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APPROACHES to language teaching and learning today tend to hover between two poles. At one end of the spectrum is what one might call the classical approach, which dominated American foreign language teaching for some time, emphasizing literature and culture (and increasingly the latter over the former) as vehicles through which language could be made to come alive for learners. At the other end of the spectrum is an emphasis on language acquisition theory, particularly aspects of pedagogy that have sprung from research on the teaching of English as both second and foreign languages. 1 This pedagogical approach has enjoyed a dramatic ascendancy in the last two decades, thanks both to the increased demand for teachers of English to nonnative speakers and to the application of social science research methods to an informed examination of teachers, learners, language, and the language learning process.
At their best, both the literature-culture and the SLAFLA approaches offer a great deal to the teacher and the learner. Literature and culture not only offer content, which vivifies the learner's task, but also play on the cathartic matrix that exists between a language, the cultures in which it is spoken, and the expression of that culture. Rigorous research into the learning and teaching processes, by contrast, offers us the opportunity to step outside language catharsis—both the positive, reinforcing catharses that students and teachers experience at good moments and the negative, inhibiting catharses that come at the bad times—and to systematically examine such basic questions as “What works?” “What doesn't” and “Why?”
It must be said, however, that the two approaches are not fully at peace with each other. The great success of SLA-FLA theory in the last two decades has left some who espouse the literature-culture approach wary, even antagonistic, over what they fear is the mechanization of language teaching and learning, the substitutions of specific purposes for the grand, humanizing impact they have always felt foreign language learning can and should bring. The difficulty one encounters in finding satisfactory means of identifying current schools of thought underscores how uncharted the pedagogical terrain covered in this essay really is. At the same time, SLA-FLA theorists often see themselves as providing a long-overdue counter-balance, even antidote, to language teaching, which, by virtue of its classical heritage, has refused to descend into the rag-and-bone shop of pedagogical self-examination and replace humanistic acts of faith with hard questions. 2 Thus it might fairly be argued that either foolhardiness or bravado was involved when, in the fall of 1990, the English department of the Ecole Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) in Paris set out to rebuild itself on the basis of a combination of literature-culture and SLA-FLa pedagogical biases.
The grandes écoles occupy a special place in French education that has no direct counterpart in the American educational system. Roughly analogous to the United States military academies, where a select student population is groomed for elite careers in specialized services, grandes écoles exist for a variety of professions, particularly in the hard sciences, and they provide highly specialized career-oriented training to an elite group of students chosen through a rigorous—some would say brutal—selection process.
For over a century, HEC has been the preeminent grande école for management: among its alumni are the country's last prime minister and half the CEOs of the top thousand companies in France. 3 To gain admission, students generally attend two years of a class préparatoire between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and the take a national examination, or concours, in which approximately six thousand applicants compete for three hundred places in the entering class. 4 the HEC diplôme takes three years to complete, and it includes course work at the advanced level in two languages other than French, one of which must be English. 5
Given this highly select population, the level of English skills at entry can be high—dramatically so by the standards of most ESL and EFL teachers. In 1990, sixty percent of students ar the end of their first year scored 600 or more on the test in English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL); only eleven percent scored below 570. However, by virtue of the large class size in the class préparatoire language courses (classes of 35 are not unheard of) and the rather rigidly traditional style that often dominates language teaching in France, with its emphasis on structural aspects of language and on teacher intervention to correct student errors in conversation, the TOEFL scores of HEC students were misleading. Most could understand a highly complex lecture delivered in English, but only a small group could generate responses to the lecture in the form of questions or comments without considerable effort—effort impeded by the inhibitors created by the constant teacher interventions that had punctuated what little conversational practice was available in the class préparatoire
Fore more than a decade, students at HEC had taken mandatory courses in English (2 hours and 40 minutes each week) during each of the trimesters of their first year ( Formation Initiale ); at the same time, they took the same number of mandatory hours in a second language of their choosing. During the first trimester of Formation Initiale they were placed in English courses by level, but subsequently they were free to choose courses at will. Topics for these courses were chosen by the professors themselves, and they ranged across a variety of subjects, from culture and society to business English. In their second year ( Formation Supérieure Management 1 ), students were required to take three additional trimesters of language, one of which had to be English; course topics in second-year courses did not differ greatly from those in the first, though there was an understanding that the level of the courses should be higher than the level of first-year courses.
In many respects, the initiative for reforming and restructuring the English department offerings at HEC can be credited to the students themselves; graduates had commonly complained that their skills had actually diminished during their three years of degree work. Moreover, the environment created by the increasing importance of the European Community in business was pushing HEC to internationalize its curriculum across the board; the upgrading of the English department offerings could not be overlooked in this process. In a department of four full-time faculty members and some twenty part-timers ( vacataires ), no new full-time faculty had been hired in thirty years; and with the retirement of virtually the entire full-time faculty looming, the time for change seemed right. A new chair ( coordinateur ) was recruited and discussions about reform were initiated.
At the outset there was some impatience among administrators for immediate and sweeping moves to a variety of new structures and approaches—for instance, intensive weekend courses replacing weekly courses and the reconstitution of the department as a “business English” service department. However, it was clear that the passage of time and the lack of new ideas in the department had all but deprived it of a foundation on which any sweeping changes could be built: a leap into large-scale experimentation might create a program with not anchor, drifting aimlessly from experiment to experiment. Some basic systems had to be put in place before any experimentation could be begun.
A step preliminary even to foundation building remained, however: the identification of goals for the department and its courses. This step had two substantive parts: identifying an overarching pedagogical principle that would serve as the basis for departmental reforms and deciding the means by which the department's goals could best be achieved.
Identifying an overarching pedagogical principle was not a difficult task. Both the TOEFL performances and the assessments given by professors had repeatedly shown HEC students to have a very high degree of passive proficiency; put in more pedestrian terms, they knew a great deal about the language. However, their ability to use that knowledge actively was greatly atrophied; they were like dancers who had trained to physical perfection, had studied all the great performers and their moves, but had rarely had the opportunity to step out onto the floor with a partner. Communicative competence—the ability to convey meaning in a natural setting—had to be the goal set for HEC students; and, since their primary and most demanding active language use in subsequent career settings was likely to be spoken, oral proficiency was to receive the primary emphasis in the classroom.
The second part of the identification of departmental goals—the selection of the modes by which these goals would be achieved—represented a more difficult task. For some, the emergence of business English as a subdiscipline of ESL-EFL pedagogy, combined with the fact that the corporate boardroom was the desired destination for an HEC graduate, made the creation of a business English department a foregone conclusion. However, a number of related facts cast doubt on the advisability of the complete reconstitution of what had been a loose hybridization of literature, culture, and language for special purposes.
To begin with, the age of incoming students—nineteen years, on average—and the fact that most had been urged by their parents to pursue the HEC track in preparatory school produced a curious result: the great majority of incoming students had relatively low personal motivation for studying management. Many openly expressed a preference for a variety of different and unrelated topics, citting everything from parental pressure to the economic facts of contemporary life to explain their willingness to go through the rigorous process of gaining admission to HEC.
As a consequence, students were not highly motivated to study business-related topics in their English course work. Choosing from among a variety of topics in the third trimester of 1991, only 5% of the Formation Initiale students chose business English courses; more than half made literature courses their first choice. In conversation, students often cited their language courses as the one opportunity they had to take a breather from the week-in, week-out deluge of management courses that constituted the rest of their program.
Moreover, the corporate environment in France, like the culture in which it exists, is dramatically different from that in the United States. A high degree of classical training in the French educational system creates a highly literate population. High culture is a part of everyday life among the educated classes in France, and thus the advanced language learner in France often does not consider himself of herself fully proficient without at least a basic exposure to the important elements of the culture or cultures in which the language is spoken.
This constellation of conditions—some of them unique to the circumstances of HEC students—suggested that student motivation had to be a highly weighted factor in designing the language learning experience at HEC; moreover, it was clear that the kinds of motivation present among the HEC students were at odds with those most often articulated by current SLA research. 6 Whereas learners' motivations are often characterized as either instrumental (having to do with utilitarian goals such as use of the language in a career) or integrational (having to do with cultural integration) the motivation of HEC students, at least at the outset of their diploma work, might be alternately characterized as enrichment-oriented or escapist. 7 Given the need to engage the students in active, spontaneous, and unselfconscious oral production, students' interests in society and culture were going to have to play a major role in the development of departmental curriculum.
Of course, there could be no denying that these students were headed for careers in management, and their eventual career language use would be dominated by that setting. However, the danger of making career orientation the prime mover or program design—a problem that can arise when too narrow a conception of language-for-special-purposes methodology is applied—is that the special career purposes may not afford students sufficient opportunity to enhance and enlarge their global language proficiency. Intense career (or daily life) orientation clearly has its place; but a learner with a highly advanced global knowledge of a language may quickly pick up appropriate vocabulary and adjust to specific communicative settings with relative ease, provided he or she has mastered productive skills commensurate with his or her passive skills. A program that makes career orientation the sole motivating methodological factor would be an underutilization of such a learner's potential.
Thus it seemed much more appropriate to play on the strong interest of students in language and culture topics to developed their atrophied productive skills but at the same time to develop a flexible, mixed-systems approach to curriculum development. As students would gradually become more aware of and concerned about their precise career orientation (they generally seemed to do so toward the middle or end of their second year at HEC), they would have the opportunity to work in situations that focused more on English as it is used in the management setting; if the department's goals were achieved in the first year, students' productive skills would be sufficiently developed in later years to allow them quickly and effectively to absorb material relating to specific purposes.
As a consequence, the department opted for a balanced exposure to basic elements of American and British society and culture during the Formation Initiale: students would have a British instructor for one half the year, an American the other, 8 with two weeks in each term devoted to such basic elements of management English as preparing a curriculum vitae and writing business letters. In the second year, courses would continue to be offered in more specific topics such as British or American politics, film, and English in the developing world; however, students whose career interests had begun to influence their choice of language courses would also have the opportunity to take courses that focused on simulations of English-speaking business settings. 9
Of course, the most advantageous final stage of this gradual expansion of English-style management offerings as the students moved closer to graduation would be for them to have the opportunity to take management courses in English. At the time of restructuring, slightly less than ten percent of management courses at HEC were taught in English, and the administration hoped to increase that figure during the 1990s. However, students who had chosen an international focus for their diploma work (the International Track) had priority for enrollment in these courses, and very few others could take even one management course taught in English.
To help ameliorate this situation and to address the need to offer more specifically business-oriented courses late in the students' diploma work, the English department proposed a partnership with other departments to provide modules in English that would attach themselves to management courses currently taught in French. These modules—of about one hour per week for any given course—would provide work in English on everything from specialized vocabulary to simulations with relevance to the topic of the course itself. At the same time, the module instructor would offer to help the French instructor expand his or her ability to developed materials that would eventually allow the entire course to be offered in English. 10 In offering this partnership with other departments, the English department also urged the administration to see that students would be able to do thirty percent of all course work in English by the end of the decade.
Thus the larger framework of the HEC English course offerings was established around the following points:
As an overall structure, these tenets and the initiatives they implied seemed to put the department and its offerings on a firm footing. The proposals represented a much greater degree of structure than had existed in department offerings in anyone's memory, but they seemed at the same time to allow flexibility, for instructors as well as students. The idea of moving to a lock-step syllabus in Formation Initiale, for instance, was rejected as being inappropriate to the skills level most students demonstrated. But it was agreed that a process of sharing and comparing syllabi would begin whereby the Formation Initiale instructors would review what each one covered during the term, so at to come to some general consensus about what students needed to be exposed to at this introductory level. During the 1992–93 school year, discussions will be held to identify which course topics should be offered regularly in the second year, which intermittently, and which only rarely.
There still remained the need for certain basic systems that would monitor the success of the programs and their impact on students. Chief among these was a system for placement and tracking. Previously, the only assessment of a student's proficiency in English during course work at HEC was the course grade. Moreover, there was a consensus of opinion among students and instructors a like that, though the students might be considered very advanced by global ESL-EFL standards, there were perceptible differences in students' level within classes—sometimes so obvious that the readiness of the more orally proficient students to speak in class was a disincentive to the less proficient, while the inadequacies of the less proficient were a disincentive to the students who were ready to speak out.
The Formation Initiale instructors were themselves a mix of various backgrounds and interests. Though gifted and committed teachers, many of them were relatively unfamiliar with current assessment methods and terminology. This fact, combined with the students' advanced grammatical competence, created a need for a reasonably detailed means of determining a student's level at entry and of tracking that student's progress throughout the course of his or her degree work. A brief review of existing assessment devices offered little in the way of assistance. The ACTFL guidelines offered descriptions that were sufficiently detailed for placing and tracking HEC students, but most HEC students would easily fall into the advanced ACTFL category: greater definition and precision of levels within this category were required. The Foreign Service Institute levels, weighted more heavily toward measuring advanced proficiency, gave only a brief description of the performance represented at each level. 11
It became clear that the department would have to establish its own proficiency descriptives—to blend the weighting toward the upper end of the scale of the FSI levels with the high degree of definition of the ACTFL guidelines. Several months of the 1990–91 school year were devoted to refining these descriptive (see (appendix). It was generally agreed that HEC students fell into three distinct groups: the extremely proficient (most of whom scored above 610 on the TOEFL); those still in need of basic skills work (TOEFL scores below 560); and those in the middle, making up as much as eighty percent of the population. For simplicity, these three groups were characterized by the nature of the courses they would take: “content level” for the most advanced students, “skills level” for the weakest, and “content and skills level” for the vast majority in between. Instructors agreed on four categories in which the students' oral proficiency could be assessed: spontaneity, accuracy, subtlety, complexity. Descriptives for these categories were developed for each of the three levels, the descriptives were discussed and revised, and a final document was issued in the spring of 1991.
There remained the problem of inventing a means whereby these descriptives could be systematically applied, a cradle-to-grave system, so to speak, that would allow the department to place, track, and qualify students for graduation. The question arose whether a placement test should be administered when the students arrived at the beginning of the first year; however, after some discussion it was agreed that such a test would be an unnecessary duplication of work: each student had been thoroughly tested as part of the concours process, and it remained only to finetune the concours to the needs of the department. Eventually, it was decided that the concours would become the engaging mechanism for the cradle-to-grave system.
The English portion of the concours involves a written sample, a cloze test, and a ten-minute oral interview with two examiners. Fortunately, and uniquely among the various subjects in which oral exams take place, the English oral interview team is assigned by the English department. 12 Thus it was decided that, if the oral examiners were predominantly Formation Initiale instructors, correspondence could be guaranteed between the proficiency descriptives developed by the department and the scores awarded in the interview, making the concours oral scores not only an appropriate tool for placement but also a useful scale for tracking students and qualifying them for graduation.
The concours oral interviews are scored on a 0–20 scale. Members of the department who had served on the oral interview team in previous years discussed cut-off points that would correspond to the distinctions between content, content-skills, and skills levels in the departmental proficiency descriptives. It was finally determined that students with scores of 15 and above matched the profile of the content, level, those with 9 and under the skills level, with those scoring in between characterized as content-skills. Formation of classes in the Formation Initiale was done on the basis of the concours scores, and a system was established whereby each student would be reassessed at the end of each term in the Formation Initiale and increases in proficiency would be noted in the student's permanent record. In subsequent years reassessment would take place at the request of the student, but each student would be expected to reach a score of 14 by the time of graduation. Those who did not would be required to pass an approved examination in order to receive a diploma. 13
As students, instructors, and administrators recognize, one of the factors that inhibit French students from achieving ease and facility in language is that teaching of language in France is scolaire —not, as the word might imply in English, “scholarly,” but “academic,” “theoretical,” even “dry.” As has been said, emphasis in the early years of language learning is decidedly structural, with great attention paid to obtaining accuracy and almost none to creating a productive flow of communication.
Thus, no attempt to reform and restructure English department programs could hope to succeed unless accompanied by an effort to overcome the scolarité that the students brought to the use of English. The department took several steps to this end. The first was to explain, at in orientation meeting for incoming students, that they style of English teaching they would encounter at HEC was not likely to be what they had encountered in the past. The reasons for the differences were tactfully but explicitly set forth; it was mentioned that the students could congratulate themselves for the high level of knowledge about the language they had achieved and that the department now wanted to help them use that knowledge actively. (This message was repeated in the classroom and the conseils pédagogiques —feedback sessions with student representatives held by each department six weeks into the fall term.)
In addition, the department chair invited the students to resurrect the English Club, which had disappeared years before—a suggestion enthusiastically received by a number of students. Within a few weeks, planning had begun for an array of on-campus activities in English (a film series, visiting speakers, Sunday brunches) and some off-campus (a weekend in London, a pub crawl of Parisian taverns and cafés frequented by anglophone residents and tourists). Plans have also been made for the 1992–93 year to develop an “Adopt an anglophone” program whereby a group of incoming students will strike up a relation with one of the visiting anglophone students for French-English conversational practice.
Finally, the department has adopted a high-profile policy for faculty members. In France—as in other European countries—the physical presence of a faculty member on campus outside the classroom is not considered of great importance. However, in recruiting and hiring new full-time faculty members, the department has made clear that it expects its members to be present four days a week specifically for the purpose of creating a stronger English-speaking profile on the campus. The department also asked for and received permission to offer a yearly teaching fellowship to a recent graduate of an American TESOL masters program; the fellowship will include on-campus housing and will required the recipient to work with the English Club and interact with the students in nonclassroom settings.
It is far too early to know just how substantially the program restructuring and departmental reorientation of the past two years will change the proficiency of graduating HEC students. The first academic year of the process (1990–91) was largely a year for planning; the first real implementation of changes took place in 1991–92, and the students who entered under the first year of the new reforms will not receive their diplomas until 1994. Moreover, the reforms have only just begun; more will be implemented in the coming years, and assessments of short-term successes and failures will, no doubt, require adjustment for some time to come. 14 No comprehensive evaluation of the reforms is likely to be possible before two or three generations of students pass through the programs.
However, there are already some encouraging signs, perhaps the strongest of them the responses of the students themselves. By promoting the reforms at the orientation session and appealing to students as pioneers whose input was a prerequisite for success, the department seems to have engaged them as partners, not simply as end users of a prepackaged product. Moreover, the inclusion of the part-time faculty in discussions about a wide range of issues, from pedagogical philosophy to the placement of incoming students, has created a dramatic turnaround in the department itself. Seen previously as lacking strong direction of focus, the department now has an upbeat mood; despite the pressures of budgetary cuts and the increase in enrollments, instructors feel they are part of a serious and vital effort to invigorate language teaching and learning, and that has created in them a sense of commitment and purpose not often found in a department so heavily dependent on part-time teachers.
But perhaps as important as any early signs of success is that the department has taken a mixed-systems approach. As has been suggested, a too simplistic needs analysis of the students at HEC and their career orientations could easily have resulted in a wholesale move away from the classical literature-culture model toward an English-for-special-purposes model favored by some SLA-FLA curriculum developers. However, a look at the deeper and more subtle elements of the student's profile their levels, of proficiency, their cultural backgrounds, their motivations, and their career goals made clear that, while the reform of the department would have to include a badly needed infusion of SLA-FLA orientation toward the nuts and bolts of curriculum development, there was as significant a need to retain features of the old approach.
If nothing else, the two years of reforms in the English department at HEC have demonstrated that the two approaches, literature-culture and SLA-FLA, are not mutually exclusive, that, on the contrary, they can be complementary, even mutually invigorating. If, as early indications suggest, the program reforms produce a graduate who is more comfortable with the language, more spontaneously able to communicate, and more at ease with the cultural transcendence that is implicit in speaking a language and often in the very learning of the language itself, then the reforms at HEC will have helped take a badly needed step toward demonstrating that “mixed systems” not only work best for our students but also provide us with the satisfaction of a job well done.
The author is Professeur Associé and Coordinateur, Section Anglais, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Jouy-en-Josas, France.
Spontaneity: Students can maintain the topic of conversation but may be unable to produce much in the way of original contributions. Their remarks will tend to be somewhat programmatic, and their questions will remain at a very basic level, sometimes involving attempts, direct and indirect, to determine whether they have understood the speaker correctly. When their integration into the topic of conversation is genuine and compelling, their desire to contribute may force them to make awkward, even ungrammatical, remarks, to use hand and body gestures, or simply to abandon the thought in frustration or embarrassment. (In listening to a complex statement, they may have to ask the speaker to repeat some or all of the thought.)
Accuracy: Errors are of a sufficiently high frequency that meaning may sometimes be lost. Sentence structure may be shaky; complex thoughts will probably have to be delivered in telegraphic style, since the student's inadequate command of grammar and syntax would force them to lose the thought if they groped for accurate phrasing.
Subtlety: Subtlety is a fleeting thing, sometimes completely absent from a conservation. While students may be able to get the gist of a subtle remark spoken in their presence (a comic aside, a whispered intimacy), they will not be able to respond to the subtlety with more than body language. Attempts to experiment with the language—which will be few and far between—will often if not always miss the mark.
Complexity: Compound sentence structure probably represents the highest regular achievement, though infrequent statements of greater complexity (“if … then” clauses, for instance) may sometimes occur. Sentence structure may sound very stilted and stiff to a native speaker, and linguistics inability will be an obvious hindrance to the expression of thought. Comprehension of complex statements in conversation will be spotty, sometimes very much so; lecture comprehension may be better.
Spontaneity: Students respond readily to questions in the target language; however, they may occasionally grope for words or constructions suitable to the thought they are trying to express. Nonetheless, the level of hesitation involved does not force them to either abandon or even reduce their thought to more simplified expressions. Thought the flow may not be smooth, their ability to maintain the speaker's thoughts and their own is relatively constant. (Occasional signs of having to concentrate—such as narrowing of the eyes—may be noticed in this group.)
Accuracy: There may be a noticeable frequency of structural errors; however, these are not sufficient to confuse a listener who is a native speaker of the language. Many of the errors may be repetitive (person and number errors, tense ending errors, etc.), but the basic construction of the spoken sentence is sound and the errors do not generally impede the flow of speech.
Subtlety: Student's confidence will be marginal enough, if only at times, to prevent them from taking any risks with production; their word choice tends to lean toward the literal rather than the figurative, and they may exhibit many intonation patterns that are more appropriate to their native tongue. When they encounter an involved statement from someone else, they may be able to respond, but signs that they are working their way through the syntax or response may indicate that they would produce a response with significantly greater finesse in their native tongue.
Complexity: Compound sentence structure will appear, even frequently, but somewhat repetitively: one often senses that the though intended is really more contingent on variables than the student's command of syntax will allow. “If … then” clauses often represent the highest degree of complexity achieved in a statement. Comprehension of complexity in the speech of others may be good, but there may be occasional lapses of understanding or actual misunderstandings. Extended conversations of relative complexity tax students' concentration, often forcing them into an entirely passive mode.
Spontaneity: Students respond to questions without hesitation over word choice or construction. There is an even flow of thought and expression in the target language. Breakdowns in coherence of syntax are attributable to general difficulties of expression that might easily occur in the native tongue. Eye contact indicates an unbroken flow of comprehension when students are addressed in the target language. (Exceptional students will be able to keep track of two overlapping speakers.)
Accuracy: Grammatical, syntactical, and vocabulary errors occur infrequently (no more than two or three per conversational turn) and do not generally disrupt the flow of conversation. Students may correct their own errors, their may be isolated (not repeated), or they may display some repetitive errors in more complex or idiosyncratic situations—but these repetitive errors remain infrequent. Misunderstanding the speaker because of linguistic miscues is rate, hardly more noticeable than with a native speaker.
Subtlety: Students will have acquired sufficient confidence with the language to be able to speak figuratively without hesitation and to brave experimentation such as phrase coining. The modulation of their vocal patterns will closely approximate that of the target language rather than their own, and they may even exhibit the ability to become caught up in the euphony of a statement, raising and lowering their volume and their pitch in counterpoint with the phonetic properties of the target language. An involved statement made to them will be perceived for what it is—an expression of complex thought, for example, or of intimacy or intimidation—rather than as a linguistic challenge or task.
Complexity: A high degree of subordination and compound sentence structure will be available to the students when they have complex thoughts to express. Students can be so taken with their thoughts that they are led to attempt constructions they cannot complete, but they easily back out of these difficulties and complete the thoughts with appropriate constructions. Nonverbal cues indicate that their comprehension of complex thoughts articulated by another speaker is thoroughly content-based; misunderstanding or failure to understand is almost never language-based.
1 Though it is an oversimplification, “SLA-FLA” is used to identify pedagogical biases that lean toward emphasis on the cognitive aspects of language learning and teaching; clearly, in other situations the distinctions between these two subdisciplines would need to be emphasized (as I have done in notes 6 and 7 below). “Literature-culture” will be used to identify pedagogical approaches that lean toward more traditional, humanistic biases.
2 This conflict of philosophies is probably most apparent in the orientations of graduate programs in foreign language and literature. However, it makes itself left, often heatedly, any time such subjects as the role of literature in language teaching and learning are discussed in mixed company.
3 A good introduction to HEC's role in molding the French corporate elite in Barsoux and Lawrence, chapter 3, “The Making of French Managers.”
4 Under current reform plans, this figure is being increased dramatically—to five hundred—over the coming five years.
5 German and Spanish are the most frequently chosen languages after English, though Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese are offered, and some students elect to do work in three languages.
6 For a typical summary of contemporary SLA approached to motivation, see Brown 114–17. See also Larsen-Freeman and Long 172–92.
7 That no terminology for these situations exists in SLA research illustrates how the realities of English language learning throughout the word—which often do fall into these categories—have unduly colored the lenses of approaches to language learning. To consider love of language for its own sake as a motivation would be to admit the positive influence of a factor generally treated only in negative terms by SLA research: affect. I have discussed this problem in “Culture and Affect in Language Teaching and Learning.”
8 As part of a larger, schoolwide set of reforms, HEC was also moving from a trimestrial to semesters during the 1991–92 school year, making the British-American split easy to balance.
9 It needs to be said that a smaller, bilingual French-English MBA program, the Institut Supé'rieur des Affaires, exists under the larger administrative umbrella of Groupe HEC ; this program has a much older student population (an average of 28), most of whom have business or professional experience before entering. At ISA, the career horizon for most students is omnipresent, and virtually all English courses focus on management English.
10 This feature of the reform package is currently under discussion with the administration.
11 For a good summary comparison of the FSI and ACTFL scales, see Brown 233–37.
12 The department shares responsibility for the written and cloze tests with other schools who use the concours process; but since oral proficiency has, at least at the outset, been targeted as the area of greatest concern for the students' work at HEC, that section of the concours was made the vehicle through which placement would be handled.
13 Both the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris and the London Chamber of Commerce offer such exams, which include substantial assessment of oral proficiency. A number of exams will be reviewed as possible alternatives for satisfying this requirement; the TOEFL test will not be accepted. Recently, all full-time faculty members participated in an oral proficiency interview workshop provided by ETS.
14 Now that a firm foundation has been built, a whole variety of second-stage innovations pose themselves as possibilities, some of which, such as weekend intensive courses and “field work” among the large expatriate anglophone population of Paris, have already been tested on a trial basis.
Barsoux, Jean-Louis, and Peter Lawrence, French Management. London: Cassell, 1991.
Brown, H. Douglas. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1987.
Larsen-Freeman, Diane, and Michael H. Long. An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research. New York: Longman, 1991.
Shanahan, Daniel. “Culture and Affect in Language Teaching and Learning: Reflections on the Work of Ernst Cassirer.” Paper presented to the Dubrovnik Inter-University Centre Colloquium on Foreign and Second Language Teaching in Europe. 21–25 May 1990.
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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