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THE schizophrenia to which we are professionally susceptible—that is, the infamous split between language and literature—has become exacerbated over the past ten to twenty years. On the one hand, the “proficiency movement” has caused us to call into question many of our traditional ways of teaching language. On the other hand, structuralist and poststructuralist literary theories have challenged many of our traditional ways of dealing with literature.
Responses to this twin-pronged pressure have varied. At large universities, a common effect has been to create a second category or class of faculty member in foreign language departments (a second class that is often treated as second-class). I refer of course to the position of language coordinator, on whose shoulders large departments have dropped the burden of organizing and supervising first- and second-year language instruction. In the meanwhile, the “first-class” citizens in the department have been left to deal with literature and to wrestle with the questions of whether and how to incorporate new critical practices into departmental offerings.
At small colleges (where faculty members have customarily dealt with language courses to a much greater extent), the response has been more varied. For example, some faculty members have taken the proficiency movement to heart and reorganized their programs to include more and more language and culture courses (with a consequent reduction in literature). As a result, some of these professors see themselves as quasi specialists in language pedagogy to the detriment of their original interest in literature. A few faculty members have chosen the opposite solution, devoting their energy to the study of various aspects of the new critical theory and sometimes pursuing research interest that take them even further away from what they do in the classroom. Finally, a large number of instructors have tended to pay little or no attention either to the proficiency movement or to structuralism and poststructuralism. They have continued with a grammar-based approach to language instruction and a traditional literary-historical methodology when teaching literature, perhaps in the hope that “proficiency” and modern criticism will disappear.
I find this dichotomy—languages versus literature—most unfortunate. First, both the proficiency movement (or, if you prefer, the trend toward communicative competence) and modern critical theory have much to offer our profession as a means of revitalizing and facilitating the study of language and literature. Moreover, they share a common base, having undergone parallel evolutions in emphasis during the past two decades. With the advent of proficiency-oriented instruction, we have seen the focus shift from the instructor to the student. Instead of asking What should we teach? we now ask What does the language user/learner need to be able to do to function in the language? Similarly, much of modern literary theory has encouraged a shift from the author and the text to the reader. Instead of asking What is the author or the text trying to say? we now ask What does the reader need to do to produce a reading?
Ernst Fedor Hoffmann and Dorothy James argue persuasively for the need to rethink the relation between language and literature in our programs. In the same vein I would like to consider how the contributions of the proficiency movement and modern critical theory can be brought to bear on the question of how we deal with literature in our language and literature programs. In particular, I consider whether it is possible to apply some of the basic ideas and tools of proficiency-oriented language instruction to the way students work with literature; in doing so, I use some of the concepts of modern critical theory as a corrective to what the ACTFL proficiency guidelines suggest about reading. To explore this question from different perspectives, I look at three key aspects of a proficiency orientation.
The fundamental notion of the proficiency movement is that of doing, then idea that it is what we want students to be able to do that should determine what they need to know. 1 This approach, of course, does not eliminate knowledge: students still must learn vocabulary, practice conjugating verbs and making agreements, and so on. But it does force us to rethink the organization and sequencing of grammatical structures, lexical items, idiomatic expressions, and cultural information. When we deal with literature, however, we often tend to put knowing ahead of doing. We want students to know that writers A and B are classical playwrights, that Romanticism is a response to neoclassicism, that such and such a poem is an irregular sonnet; or (from a more contemporary angle) that writers X and Y unconsciously contradict themselves in their texts, that writer Z individualizes male characters but portrays female characters stereotypically. Once again, I do not deny the value of some of this knowledge, but I question its position as an organizing force for the way we deal with literature.
Should we not begin to build our programs by asking What do we want students to do with literature? Do we, for example, want them to be able to read a play or a poem or a story without the instructor telling them what it is “about”? if so, what skills do they need to read these texts? We might thus decide to organize activities that would teach them to trace a plot or describe characters or look for sound patterns. Perhaps we are more interested in students' being able to distinguish works from different periods and styles. In that case, we might work on helping them to identify structures, narrators, and themes and to pick out similarities and differences. Or would we rather concentrate our efforts on having them appreciate the creative process? Then we might use the texts they read as catalysts for generating their own tests: we could ask them, for example, to describe a visual image that evokes a feeling similar to that of the text just read, or to generate a poem using similar sounds, or to create a modern version of a historically dated story, an American version of a foreign tale. Or, if we want them to be able not just to read a text but also to critique it, we might lead them toward problems within the text by asking them to contrast male and female characters, or to set up thematic oppositions, or to express their feelings about characters and events. Once they have done that, we could pose questions that challenge the results of their work.
This listing is by no means exhaustive, nor do I wish to suggest that there is a single answer. However, the responses to these and similar basic questions should play a major role in determining what we do in class and what students need to know in order to participate in the class activities.
A second key feature is the motion of incremental levels of proficiency, the idea that learners move through progressive stages of development as they learn a language and, concomitantly, that the various skills do not develop at the same rate. But when we examine the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines to see how literature might fit into these levels, we encounter two problems.
First, literature is accorded a relatively late position in the developmental sequence. The suggestion that students might be expected to read a literary text does not come until the high intermediate level, and at the advanced level the guidelines are still talking about edited versions of literary texts. Second, a closer look reveals a more flagrant discrepancy. Although the guidelines are implicitly based on the idea that the receptive skills (reading and listening) develop more rapidly than the productive skills (writing and speaking), the guidelines nevertheless suggest that students can narrate (productively) at levels equal to or even below those at which they are expected to read narratives.
I argue that students can and should work with narratives and other literary forms from the earliest levels on. Moreover, I contend that students can work with these texts as literature, not just as examples of language usage. In other words, we need not wait until the advanced plus and superior levels to use techniques of literary analysis, including some of those suggested by modern criticism.
Instead of limiting work with a text to the traditional pedagogical apparatus that characterizes most elementary and intermediate readers—that is, the often endless series of questions about who did what, where, when, and, maybe, how—we can, for example, have students
figure out sound patterns of a poem; do a simple actantial analysis of a story; link words with similar associations; identify moments when situations change; associate actions with emotions or responses; pinpoint similarities and differences between moments in a poem or story; set up oppositions between male and female characters; organize the social structure of a play or story; identify dominant and dominated characters.
Certainly, at the early levels, the tasks would be quite simple and mechanical, requiring minimal production on the part of the students. When working with a poem, we might ask them to list all the words containing a particular sound or set of sounds; when dealing with a story or a play, we could have them fill in a basic role model (subject, object, helpers, opponents) or have them diagram positive and negative relationships between characters at various points. Then, as their linguistic abilities increase, the tasks we assign them can become correspondingly more sophisticated.
In short, we can get students doing literary analysis, even if their linguistic background is still limited. Clearly, at this stage, I am not suggesting that students talk about literary analysis: we no doubt want to reserve the introduction of critical vocabulary and meta-analysis for more advanced levels. But students are capable, at a very early level, of performing critical operations on texts.
Finally, a third key notion of proficiency-oriented language instruction is the interrelation of function, context, and accuracy. 2 These three concepts might serve as a point of departure for the development of a systematic approach to the teaching of literature.
For example, the literary equivalent of the linguistic context might be genre or subgenre. Here I urge that we consider accepting an expanded notion of literature, that we be willing to begin where many students are—that is, with what they know the like. Thus we might work with songs as a means of introducing poetry, with ads and cartoons as a lead-in to stories, with comic sketches or TV soap operas as an introduction to drama. The functions might involve the performance outcomes alluded to earlier in the discussion of doing and knowing: What operations does the reader need to be able to perform to read, compare and contrast, create, or critique that particular type of text? Then, under accuracy , we could include the vocabulary and critical concepts necessary to perform those operations.
One might object that, given the multiplicity and diversity of modern critical approaches to literature, it would be impossible to reach agreement on basic guidelines. Perhaps what is needed is not a full-blown system of levels and competencies as has been developed for language. Perhaps literature calls for a different format, one that emphasizes not so much what students should be able to do (the guideline approach) as what students can do when given the chance. A possible strategy might be to bring together partisans of various critical approaches—those reader-centered approaches to which I have obliquely alluded (rhetorical poetics, reader-response theory, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction)—and other more performance-oriented criticisms. These experts might be asked: What do you do when you approach a text? What procedures do you follow? What processes do you seek out? What relationships do you try to identify? What can students do either to imitate what you do or, if that is too difficult, to prepare themselves to be able eventually to do what you do? If these experts managed to reveal some basic activities that many of them share and if they could indicate how these activities might be initiated in relatively simple ways, we would have taken a major step toward what should be one of our goals: to interest students in literature as well as in language, to show them that literary texts are not an elitist domain to be feared and avoided.
The ACTFL proficiency guidelines for language have radically transformed both methods and materials for teaching languages. It seems to me that the teaching of literature could stand a similar catalyst. If a group of literature specialists whose interests combine theory and teaching could undertake a project that does for literature what the ACTFL project has done for language, and if, perhaps, some of these people were versed not only in modern critical theory but also in contemporary notions of proficiency-oriented language instruction, we might be able to say one day, to the great benefit of our profession, that the twain have come a bit closer to meeting.
The author is Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Hamline University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 21–23 June 1990, in Tucson, Arizona.
1 The verb to do , of course, is not absent from the discussions about teaching literature that faculty members currently have with one another. Too often, however, we ask each other Who are you doing in your nineteenth-century lit class next term? rather than What are you going to ask your students to do in …?
2 The revised version of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines has reorganized the “functional trisection” into a “quintasection” (functions, context, content, accuracy, text type). This new model, however, developed only for the speaking skill, is intended to serve as assessment criteria for testers. In suggesting function, context, and accuracy as a possible starting point for the development of literature-proficiency guidelines, I am dealing with these categories as used by Alice Omaggio as well as by various textbook writers and curriculum experts—that is, as a guide to organizing instructional material.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Hastings-on-Hudson: ACTFL, 1986.
Hoffmann, Ernst Fedor, and Dorothy James. “Toward the Integration of Foreign Language and Literature Teaching at All Levels of the College Curriculum.” ADFL Bulletin 18.1 (1986): 29–33. [Show Article]
Omaggio, Alice. Teaching Language in Context: Proficiency-Oriented Instruction. Boston: Heinle, 1986.
© 1991 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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