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Decades of research and reform have not altered the fundamental facts of teaching. The task of universal, public education is still usually being conducted by a woman alone in a little room, presiding over a youthful distillate of a town or city. If she is willing, she tries to cultivate the minds of children both in good and desperate shape. Some of them have problems that she hasn't been trained even to identify. She feels her way. She has no choice.
—Tracy Kidder
THE foreign language education community could add to the description offered by Tracy Kidder that in over seventy percent of the nation's school districts instructors are also charged with teaching these same students to communicate in a foreign language (Rhodes and Oxford). Given this fact, foreign language department chairs should ask themselves whether they should be concerned with their departments' influence on the development of these teachers.
A review of the limited descriptive statistics available on graduating senior foreign language majors helps answer this question. Between 1989 and 1992, over thirty-two percent of foreign language BAs were granted to students who had completed or were in the process of completing the requirements for licensure to teach in the precollegiate environment (Committee on Institutional Cooperation). 1 When one-third of the graduates of a department are pursuing careers in precollegiate teaching, the answer should be yes. The purpose of this article is to help chairs comprehend the dynamic environment of elementary and secondary foreign language teaching, understand their departments' role in developing successful foreign language teachers, and become sensitized to the teacher licensure process.
Within the last ten years, precollegiate foreign language teaching has moved from the comfortable cloistered existence of teaching a “college prep” course to the harsh reality of teaching required classes. Teachers new to the profession may find themselves in an environment that bears little resemblance to the traditional four-year high school sequence, which may have motivated them to pursue foreign language study in college. The assumption that foreign languages are subjects for academically gifted, college-bound students is giving way to the idea that foreign language study should be accessible to all students. Thus many states and districts have mandated language requirements for their students (Tedick, Walker, Lange, et al.) that in turn require adjustments for teaching a diverse group of students. The focus of curricula and hence assessment have, therefore, also shifted. Traditional examinations that emphasized the knowledge of grammar and literature are being replaced by oral proficiency and authentic outcomes assessments (Phillips and Everson). Furthermore, competency tests are being developed to rate candidates and thus ensure that only those who are qualified can enter the profession: whereas graduates with little experience of the target culture or success in language learning once might have ended up teaching in the precollegiate classroom unchallenged, prospective teachers now face tests on their content and pedagogical knowledge (Wing). 2
The result is that language teaching at the precollegiate level is changing to reflect the needs of the learner and hence society. Language teaching is responding to society's need to prepare its youth for an unpredictable future in which language skills will be in great demand. Realizing the need to maximize the learner's foreign language abilities, many school districts in the nation are offering language instruction beginning in the elementary schools (see Rhodes and Oxford). This different language learning environment, the elementary school, requires the foreign language teacher to be prepared to use different teaching techniques to meet the needs of the young learner. Furthermore, if schools are to prepare our society to be multiculturally literate by developing in our youth new communication and interaction skills, second language and culture knowledge, and more positive attitudes toward those who are culturally different, graduates of foreign language departments will have to teach in new types of programs. (Tedick, Walker, Lange, et al. define multicultural literacy as “the skills, patterns of behavior, attitudes, and values that characterize a society knowledgeable about and supportive of its diversity” [69].) These new teaching environments will include, at the elementary level, foreign languages in the elementary schools (FLES) programs and immersion language schools and, at the secondary level, communication-oriented classes and foreign language literacy courses.
Curricular definitions of FLES programs vary within and among school districts: an FLES program is generically defined as foreign language instruction offered to elementary school students. When, how, and who offers this instruction defines the school district's commitment to developing the young language learner. Foreign language instruction in the elementary schools can occur within the school day as part of the daily curriculum of the students, before and after school, and during the weekend. The instruction varies from curricula that reflect the instructional goals of the district delivered by licensed teachers to casual programs that are designed by interested members of the community who have little formal preparation in foreign language instruction. (For an overview of FLES programs, see Lipton; Curtain and Pesola.)
In immersion language schools, unlike FLES programs, the language is a means of instruction, not the object of instruction. For example, in a French immersion school, the student is taught math, science, and reading in French; the object of instruction is the subject taught, not the French language. This form of language instruction is usually used in magnet elementary schools in the inner cities; excellent examples can be found in Columbus, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, Missouri. Of the two types of elementary school language instruction environments, only immersion language instruction has generated a research-based model of teacher preparation (Bernhardt and Schrier). Investigations into the immersion school environment reveal preparation needs unique to elementary school foreign language teaching and offer direction for improvement in teacher education programs. Research shows that complete knowledge of the elementary school curriculum is essential for effective immersion language instruction; thus, the competent immersion language teacher has complete fluency in the target language but is prepared as an elementary school teacher first and a language teacher second.
In secondary schools the setting for language teaching has been more stable than that in elementary schools, but it has undergone notable curricular changes. Conventional college preparatory classes that have emphasized the grammar translation approach have evolved into language classes that are communicative in design. These classes still teach language as “object,” but language for communication is gradually becoming the overarching goal. This change is the by-product of the criticism leveled at the foreign language education community by the 1980 report of the President's Commission on Foreign Languages and International Studies, which urged the foreign language teaching profession to teach spoken language more effectively. Over the last decade it has become evident that educators are attempting to heed the critics.
Another new approach in secondary language teaching is more common in areas with high concentrations of Asian and Hispanic citizens. Here, students are being offered literacy classes in languages other than English. Literacy courses constitute a form of bilingual education in which the curricular goals are to teach the students to read and write the languages used in their homes. Frequently, students in these classes have oral fluency in the language but are illiterate.
Because the environment of language teaching at the precollegiate level is changing, teacher preparation must change as well. Conventional preparation programs divide teacher preparation into three areas: general education, specialist education, and professional education. Foreign language departments have the greatest influence in the area of specialist education because they provide much of the future teacher's content-knowledge preparation. One should not simplistically assume, however, that the satisfactory completion of a baccalaureate degree in a foreign language implies that the student has obtained reasonable content-area knowledge; on the contrary, the construct of foreign language content knowledge is far more complex and encompasses a far larger picture than just the college major. It is the acquisition of the subject-matter knowledge that is essential for teaching a language, and it includes many teaching characteristics interacting within the presentation of subject-matter knowledge in the context of a precollegiate classroom.
I present an illustration of the complexity of teaching foreign languages in an article suggesting steps toward the professionalization of the foreign language teaching occupation (“Prospects”). In that article, I outline the four characteristics desirable in future foreign language teachers: proficiency in the foreign language and its cultures, proficiency in the language and culture of the school's community, expertise in curricular design and its implementation, and technological sophistication (117). On the surface it would appear that foreign language departments are only concerned with the first attribute listed; however, the foreign language community influences the acquisition of each of the four characteristics during the content-knowledge development of the future teacher. 3
To understand the foreign language community's influence on developing these characteristics, it is helpful to examine current research on teacher education. Researchers have isolated three specific sources of influence on teachers' content and pedagogical knowledge: the elementary and secondary educational environment; the college major; and the experience of teaching (e.g., Ball and McDiarmid; Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching” and “Pedagogical Content Knowledge”). In this article I explore the first two influences because they relate directly to the role of educators in helping their students develop the potential to become successful teachers.
In general, foreign language instructors come to their profession after having been excited about the subject by their high school language teachers and inspired to re-create the atmosphere that inspired them to learn (Bernhardt). The influence of this experience cannot be overestimated. Rarely do teachers aspire to model their own classes on their college experience.
The collegiate language major is, however, the primary source of knowledge about the foreign language, literature, and culture, and it does contribute explicitly and implicitly to future teachers' ability to teach languages. The explicit influence comes from the content of the courses required to complete the major. The implicit influence comes from the 460 to 500 hours the average foreign language major spends sitting in foreign language classes. Through this contact, future teachers not only learn the subject but also learn implicitly what it means to teach it. How this development is influenced is best expressed by Ball and McDiarmid:
Watching their teachers, [future teachers] acquire specific scripts for teaching particular topics and develop views about what teachers should and should not do, beliefs about what contributes to academic success, and notions about what makes a good class. (446)
With these observations in mind, let us examine how the foreign language major helps build the four characteristics of successful language teachers.
The first characteristic, proficiency in the foreign language and culture, might seem obvious to the foreign language community, but it is not a given, as indicated by recent efforts to ensure it. Several states and over forty-five percent of foreign language teacher education programs in the United States have instituted licensure standards that use either recognized assessment instruments (e.g., the ACTFL oral proficiency interview) or specially created metrics to measure language proficiency (Schrier, Survey 115). More important, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages has included this characteristic in its published guidelines for foreign language teacher education (ACTFL 75). This concern over language proficiency reflects directly on the preparation or lack of preparation of language teachers by departments.
In a 1979 study of eighty school districts in ten states, as well as twenty teacher-training institutions, secondary school teachers reported having spent fifty percent or more of their time in college foreign language courses studying literature (Brickell and Paul 173). This course work was not reflected in their later teaching assignments. The majority of teachers surveyed taught levels 1 and 2, in which language and culture, not literature, are emphasized. Unfortunately, preparation patterns did not change over time; ten years later a survey of foreign language teacher preparation programs in four-year colleges and universities revealed that fifty-six percent of the five hundred responding institutions still placed heavy emphasis on the study of literature (Schrier, Survey 110).
These findings, and the fact that teachers feel their college preparation did not provide them the necessary expertise to teach language in elementary or secondary schools, should not be a surprise. Higher education has debated the integrity and value of existing academic majors for the last ten years. A report from the Association of American Colleges' Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees summarizes the problems with academic majors in this manner:
The major in most colleges is little more than a gathering of courses taken in one department, lacking structure and depth, as is often the case in the humanities and social sciences, or emphasizing content to the neglect of the essential style of inquiry on which the content is based, as is too frequently true in the natural and physical sciences. (Project 2)
In the foreign language major, this lack of structure and depth means a dearth of the language and culture course work necessary to build content knowledge for teaching the language. This problem of preparation for precollegiate foreign language instruction has led to the creation and use of metrics for assessing teacher competency.
The second characteristic, proficiency in the language and culture of the school environment, directly affects the implementation of foreign language curricula. Recent teacher education research has emphasized that effective teachers are those who are informed about how their schools and communities value and interpret the roles and responsibilities of the teacher (e.g., Copa; Ryan). This attribute of the foreign language teacher is usually implicit; however, it is necessary to make it an explicit priority. With the increased use of native speakers as instructors to seed or augment language curricula and placement of novice teachers in schools of which they have had little personal experience, knowledge of the ways of the school and its community must be emphasized as essential for teacher success. Teachers who are proficient in the native language and culture of their students and are familiar with the communities in which they work should be more effective in creating and implementing meaningful curricula for their students.
The collegiate foreign language environment also implicitly influences this attribute. During their college careers, students are more than likely to encounter native speakers as instructors or professors; an MLA survey of foreign language programs found that seventy-five percent of assistant professors in the responding programs were native speakers (Huber, “Survey” 17). Consequently, the scripts and views of good language instruction that future language teachers observe in their native instructors can influence how those students value understanding the culture of the environment in which one teaches. Further, the effort that native speaker-instructors make to achieve such an understanding may influence the overall effectiveness of their instruction. This hypothesis could explain the very interesting finding by Bettina Huber that the percentage of enrollments in advanced courses “increases as the number of full-time, tenure-track faculty members increases … but decreases as the percentage of full-time faculty members who are native speakers increases” (“Characteristics” 25). Teachers who are not proficient in the culture and language of their students may have difficulty explaining their breadth of content knowledge to their students, understanding their subject on other people's terms, and influencing other people's understanding within the subject (Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching”).
The third characteristic, expertise in curricular design and implementation, implies a degree of theoretical and clinical sophistication in the content knowledge. With the variety of new language teaching environments available in precollegiate education (e.g., FLES programs, language immersion schools, and literacy classes), the teacher who is expert in analyzing learners' needs and developing a curriculum to meet those needs will be invaluable. Competent curricular development requires teachers to be able to select and implement language learning and teaching approaches, methods, and techniques appropriate for their instructional environments.
Unfortunately, few teacher education programs provide this type of preparation (Schrier, Survey ), so again future foreign language teachers are indirectly influenced by the structure of their majors and the design of their foreign language courses. But the college major has recently come under fire by the public in the form of calls for accountability within and among higher education institutions. Karen Maitland Schilling and Karl L. Schilling pinpoint the reason the criticism appears to be valid: “Part of our problem has been that most faculty members are unable to describe, in terms other than vague generalizations, how the curriculum is structured.” It is then vitally important that the curricula in foreign language departments become models for future teachers and that professors be able to articulate the rationale for the selection of the curricular design.
The fourth characteristic desirable in future foreign language teachers, technological sophistication, means more than computer literacy. It means the ability to understand the power that technology can have in a fully articulated language curriculum. Technological tools can enhance creative development in the language learner instead of merely promoting the mechanical, uncontextualized acquisition of facts. Furthermore, teachers can use technology to stimulate creative development while furthering the communicative skills of the language learner and to provide the learner with positive links to traditional sources of information and knowledge (books and human interaction). Sadly, I discovered in a 1989 study that only forty-one percent of future foreign language teachers had any foreign language-specific exposure to using technology in foreign language teaching (Schrier, Survey 93).
By examining these four teaching characteristics we can trace the influences on teacher development and, by extension, on how teachers will present their knowledge to others. The role that the foreign language community plays in this process goes beyond providing content knowledge. It is the way professors organize and deliver this knowledge that provides future teachers with the scripts for understanding the structure and process of learning a language.
The development and preparation of foreign language teachers is not the sole responsibility of foreign language departments. Typically, teacher preparation requirements are determined by state departments of education working in concert with practicing teachers, precollegiate schools, and colleges of education. Teacher preparation divisions of colleges of education usually require future foreign language teachers to meet standards agreed on by licensing agencies. Included in these licensing profiles are groups of courses that focus on clinical and theoretical issues in precollegiate teaching contexts. Usually, the general teacher preparation curriculum includes concentrations of courses that emphasize educational psychology and human development, foundations of educational systems, pedagogical content knowledge, and specific content-area clinical experiences. The last two areas make up the foreign language education curriculum, and the composition of this curriculum has significant effects on the pedagogical preparation of future foreign language teachers. The influence of this coursework is very significant because it is in these courses that future teachers encounter the pedagogical structures that will guide them in their careers.
The foreign language education curriculum should combine the theory and the practice of language learning and teaching. This course of study should be designed to develop in the future teacher knowledge of approaches to teaching languages and cultures in the K-12 environment. The course work should also include activities that help form in the student the ability to create and evaluate foreign language curricula as well as practicums that provide the novice teacher with fieldwork observing and teaching in elementary and secondary schools.
As was emphasized by ACTFL in 1988, such college curricula are most effective when created through collaboration among university foreign language departments, schools of education, and practicing precollegiate foreign language teachers. The participation of the language department is obviously important because it is within this department that the content knowledge of the future teacher is developed. The language departments can also provide necessary models of teaching. This is especially true in the less commonly taught languages because of the special pedagogical issues involved with learning and teaching noncognate languages and the scarcity of examples of the teaching of these languages in the precollegiate environment. 4
In every language, however, this collaboration is needed to help assess the effectiveness of the university's teacher preparation by exposing future teachers to the actual world of the elementary and secondary classrooms. There is no better assessment metric of a teacher preparation program than the practitioner. Without teachers' input, the foreign language education curriculum lacks validity; as Morain observes, “Public school teachers hold unparalleled power over the future of foreign language study” (23). This power is diverse. Teachers exert their primary influence by introducing students to a second language and culture. In addition, they influence future teachers through the manner in which they display satisfaction with their occupation. Practitioners also mentor novice teachers and student teachers. As cooperating teachers, practitioners serve as models of good teaching, advisers on curricular design, and supervisors of teaching.
The three parties involved in this collaboration are very interdependent. The foreign language department depends on the school or department of education to provide the foundations of professional education course work, and the school of education depends on the foreign language department to provide the content-knowledge base for the future teacher. The foreign language department depends on the practitioner to excite and mentor the preservice teacher and to seed the interest in second languages and cultures in precollegiate students. The practitioner depends on the foreign language department for content-knowledge development and for in-service training that relates research on the constructs that influence learning and teaching to daily classroom practice. The interaction among these three parties is necessary for successful language teaching and learning.
Precollegiate and collegiate foreign language learning milieus help mold the beliefs about language learning and teaching that future foreign language teachers bring to their occupation. By isolating desirable teaching characteristics and locating the sources of their development, we can effect change in foreign language education. Identifying and improving these influences will be extremely important if we are to produce the amount of new language teachers we will require in the next decades. Many of today's teachers entered the profession during the period of rapid expansion of the teaching force precipitated by the baby boom. This expansion, which began in the mid-1950s and lasted through the early 1970s, was followed by significant teaching staff reductions during the late 1970s and early 1980s, which disproportionately affected younger teachers (NEA). Thus, a high percentage of current teachers are now nearing retirement age, and we can expect to see more hiring of younger teachers to replace those who will be retiring throughout the 1990s. At the turn of the century, not only will foreign language teachers be in demand but the new teachers, because of their numbers, will be able to influence generations of language learners as no other cohort of teachers has done before them (Schrier, “Prospects” 110). Because foreign language departments will be the primary shapers of these new teachers, through both the foreign language major curriculum and the manner in which it is delivered, the departments will play an enormous role in shaping precollegiate language teaching in the new century.
1 Committee on Institutional Cooperation is an informal organization of the Big Ten universities, the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the University of Chicago. CIC gathers various statistics regarding member institutions, from faculty salaries to TA teaching loads. For this year's statistics, write Annette Lendacki, Dept. of French and Italian, 248 Cunz Hall, Ohio State Univ., 1841 Millikin Road, Columbus, OH 43210.
2 Content knowledge is the understanding of a subject that an expert has in a field or discipline (Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching”). A teacher must know the subject and have the ability to see that subject matter from the perspective of the learner. This body of knowledge is what the teacher must have beyond the scholar's knowledge of content and it is referred to as pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching”). The key feature of teachers' understanding that differs from that of other experts is the ability to make their knowledge accessible to students. In order to do so, the teacher segments and structures content to make it accessible to learners. He or she may tailor content in anticipation of learners' preconceptions, aptitudes, interests, age, social class, cultural background, attention span, or past difficulties. The teacher may present the new knowledge for students in the form of analogies, metaphors, examples, demonstrations, or simulations.
3 I define foreign language community in the following manner: “The overall foreign language professional community subsumes classroom teachers, teacher-education researchers, second language researchers, and public foreign language advocates (e.g., state consultants, special interest groups, and lobbyists)” (Schrier, “Prospects” 119).
4 For more detailed information about preparing teachers in the less commonly taught languages, see Schrier, “Preparing”; Schrier and Everson.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Provisional Program Guidelines for Foreign Languages Teacher Education. Yonkers: ACTFL, 1988.
Ball, Deborah L., and G. Williamson McDiarmid. “The Subject Matter Preparation of Teachers.” Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. Ed. W. Robert Houston. New York: Macmillan, 1990. 437–49.
Bernhardt, Elizabeth B. “Teacher Recruitment: The Role of In-Service Teachers.” Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Newsletter 27 (1990): 8+.
Bernhardt, Elizabeth B., and Leslie L. Schrier. “The Development of Immersion Teachers.” Life in Language Immersion Classrooms. Ed. Elizabeth B. Bernhardt. Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual Matters, 1992. 113–31.
Brickell, Henry M., and Regina H. Paul. Ready for the Eighties? A Look at Foreign Language Teachers and Teaching at the Start of the Decade. New York: Policy Studies in Educ. 1981.
Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Personal communication. Jan. 1993.
Copa, Patricia M. “The Beginning Teacher as Theory Maker: Meanings for Teacher Education.” Advances in Teacher Education. Ed. Lilian G. Katz and James D. Raths. Northwood: Ablex, 1991. 105–36.
Curtain, Helena A., and Carol Ann Pesola. Languages and Children: Making the Match. Reading: Addison, 1991.
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Huber, Bettina J. “Characteristics of College and University Foreign Language Curricula: Findings from the MLA's 1987–89 Survey.” ADFL Bulletin 24.3 (1993): 6–21. [Show Article]
———. “The MLA's 1987–89 Survey of Foreign Language Programs: Institutional Contexts, Faculty Characteristics, and Enrollments.” ADFL Bulletin 24.2 (1993): 5–38. [Show Article]
Kidder, Tracy. Among Schoolchildren. Boston: Houghton, 1989.
Lipton, Gladys C. Practical Handbook to Elementary Foreign Language Programs, Including FLES, FLEX, and Immersion Programs. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1988.
Morain, Genelle. “Preparing Foreign Language Teachers: Problems and Possibilities.” ADFL Bulletin 21.2 (1990): 20–24. [Show Article]
National Education Association. Status of the American Public School Teacher, 1985–86. Washington: NEA, 1987.
Phillips, June, and Michael E. Everson. “Classroom Proficiency Tests: A Matter of Message and Content.” Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Langs. New York, 16 Apr. 1993.
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Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees. Association of American Colleges. Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community. Washington: Assn. of American Colls., 1985.
Rhodes, Nancy C., and Rebecca L. Oxford. A National Profile of Foreign Language Instruction at the Elementary and Secondary School Levels. Los Angeles: Center for Lang. Educ. and Research, U of California, 1988.
Ryan, Kevin. “Conclusion: Rules for Riding the Roller Coaster.” The Roller Coaster Year: Essays by and for Beginning Teachers. Ed. Ryan. New York: Harper, 1992. 247–59.
Schilling, Karen Maitland, and Karl L. Schilling. “Professors Must Respond to Calls for Accountability.” Chronicle of Higher Education 24 Mar. 1993: A40.
Schrier, Leslie L. “Preparing Teachers of Critical Languages for the Precollegiate Environment.” Foreign Language Education: Teaching Critical Languages in the American Schools. Ed. Keiko Samimy. Spec. issue of Theory into Practice 33 (1994): forthcoming.
———. “Prospects for the Professionalization of Foreign Language Teaching.” Guntermann 103–23.
———. A Survey of Foreign Language Teacher Preparation Patterns and Procedures in Small, Private Colleges and Universities in the United States. Diss. Ohio State U, 1989.
Schrier, Leslie L., and Michael E. Everson. “The Iowa Critical Languages Program: Developing Teachers of Critical Languages for Secondary Schools.” Visions and Reality in Foreign Language Teaching: Where We Are, Where We Are Going. Ed. William N. Hatfield. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1993. 139–49.
Shulman, Lee S. “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform.” Harvard Educational Review 57 (1987): 1–22.
———. “Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Usefully Wrong?” American Educ. Research Assn. Conference. San Francisco, Apr. 1992.
Tedick, Diane J., Constance L. Walker, Dale L. Lange, et al. “Second Language Education in Tomorrow's Schools.” Guntermann 43–75.
Wing, Barbara H. “The Pedagogical Imperative in Foreign Language Teacher Education.” Guntermann 159–86.
© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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