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AS JAMES Jones ventures to chart the future for us, he suggests some parameters that he believes would serve to prepare our path: Let me briefly recall them.
I find these suggestions totally appropriate, particularly since, with some modifications, they are possible for every foreign language department.
Besides acknowledging their obvious plausibility, however, I would like to relate them specifically to the focus of this conference, namely, articulation. That requires me to connect all four of James Jones's points to an overarching concern, a presumed common goal. Without any pretense of offering carefully crafted wording, let me state that goal as follows: that US citizens, with the aid of a curriculum delivered by foreign language departments or, even more broadly, by foreign language faculty members, attain a level of understanding of the dynamics of cultures, others and their own, that allows them to participate in a sophisticated fashion in diverse communities here and elsewhere. For reasons that are abundantly clear, that goal is unattainable through collegiate foreign language instruction as it is currently practiced. It is at best attainable if the work accomplished by precollegiate instruction, whatever its length, is taken seriously by higher education. That is the essence of the articulation project. Despite many verbal affirmations, I doubt whether higher education has really embraced the implications of such a stance for our work.
I could say much here, but let me limit myself to a few components that I would consider necessary in coordinating precollegiate with collegiate foreign language instruction.
Professionals at all levels must work together to find a better understanding of instructed language acquisition . This undertaking is enormously complex, since our knowledge of L2 acquisition is inherently related to, even dependent on, the age of the learner, a program's curricular context, and the length of the sequence of instruction, among other variables; all these factors may have to be changed if we are to attain our goal of a linguistically and culturally sophisticated citizenry.
Here as elsewhere one can take a purist approach, which, due to the complexity of the issues, all too easily produces little action. Or one can take an explicitly pragmatic approach, understanding that its results are likely to be flawed but hoping that there may be at least some significant improvement over past practice. Among such pragmatic approaches I count the efforts of the diverse regional and statewide collaboratives around the country that are doing enormously useful work in determining what students really know, as contrasted with what we taught, or thought we taught, and what we believed them to know. I trust I will not be misunderstood if I say that professionals in higher education can be tempted to find fault with the seemingly unsophisticated ways in which our colleagues in K-12 can construct language learning. But I believe one could also find fault with the majority of collegiate language programs, though our shortcomings tend to be different. In other words, collaboration, far from being a one-way street, would surely benefit both sides.
Better understanding must be translated into rich descriptors for language learning . It is worth reminding ourselves that we use severely limited evidence to represent the totality of the complex enterprise of students' language learning. Even more sobering is that those highly restricted descriptors are implicitly used to define future language learning, thereby contributing to potentially highly flawed curriculum construction. Even under the communicative competence banner, we continue to assign a central role to decontextualized grammatical and lexical features at the sentence level that, by and large, get at the essence of neither oral nor written communication, in production or interpretation.
I strongly suggest that second language research, typically associated with higher education faculty members, could render a critical service by providing us with rich descriptions of L2 learners at key points in an instructional sequence, thereby allowing us to shift away from the wholly inadequate features we currently rely on. Again, we can accomplish this goal only if we work collaboratively.
Rich descriptors should become the basis of rich assessment instruments . While the plea for incorporating the capabilities of technology generally refers to aspects of instruction or learning, perhaps one of the most powerful applications of technology is in the area of assessment. That is, we should recognize that technologies can allow us to reconceptualize instruction, acquisition, and assessment as being inseparably linked together.
I give as only one among many examples the use of technologically created portfolios. They could include evidence for students' development of all language modalities under different circumstances of use, richly documented and readily accessed through the new media. This evidence would more closely approximate language in use than would decontextualized, artificial products. Furthermore, they could present longitudinal evidence rather than material that gives enormous weight to an individual event. Significantly, these portfolios could assess students under different circumstances (e.g., they could include student readings of familiar and unfamiliar material). In a novel twist, they could, in portions, be deliberately biased toward demonstrating the best performance, instead of being constructed with the intention of showing learners' shortcomings.
To reiterate, lest we become afraid that this kind of assessment would demand too much effort and time, such evidence is routinely created as part of instruction and learning. But technology would make it more readily available for interested parties other than the classroom teacher, including parties removed in place and time. Moreover, this type of assessment could benefit the increasing number of nontraditional students who return to formal instruction after a significant absence, presumably with experience in the workforce, including, potentially, second language acquisition.
The need to articulate with subsequent programs requires end-of-program assessments that are more transparent to colleges and more acceptable to precollegiate as well as collegiate professionals because they have been collaboratively developed . Such an assessment approach is crucial for large institutions that otherwise find it impossible to conduct meaningful placement examinations. Here the collaboratives mentioned above, particularly innovative programs that use to advantage feeder-school relations between K-12 schools and colleges, can and should take the lead.
Colleges must develop curricula that explicitly begin by assuming that previous language instruction is the norm . Such a stance would have fundamental implications for curricula. Among its most far-reaching consequences would be that college curricula could no longer maintain conceptual priority, whereby the performance of precollegiate programs could no longer be measured in terms of the outcomes of college programs. Instead, assuming that L2 learners—even those with multiple years of instruction—come as blank slates or, worse yet, as deficient products, collegiate programs would have to take seriously the variety of competence and performance profiles among such learners. We have not yet faced that reversal honestly, neither as a basic premise nor as an approach with very practical implications for staffing (e.g., graduate students may no longer be able to teach the incoming students in the way we have asked them to in the past), for the kinds of sections our programs would need (e.g., we might not have as many “parallel” sections of the “same” course), or, indeed, for the number of sections that we might need, a critical resource issue. I must state candidly that by paying little heed to precollegiate instruction, by filling our requirement sequences with students regardless of their language ability, by being largely oblivious to outcomes and, when we do consider them, having scandalously low performance expectations of our graduates, we allow ourselves to continue business as usual, including the maintenance of graduate programs at the expense of solid undergraduate education. One can easily argue that some of our most entrenched practices would be jeopardized if we were to take articulation seriously!
Yet the above issues are just the beginning. They could be expanded significantly in all areas of language learning, language teaching, and language curriculum construction.
Permit me, then, to speak briefly to two seemingly different but closely connected issues that we must also consider: the nature and role of foreign language departments as entire units and the roles of and rewards for individual faculty members within those departments.
First, foreign language departments will have to take student diversity seriously. I do not employ the prevailing meaning of diversity in higher education here. Instead, I mean that departments must pay attention to nonmajors as well as majors. We have made the small group of majors the center of our planning and resource allocation. The other students, the vast majority, appeared only as also-rans, our dreaded service obligations. That, too, must change. Somehow we must rethink ourselves dramatically enough to treat the “others” as “normal.”
Let me adduce just one example of how we might be affected. If we assumed that students had precollegiate instruction, our requirements sequence would take on totally different dimensions—with the surprising possibility that we might, despite ourselves, produce students in the requirement sequence with usable language abilities at an intellectually defensible level and have them do work that could be recognized across the entire campus as academic study rather than as a pastime that lacks academic probity and, worse yet, takes away from courses that students could take in their nonlanguage majors. We would have to change much about our instructional approaches to seize that opportunity appropriately.
Second, faculty roles and rewards in a department that took this approach would also undergo major changes. I do not anticipate that all faculty members will joyously espouse, much less be instantly good at, something that some of them have loathed for so many years, namely, excellent teaching that does not artificially divide “language” courses and “content” courses but charges an entire departmental faculty with teaching both elements in each course, though the complexity of the enterprise means that different courses will require different approaches.
In other words, articulation might force us to address our departmental cultures themselves, including faculty roles and rewards. We might have to construct ourselves not as an aggregate of individuals but as a group that delivers a certain product, that is, a curriculum that leads to certain outcomes. Presumably, this compact would allow faculty members to do different things at different times, all of which, however, are somehow coordinated and, within our new conception of our departments, have merit and will be rewarded.
Formerly, roles and rewards focused on individual achievements, and the maximum prize was the ability to bid oneself up from institution to institution, primarily through publication. In general, those aspects of faculty life that were moored in the institution were rewarded at a lower level than those that benefited the discipline at large. If articulation is to be successful, then we must start giving faculty members who perform the necessary work a supportive environment, and that support includes appropriate rewards.
No longer should we repeat the old dichotomies of scholarship versus teaching or service and language teaching versus literature research. Instead, departments need to learn to value and judge their ability to meet creatively and responsibly the expectations that the institution and its student body rightly have of them.
To return to James Jones's four points, the relation of our discipline to national educational interests, a focus on our classrooms, and the ability to work collaboratively and to employ technology creatively would be directed toward goals that they might not otherwise have addressed without the articulation agenda. My hope for this conference is that we will identify some specific points of action in K-16 education that will allow us to progress on the arduous road toward fully articulated language instructional sequences. I look forward to those deliberations and outcomes.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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