rather than to divide. The ADFL seminars in fact always bring together a wide variety of people to talk to each other. We shall try this year in Connecticut and Vancouver to look at the problems of various segments of the profession, not as separate issues but as pieces of an interconnecting puzzle. In the next Bulletin , some more writers will discuss ways of closing the gaps in our profession. We hope that our readers will also write to us. It surprises me that so few members of ADFL use the Bulletin as a sounding board. In the time I have spent in this office, not a single person has written a letter to the editor. When I write my last editorial column, for the next issue of the Bulletin , I would very much like to be able to place it alongside an op-ed page of readers' reactions and opinions. “We must talk to one another.” Please let your voices be heard.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Oral Proficiency Testing Advisory Committee . Information sheer. Yonkers: ACTFL, 1990.
Lange, D.L. “Developing and Implementing Proficiency-Oriented Tests for a New Language Requirement at the University of Minnesota: Issues and Problems for Implementing the ACTFL/ETS/ILR Proficiency Guidelines.” Proceedings from the Symposium on the Evaluation of Foreign Language Proficiency . Bloomington: Indiana U, 1987.
© 1991 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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