26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 1-3
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
Consider the following possible scenarios: Students enter college with several years of language study under their belts; they take placement tests; they are put in classes that are too easy; they get bored; they drop out. Or students place at the intermediate level; they are unprepared for the kind of course work they encounter; they get discouraged; they drop out. Now consider these possibilities: Students graduate from high school with assessments of their foreign language competency in hand; they continue their study with challenging but accessible materials; they learn to read and analyze literary and cultural subjects; they gain greater knowledge of and enjoyment of another culture. Or students enter the curriculum at an intermediate level; they opt to major in other subjects; they continue course work in the foreign language; they use their foreign language knowledge in other areas of the college curriculum. These exempla, the worst- and best-case scenarios, demonstrate the perils of disjuncture and the advantages of articulation among levels and sequences of foreign language instruction. Articulation in foreign language education—that is, the organization of instruction in coherent sequences within programs and between elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education—hardly seems novel or complicated. Is not all education organized to guide the student progressively to more sophisticated thinking and to greater mastery of the subject matter? Why, then, is articulation in foreign languages so difficult to accomplish, especially when the field agrees it is essential for effective language learning in school?
Recognizing the importance of connected sequences for effective language learning, the Coalition of Foreign Language Organizations, whose nineteen members represent some 70,000 teachers in the United States at all levels of instruction, took on the issue of articulation as its chief project. Meetings of a steering committee for the conceptualization and planning of the enterprise began in the academic year 1987–88. The ensuing proposal that the Modern Language Association made to NEH on behalf of the coalition in 1992 resulted in the conference Achieving Consensus on Articulation in Foreign Language Education in Washington, DC, in September 1994. The single overarching mission of the project was to build consensus on ways to help students of diverse backgrounds and interests acquire the advanced linguistic competency and the cross-cultural sensitivity they will need for the twenty-first century. While many groups and individuals have addressed the issue, the project represented the first national effort on the part of the major foreign language organizations to think about and discuss coherent sequences of foreign language education across languages, levels, and institutions.
The steering committee agreed that articulation was the only way to achieve coherent educational goals based on meaningful connections among elementary, secondary, and between secondary and postsecondary language education, on recent research in second language acquisition, on accommodation of the diversity of learners' needs and learning styles, and on fair testing procedures. But there were—and are—many issues and opinions about these issues that, while demonstrating the vitality of the field, pose potential obstacles to consensus. Among these are systemic differences among institutions; theoretical disagreements concerning second language acquisition, optimal age for language study, and learning objectives; conflicting concepts of culture; diverging approaches to immersion programs and study abroad; and diverse ideas concerning the development of programs in less commonly taught languages. Thus in the title the present participle achieving was intended to signal the ongoing process necessary to create the intellectual and institutional groundwork required to accomplish the desired coherence on a large and useful scale, and consensus was intended to include a wide variety of views and activities that produce different models of implementation.
Attended by delegates of the sponsoring organizations, the conference was built around four commissioned papers and responses to them, which make up the greater part of this issue of the ADFL Bulletin. These contributions document the intellectual seriousness, probity, and goodwill with which participants approached the conference. In an attempt to give all the perspectives a fair hearing, the steering committee organized the material into four broadly defined topics: the changing realities and evolving structures of elementary and secondary schools; the situation in higher education; the differences in the field and the intellectual and systemic obstacles to consensus; and the last, addressed in a response to the first three papers, recommendations for the future. By the time those charged with writing the papers began their work, much time had elapsed since the initial planning stages of the project. While the main questions remained, the authors needed to take into account such recent developments as the activities in school reform, Goals 2000, and the National Standards in Foreign Language Education project in elementary and secondary education; the creation of teacher standards by the AATF, AATG, and AATSP; and the many fiscal cutbacks and demands for accountability in higher education. Further, many regional projects have begun the gradual process of implementing standards and curriculum frameworks that relate to levels of performance and of instruction in schools and colleges. Reports on several of these projects were featured in the conference and are published here to provide a dimension of reality to the more theoretical characterizations of articulation given in the four main essays.
Christine Brown gives a wide-ranging, detailed, and diversified picture of the school reform movement and what it means to foreign language education. She points out the dangers of site-based management, “potentially the greatest obstacle to coherent reform in foreign language education.” The shift in control in some states from governing agencies to individual schools has meant that the state or regional content specialists, including those in foreign languages, have been eliminated. The oversight of foreign languages in this situation becomes the responsibility of a building administrator, who may or may not have any interest in languages and who may not have the vision to create coherent connections with other schools and programs. But the picture that Brown paints is not entirely dark; she sees partnerships among teachers, administrators, and parents and between precollegiate and higher education as a source of strength, and she sees the National Standards project as a first phase in achieving systemic reform. She urges teachers to look beyond their past experiences, to expand their expertise for teaching diverse kinds of students in a variety of settings, and to think of the content of their courses as rich and cross-disciplinary. She notes that we must pay greater attention to teacher education and to professional development for teachers and administrators if any systemic change is to be effected. She concludes with the warning that the national language organizations will have to take on the leadership for “this massive undertaking,” or proprietary and other private schools will simply take over the business of foreign language teaching: “Whether these reforms are opportunities for teachers or threats to the existence of the language profession depends on changing the attitudes of the present workforce and understanding the context in which language education takes place.”
James Jones sets his remarks within the contexts of the critique of higher education and of the budgetary constraints that make foreign languages painfully vulnerable. He proposes that we must first make the public aware of the need for education that is substantively international so that students can thrive in a multilingual, multidimensional global environment. To bring the real world more forcefully into the undergraduate language-learning experience, the foreign language community must assess the present curriculum in order to offer students better-directed study and broader interdisciplinary options. Further support for strengthening programs both curricularly and practically can derive from alliances among higher education institutions at home and abroad, collaborative arrangements with elementary and secondary schools, and the potential of technology to help us teach and communicate better. And he reminds us in the end that “the single cornerstone for our common vision for our common future” is the teaching that transpires in the classroom.
Taking a different tack, Claire Kramsch calls for the respect of differences: “consensus is not a goal to be reached but a process to be engaged in among the many cultures encompassed by the field of foreign language education.” She provides a taxonomy of the numerous educational traditions at play in American academic life that have created discourse communities historically grounded in different goals for different sets of people. Differences in educational tradition, geographical setting, social class, views on literacy, intellectual style, research tradition, and political leanings, she notes, coexist in departments and institutions like parts of an atom. She then goes on to describe what she calls “historically determined social conditions” that influence the different discourses we apply to the goals and to our approaches to teaching languages. Among these forces are arguments from taxpayers, business leaders, and politicians, whose measures are efficiency and utility; from social scientists and humanists, whose talk is about criticism and theory for understanding concrete reality; from scholars in second language acquisition and psycholinguistics, whose basis is empirical observation of human language learning; and finally from specialists in education whose focus is on classroom learning. Besides these pressures there are different methodological discourses; proficiency-, content-, task-, and genre-based instruction; and systemic incompatibilities including second language acquisition theories, psycholinguistic theories, the teaching of culture. Only the recognition of the obstacles can lead to real articulation. “Note that these forms of discourse are not merely different means of talking about the same thing,” Kramsch writes. “Different ways with words create different ways of viewing the world to which these words refer, ways that bear the mark of different institutional histories and individual trajectories. These differences cannot be ‘resolved’ through talk; they can only be acknowledged and respected for what they are.” She comes to the conclusion that “the only common ground is dialogue itself.”
June Phillips, charged with looking forward to recommendations the coalition might make toward achieving articulation, uses coherence and transparency as organizing principles of the conversation. She believes that the learner should be presented with “a logical series of experiences that build linguistic competence” and that assessments should allow the learner to see the “capacities acquired to be able to make continuous progress toward individual goals.” She poses questions about responsibility: Who will articulate with whom? Higher education has usually set the standards, but schools and colleges could enter into a more collaborative arrangement. For example, instead of merely administering placement tests, higher education could usefully build on what students already know from their precollegiate language learning, which the schools could accurately describe by means of new, transparent assessment tools. As Heidi Byrnes says in her comments about Jones's paper, in this way the four-year colleges and universities might be able to produce students with levels of linguistic accomplishment that would allow them to function in courses across the campus. Looking into the future of departmental and institutional structures, she sees, like Phillips, that “articulation might force us to address our departmental cultures themselves, including faculty roles and rewards.” All faculty members would be charged with teaching all aspects of the curriculum and would be rewarded on the basis of the way they meet the expectations of the institution and the student body. Phillips makes a forceful plea for greater recognition of language teaching, research, and scholarship, which will have to be the bases on which strong articulation programs can be built. She concludes: “The challenge to achieve coherence and transparency, indeed, to build a consensus, will not be free of struggle or argumentation.” Or as Claire Kramsch says, “Iris through this struggle that we may come to the realization that historical positions can change if they first are understood and accepted.”
Consideration of articulation raises many questions—political, educational, and financial—about foreign language study and American education in general that cannot be answered here or solved easily. The conference in Washington provided the forum required for a beginning. What was exceptional about the conference was that participants from all levels of schooling spent the two days speaking and listening to one another and took the discussion from one another's “discourse communities” seriously. Realizing this exceptional opportunity, participants went one step further in forging the “Statement on Articulation from the Coalition of Foreign Language Organizations,” which appears in this issue. While the statement may not reshape foreign language study in a flash, it is a significant first step, and members of the coalition hope it will be of help to those attempting to form alliances, institute curricular change, or initiate new assessment plans. Now is the time for all language professionals to join forces and map out the territory for a truly international education that includes the ability to use languages and understand cultures different from one's own.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 1-3 |
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