26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 52-54
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
No Works Cited |
|
Articulating the Teaching of Foreign Languages: The Minnesota Project
Michael F. Metcalf
CONCEIVED in 1992 by the Minnesota Coalition for the Articulation of Language Teaching, a consortium of language teachers and administrators representing the Minnesota Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages, the Minnesota Community College System, the Minnesota Department of Education, the Minnesota Private College Council, the Minnesota State University System, and the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota articulation project grew out of a shared concern that too many students were not persisting with their language learning in a sustained manner and that too few students were achieving high levels of proficiency. The phenomenon of college students choosing to enter the first-year language sequence of a language they have already studied in high school, to produce an A grade rather than to face new challenges, is well known, and efforts to alter the choices of these “false starters” have been made with varying success at a number of colleges and universities. But in addition to this problem, which is connected with the transition from high school to college, a new and equally challenging problem has surfaced in recent years. At a time when postsecondary students of foreign languages are highly mobile, transferring from community colleges to private colleges, state university campuses, or campuses of the University of Minnesota—and transferring among four-year undergraduate institutions—the problem of articulating postsecondary language study has also become acute.
The Minnesota project for the articulation of language instruction got under way in 1993 with major support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Currently, a pilot cluster of one elementary school immersion teacher and twenty-one teachers of French, German, and Spanish from high schools, community colleges, private colleges, a state university campus, and the main campus of the University of Minnesota is working with Suzanne Jebe, world languages and cultures specialist at the Minnesota Department of Education, and Dale Lange, director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota, to develop a new system of proficiency-based assessment instruments by which to ascertain student progress within the framework of a common set of standards. It is hoped that the articulation project, which closely follows the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, will culminate in the statewide adoption of proficiency standards and testing instruments for students making the transition from high school to postsecondary study of French, German, and Spanish, as well as from second- to third-year postsecondary study of those languages.
The Minnesota Coalition for the Articulation of Language Teaching firmly believes that while it is not realistic or even desirable to establish common curricula at the various levels of instruction throughout the state, the key to articulation is the adoption of proficiency-based standards and tests that are recognized by teachers and instructors at all levels as reasonable and achievable. We also envision the sharing of pedagogical strategies for the delivery of language instruction and the emergence of a statewide dialogue among language faculties based on a common vocabulary and a common metric. Our plan is that the common metric, in turn, will hinge on the expectations of proficiency for novice language students after one and two years of postsecondary study. The proficiency target for high school students of French, German, and Spanish is likely to be set at a level that novice learners may reasonably be expected to achieve after one year of postsecondary study.
The prospects opened up by a statewide adoption of proficiency standards such as those outlined above are very exciting, especially if the high school proficiency tests are only administered to students in the spring of their senior year. Testing the language proficiency of high school students at that point and linking the results to the fulfillment of postsecondary language study requirements is expected to change student behavior. Instead of “getting the language requirement out of the way” in the first and second years of high school, students and their parents, teachers, and administrators, we hope, will be motivated to shift language instruction to include (or continue through) the senior year. This result itself would be extremely beneficial to articulation for students who go on to postsecondary study of the same language, since the phenomenon of language loss between secondary and postsecondary instruction would be significantly reduced.
Similarly, we expect the adoption of common standards and proficiency measures to facilitate the successful pursuit of further language studies by students transferring from one postsecondary institution to another, be it from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, to Hamline University; from North Hennepin Community College to Saint Cloud State University; or from the College of Saint Scholastica to the University of Saint Thomas. Whether the student is a novice learner of German who has studied one full year at her or his first postsecondary institution or one who has completed the second-year curriculum in Spanish at her or his first postsecondary institution, successful completion of the appropriate proficiency test should serve as a universal ticket to the next level of instruction at the transfer institution. One source of uncertainty and tension would thus be removed from the transfer process, and the student could get on with studying the foreign language of her or his choice with as little lost time or added anxiety as possible. Like the high school student passing the proficiency test in the spring of senior year, this transfer student would be more likely to persist with language study and to become a lifelong user of the language.
The Minnesota project also has the potential to improve the quality of instruction in French, German, and Spanish where that instruction does not meet the standards that the project is now setting. Carefully crafted, realistic, and achievable standards and proficiency tests developed by practicing teachers will establish benchmarks that school districts, community colleges, and four-year colleges and universities will embrace. If students in a particular high school fail in significant numbers to pass the proficiency tests, the language faculty, administrators, students, and parents will have a clear signal that improvements might be needed, as well as models of successful teaching programs in nearby districts that they can study. This situation would contrast sharply with today's, in which high school language teachers and administrators receive little feedback except for the advanced placement exam results of their more successful students.
Language faculty members and administrators at postsecondary institutions would derive similar advantages. The need for placement tests to fit individual students into specific curricula will continue, of course, for the assessment of proficiency is not linked to a particular curriculum. But knowing the results of their students' proficiency assessments at the end of the first- and second-year French, German, and Spanish courses will enable faculty members to measure their students' results against those of students at other participating postsecondary institutions throughout the state, at least by comparing the percentage of students who demonstrate proficiency at the levels targeted by the testing instruments. Armed with this knowledge and with the knowledge of aggregate results from other postsecondary institutions, language faculty members at any given school would also be better able to assess the likelihood that students transferring to their school after taking such proficiency tests at other named Minnesota colleges and universities would succeed in their second- and third-year language curriculum.
Increasing the persistence of language learners and facilitating the start of serious language learning at the high school level (or even earlier) may be ends in themselves, but they are also means by which to increase the number of adult Americans who continue to study languages beyond the second-year postsecondary curriculum and who apply their acquired language skills and knowledge in other domains. We in Minnesota hope, for example, that a much larger subset of students will be motivated to complete a third year of French, German, or Spanish and then to apply their skills to the discipline in which they have chosen to major, whether through study or work abroad, through language-across-the-curriculum opportunities at their home institutions, or through individual research projects in which they utilize their second, as well as their first, languages. Given the national debate about the state of foreign language knowledge among American citizens, every such additional to our national capability is welcome.
Minnesota is already well positioned to facilitate language learning by high school students because of the state's postsecondary options program, under which qualified high school juniors and seniors may enroll in postsecondary courses at state expense. Postsecondary options courses may be offered at postsecondary institutions or at the high schools themselves, although courses offered at high schools are supervised by the postsecondary partner offering the credit. The potential for this system to improve the language facility of high school students is illustrated by the German-in-the-Schools Program operated by the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In this program, seven highly qualified high school German teachers at seven different Minnesota high schools teach the second-year University of Minnesota German curriculum as it is taught at the university, thus positioning their students not only to benefit from advanced instruction in the language but also to take the University of Minnesota graduation proficiency examination in German.
The German-in-the-Schools Program is successful not least because students completing it are able to demonstrate the results of their studies through passing the same proficiency-based examination that is taken by their fellow second-year German students at the University of Minnesota, thus reducing the significance of the question of whether a B in the schools-based program is equal to a B in the university-based program. For this reason, then, the elaboration of a set of proficiency standards and assessment mechanisms accepted across the state would encourage similar language-in-the-schools programs, both by the University of Minnesota and by other postsecondary institutions, in interested high schools that have qualified teachers and a sufficient number of students prepared to take second-year postsecondary language courses.
At the end of its first year, the Minnesota articulation project has made progress toward the development of the requisite testing instruments and has piloted extant University of Minnesota proficiency tests on a fairly small number of students in other schools and colleges in spring 1994. The analysis of the resulting data has led to modifications of the testing instruments that are currently being elaborated, and a second pilot-testing project will be carried out in spring 1995. Participants have found both rewards and frustrations in the project. One participant responded to an evaluation question about how “the articulation project [has] met of failed to meet your expectations” with the following:
I must say that I did not have very specific expectations for the articulation project when I joined the pilot group. I felt that the project intended to address the problem of wasted time, effort, and money that occurs when students take foreign language courses in high school, only to repeat the same levels when they begin college study. I also thought that the project would offer me the opportunity to make some professional contacts and to learn more about current theories of foreign language pedagogy.
My individual interests have been met in this first year of the project in that I now have a good network of contacts at various types of institutions throughout the state. I feel that I have a better understanding of the goals and approaches of the foreign language programs of these different institutions, and it is important to see how my home institution fits into that picture. I am now much more familiar with ACTFL proficiency guidelines and their importance both in the state of Minnesota and on a national level. I have been able to share teaching and testing ideas with my pilot group colleagues and have a clearer idea of current theories of foreign language testing.
As far as the project's stated goals are concerned, I do not feel that we have made as much progress as we had hoped to in the first year. Considering the time that the participants have put into the 1993–94 workshops, it seems as if we should be much closer to a definition of the proficiency testing we will propose and develop.
It is clear that the Minnesota articulation project has undertaken a challenging task and that it has a long way to go if it is to achieve its goals within the current three-year period of funding. Moreover, we in Minnesota recognize that this project is but a first step toward articulating language instruction across the state, since it does not address the needs and challenges of teachers and students of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. These languages, while not as widely taught as French, German, and Spanish, are nonetheless offered by a respectable number of schools and require attention. We have chosen to tackle the three most commonly taught languages because of the numbers of students studying them rather than because of their relative accessibility. Yet, the accessibility of the commonly taught western European languages does, of course, make it easier to realize the goals of the project. The first task facing the Minnesota Articulation Project is to articulate successfully the teaching of French, German, and Spanish before facing the even greater challenges presented by Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.
The author is Assistant Provost and Director, Institute of International Studies and Programs, at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 52-54 |
|
|---|
|
|
|
|
No Works Cited |
|
