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I BEGIN this essay on curricular theory and practice with a definition: Curriculum is suite of teaching and learning events with intentional substance, scope, and sequence, events that are patterned according to local and professional criteria and principles, designed to achieve specific instructional outcomes, and measured and justified by appropriate evaluation procedures. To this definition I proceed to add dimension and depth.
Planners and teachers know that a standard curriculum has multiple hallmarks.
A curriculum is rigorous to the degree to which its course material is up to date, challenging, and comprehensive. Curriculum planners, as field specialists and representatives of institutions, typically derived that material in top-down ways, without significant input from students or the world beyond the academy. A curriculum is an expert-managed enterprise defined and delimited according to disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or other professional canons.
A curriculum aims to achieve an ensemble effect. It is organized from simple to complex, is mindful of the needs and abilities of learners, and is sequenced to advance learner sophistication. Coherent teaching subsets are apparent—elementary, intermediate, and advanced learning plateaus, for example. At the elementary level, learners encounter the essential artifacts or data of the discipline. They are then introduced to its central questions and concerns. Intermediate-level work broadens and deepens learning by adding the special vocabulary of the field. At the advanced level, students work as bona fide apprentices who learn by doing. It is at this level that they begin to “think as” biologists, historians, or sociologists. There is prescribed progress with a symmetrical sense of beginning, middle, and end. A curriculum is not random but systematic, having entry points, gate-ways, and prerequisites. It provides guidance in the form of advising, and feedback in the form of testing. It is a system that also accommodates the reality of what can be acquired in the instructional time available.
There is cumulative effect and goal-mindedness in the way a curriculum moves toward closure. Integrity accrues to learners as they demonstrate mastery of the prescribed content. It accrues to the curriculum as the programmatic learning claimed is demonstrably achieved. A curriculum is always intentional but sound only if its intentions are met.
Finally, there is a general kind of integrity that accrues to the learners and the curriculum in the degree to which the students internalize a sense of the connectedness of their learning within and beyond the overall undergraduate curriculum.
These criteria may be applied to any typical undergraduate curriculum in the academy. Indeed, a glance at any college catalog gives at least a surface validation to the criteria. At Earlham College, for example, first-year undergraduates enter the chemistry curriculum in Principles of Chemistry, proceed to Organic Chemistry, then to Energy and Entropy, and then to senior research. Students who embark on a general humanities track might go from Introduction to United States History to Race, Religion, and Ethnicity in the United States to a senior seminar. Of course, the degree to which these two curricula display coherence and integrity can be determined only by scrutiny of syllabi, lesson plans, testing procedures, student portfolios, and so forth. I submit that my definition, when considered with David Nunan's overview of standard curricula planning practice (10–21) and with personal experience, provides a standard against which one can measure any institution's foreign language curricula and can take stock specifically of the intermediate level.
We launch our discussion by labeling intermediate foreign language includes (FL) courses as stations on a continuum that includes elementary, intermediate, advanced (with their traditional conversation and composition courses), and upper-level content courses. In searching for a larger context it is possible to generally describe content and patterns at the two ends of the FL curriculum continuum, but the intermediate level is fog-bound and difficult terrain. Indeed, nationally and in our program at Earlham College I discern many discontinuities that plague the intermediate level.
Traditionally, intermediate course have often been meant to “fill the gap” between elementary-level learning and upper-level content courses. But they usually don't fill the gap—which is more like a chasm anyway. In fact, learners experience intermediate courses not as smooth transitions but as dramatic, even traumatic departures from the comfort zone of textbook and modified readings to real-world texts—literary and nonliterary—written in the target language for educated readers of that language. In addition, students have to adjust effectively to the fact that the rate at which they progress through the intermediate ACTFL proficiency levels will not be as rapid and rewarding as it was at earlier levels.
Intermediate courses are often taught as passages, as learning events on the way to something else, as preparation for something to come. But most students in intermediate courses are not interested in what lies beyond the learning horizon; they wish to improve all four language skills now; the improvement is an end in itself. Architects of intermediate courses, in their effort to make them work as curricula bridges, sometimes forget the real-world interests and needs of learners. Intermediate courses are often manipulated as structural elements in the architecture of an FL program and not as student-centered learning experiences.
Intermediate courses sometimes have a confused content agenda: Should they introduce new and more complicated linguistic structures, review only the more complex grammar from elementary courses, or try to consolidate basic first-year grammar? Teachers also have difficulty deciding on the role of belletristic texts in intermediate courses. Are the texts there for the language to be taught of for the texts to be taught? This ambiguity confounds the teachers' sense of membership in the humanities and can dampen their enthusiasm for intermediate-level teaching.
In our profession today, elementary courses are, generally speaking, defined and unitary, while upper-level courses usually constitute a rich and varied menu of choices. But the ambiguity in intermediate FL programs produces ambivalence in students about continuing their studies. Indeed, the counter on the turnstile tells us that at universities only one of ten students who begin at the elementary level of a language continues on to intermediate courses that are not protected or sponsored by an institutional FL requirement (Lambert 59).
In sum, the rigor, coherence, and integrity that I have posited as the hallmarks of a sound curriculum are simply not evident in intermediate-level learning. But what do language learners themselves tell us about their expectations and experiences at the intermediate level?
Extensive survey data from recent years reveal a lot about learners' beliefs, attitudes, goals, and behaviors. At the intermediate level Linda Harlow and Judy Muyskens conducted the most ambitious survey, questioning nearly 1,400 respondents enrolled in French and Spanish courses at twelve different universities. The researchers asked students to rank their learning goals for their current year of French or Spanish instruction. The following list summarizes that ranking:
(Harlow and Muyskens 144)
When the survey asked students to rank their preferred classroom activities, the respondents put speaking, vocabulary, and pronunciation at the top of the list (147). Their goals and activity preferences correlate well, showing how much students want to be able to speak the language.
Reading nonliterary texts ranks no higher than the middle third of student choices, and reading literary texts is in the bottom third. The acquisition of knowledge about the target culture ranks even lower. From a learner's perspective languages may not have career value, but they clearly have utility: they are the means to communicate one-on-one with speakers of the language. This sense of communication is one-dimensional, however, for it values only speaking and listening and discounts reading and cultural literacy.
Elaine Horwitz's survey of student beliefs and attitudes focused on students of Spanish, German, and French at the elementary level of instruction, but what elementary-level students believe about language learning can be generalized to their intermediate-level experience as well. A majority of the Spanish and French students in Horwitz's study said that they were motivated to learn the language so that they could get to know its speaker better. Students of German were somewhat less motivated in this regard, but they did not reject outright the goal of communicating with speakers of German (290). The survey also asked students to agree or disagree with the statement “If I learn to speak this language very well, I will have many opportunities to use it.” Sixty-five percent of the Spanish students, 49% of the French students, and 39% of the German students agreed. Opportunities must have meant travel or casual contact to the students, because a majority disagreed with the statement “If I learn to speak this language very well, it will help me get a good job.” Only 27% of the Spanish students, 22% of the French students, and 12% of the German students with that statement (290).
Horwitz's data suggest that learners are motivated by the prospect of interacting with native speakers but that they are lukewarm-to-cool about other avenues that language learning might open up for them. And about the career-related usefulness of language learning they are altogether pessimistic. Horwitz's data correlate well with the student profile that emerges in the Harlow and Muyskens study. The Horwitz's survey also shows that a substantial number of students (40%) felt that two years of study would suffice for them to learn the language (286). If those students continue to overestimate their progress, what will be their response at the intermediate level when they fall short of their goals?
The study of Susan Bacon and Michael Finnemann focuses on beliefs and attitudes of novice learners in the second and third quarters of instruction. Bacon and Finnemann assume that it is a contemporary curricular sine qua non for elementary (and, I submit, intermediate level) instruction to employ as much authentic oral and written input as possible. They undertook to create a typology of successful and satisfied learners and of their receptiveness to authentic oral and written input. Using regression analysis, the researchers concluded that the most successful and satisfied students in their study of 1,000 students of Spanish at two universities were those who had the highest degree of noninstrumental motivation. That is, the students who hoped to use their Spanish for one-on-one communication were the group that had the most positive affect and chose the most appropriate learning strategies for authentic oral and written input (465). Only one facet of the complex Bacon and Finnemann study is relevant to this discussion. The FL field's choice of authentic oral and written input as curricular content harmonizes with the expectations of the most successful students. Their goal is what elementary and intermediate language instruction is all about: learning how to communicate with native speakers.
Anne Martin and Ian Laurie surveyed 1,500 students of intermediate French. Their study established that oral proficiency is the students' primary goal and that in the students' opinion the study of literary texts and the acquisition of cultural content played little role in achieving that goal. Seventy-one percent of the students said they chose French to improve their speaking and comprehension skills, 53% named travel plans as a reason, and 36% improved employment opportunities as a reason. Asked to name the three most important things they hoped to gain from the course, fully 100% of the students chose improved linguistic performance as important; 87% chose “knowing something/more about French life and customs”; 84% chose “knowing something/more about major aspects of French life and customs”; and 62% chose “knowing something/more about major aspects of French literature.” Asked to rank fourteen classroom learning activities, students named class discussions in French, oral exams, and oral presentations as their top choices. Reading literary works in class, written exams, and written essays were in the bottom third of the students' list of preferences (198–202).
In a follow-up interview of the students surveyed, the data took on less of an antiliterary bias; the researchers saw more clearly that it was literary theory and analysis in particular that the students did not care for. As a means to communicative success, as a vehicle for vocabulary, and as a repository for correct linguistic forms, literature assumed a more favorable light. But here again, we conclude that the ability to communicate is the sine qua non and not the acquisition of cultural content or the study of literature.
What can students' course-taking patterns add to this portrait of intermediate-level language learning? As teachers we all have a sense of poor student persistence in the transition from first- to second-year language learning. Data collection does in fact show heavy attrition. According to lambert's 1989 study of seventy-five undergraduate institutions, only 49% of first-year language learners continue on to a second year, and only 26% of intermediate-level students continue on to a third year of language study (59).
I began with the premise that a credible, respectable, and responsible curriculum expresses an ethos, an ideal character to which curricular content, intention, and effect all conform and from which rigor, coherence, and integrity all flow. On the basis of these hallmarks, the student-survey data, and my own experience of intermediate-level FL courses, I offer this assessment of the state of affairs.
In the surveys, learners expressed a strong interest in oral communicative competence and in little else. That they view linguistic skills as the essential curricular content is not in itself problematic, since skill-getting can indeed serve as the raison d'être of a curriculum. Skill-getting is valid and rigorous content; what is troubling is the one-sidedness, the exclusion of other knowledge and other kinds of skills.
If students' curricular field of vision is limited to oral proficiency, teachers' field of dreams is wider. We intermediate-level planners and teachers may also put communicative performance at the content center of things, but we would like that space to be shared with other emphases. For example, we want to teach the students something of the target culture. This culture ranges from the foods and fiestas of quotidian life to the master institutions of political and educational life. It includes contemporary issues, the history of ideas, and literature and art. Taking the long view, we want to develop cultural literacy in students, knowing that it is a foundation of successful communication. But students have an unrealistic sense of how quickly they can learn to communicate. Their quick-fix expectation leaves no room in the intermediate agenda for the deliberate but slow acquisition of knowledge and analytical skills.
I posited that the intermediate level in general is where learners encounter the core content of a discipline as determined by disciplinary canons of integrity and relevance. Intermediate-level courses in, say biology or sociology are driven by such canons, but FL intermediate-level content is remarkably unsalient and nondistinctive and in many ways differs from elementary-level content only in degree of difficulty. After all, it is still four-skills-oriented.
Students' assumptions about intermediate-level learning should come as no surprise considering the focus on the sending and receiving of linguistic messages in introductory classrooms and textbooks. Both elementary and intermediate agendas, for example, teach and reteach the cases, the passive voice, the subjunctive, and so forth. For students the routine of endless reencounters can give to intermediate content a pattern of sheer, drumming predictability.
Can FL teachers speak of rigor when they see their multifaceted agenda of linguistic development, literary encounters, and target-culture acquisition squared off against the students' monolithic emphasis on oral skills? Teachers' content expectations diverge from those of their students. Moreover, among FL educators, individual sense of intermediate-content agendas do not represent a professional and disciplinary consensus. Indeed, the professional literature on intermediate-level instruction is a zigzagging debate that emphasizes, in turn, one of the four skills, the introduction to literature, cultural knowledge, cinema, and so forth.
Further, intermediate content partly reviews and repeats elementary-level content even as it anticipates and rehearses content yet to come. Is intermediate content a trailer event or a threshold activity? Is it surprising that students glance back in frustration at the linguistic content they never mastered and look ahead in dread at the linguistic content that appears so formidable?
Is there content rigor? In the typical intermediate course today, there is little that is intellectually challenging and disciplinary salient. Oral proficiency is a valid goal, but the world of content should be more broadly defined. Planners, teachers, and learners all have views and expectations that are divergent if not incompatible. The curriculum is in practice expert-managed and as such often ignores learner-centered expectations. In lieu of content rigor a content tangle exists that frustrates all parties concerned.
When one views intermediate-level learning in the arc of the full FL curriculum, there is indeed a high degree of coherence and continuity. But a focus on the intermediate level alone compromises this sense of linkage. The nearly dichotomous agenda reviews and rebuilds while previewing and rehearsing upper-level content. And if coherence has to do with the organizational quality of an event, what of the disjunction perceived by learners who are motivated to develop oral proficiency but are continually confronted with textbooks and syllabi that emphasize reading and writing as well and are weighted toward literature and cultural literacy?
Other discipline-driven curricula in the academy have a clear and distinctive beginning, middle, and end. The middle field or learning plateau is where students encounter the central paradigms, vocabularies, and taxonomies of the discipline. It is where students experience for the first time, in a proxy way, what it is like to “think as” a sociologist or biologist. But what sort of professional epistemology do learners encounter on the intermediate FL plateau? What is consciously and effectively modeled there? Are FL teachers members of a humanities discipline, applied linguists, or an interdisciplinary guild? The learners' cynical answer to these questions might be that we have assembled an overall curriculum with something like a distinctive beginning, a focused end, and an intermediate muddle.
Curricula also cohere because a prescribed traffic flow is regulated by prerequisites and an advising system. There are no multiple points of entry to, say, the United States history curriculum. There is only one Introduction to American History. A second-year FL course is, in contrast, itself a curricular point of entry for large numbers of students with existing FL skills. The intermediate level is a melting pot where students who have become acclimatized to the local FL curricular ethos are joined by newcomers who have different FL learning experiences, expectations, and styles. In this melting pot assimilation and adjustment are the teacherly expectation, but the reality leaves something to be desired. Despite planners' best efforts to make the intermediate plateau a productive, familiar terra firma, its footing remains treacherous.
To what degree does integrity accrue to intermediate-level learning? In wanting communication skills, students certainly have practical goals beyond the classroom, and that is good, but what of the literacy that we educators think an educated person should have? Literary texts don't figure in the students' world, and even if we try to introduce literature in the most learner-friendly and connected way, students think we mean literary analysis and literary theory. Their lack interest in cultural knowledge compounds the difficulty of teaching FL literature. The baccalaureate degree presumably prepares one for lifelong learning and engages the whole person: curiosity, critical thinking, values, and so forth. Do we touch students at all in these ways at the intermediate level? Is there an ensemble effect?
In first-year programs there is a clear ethos. Textbooks, methods, goals, and outcomes generally cohere. At the upper level the principle event and artifact is the literary text. The two ends of the FL curriculum have unity and integrity, but at the intermediate level eclecticism is the rule.
A curriculum has integrity to the extent that it achieves closure and accomplishes its goals. But is closure possible at the intermediate level? Inasmuch as students' unrealistic proficiency goals cannot be met, does the intermediate level take on the character of an unfriendly place that offers no sense of completion and satisfaction to learners or teachers?
Students in calculus, statistics, English composition, or computers know that the skills taught in those courses are prerequisites for success elsewhere in the curriculum. Courses in values, critical thinking, multiculturalism, and international education are often required for their general usefulness. Such learning—both of specific skills and general knowledge—is integrated learning. It displays integrity; it is applicable beyond a single course and, for that matter, beyond the walls of the academy. But what cumulative effects does the intermediate level contribute to the FL curriculum and to the broader undergraduate curriculum?
The intermediate FL course is a tangle of divergences. Beyond skill development there is a lack of tangibleness, satisfaction, and reward. Events are decontextualized and unconnected; attempts to be eclectic confuse; overly ambitious agendas produce shallow results. The teacherly commitment to literacy conflicts with the students' drive toward practical skills. Student frustration and disappointment lead to poor learning performance and high attrition, and teacher frustration and disappointment lead to a view of the intermediate level as a gap to be bridge or paved over. In 1972, Renée Disick characterized the intermediate level as a “perplexing disarray” (417). It appears that things have not improved in the last twenty-five years.
Although FL teachers do provide the oral skills students want, the intermediate suite is still not learner-centered. I agree with both Joseph Katz and David Nunan, who criticize teacher-centered and top-down curricula for their lack of individuation, collaboration, practicality, connectedness, and rewards. The top-down character of intermediate-level curricula exist because we, as the expert managers, have allowed the needs of our upper-level curricula, which in fact serve the fewest students, to drive the overall architecture. Can we end this inequity? Can we redefine intermediate-level learning to make it a more inviting and rewarding event in itself as well as a meaningful station along the long developmental road of L2 acquisition?
I call for an intermediate ethos that is less top-down and more learner-centered. The intermediate FL course should be restructured to allow for the infusion of new emphases and a new “value-added” content—one that presumes individuation, collaboration, practicality, and reward and pursues a different kind of curricular rigor, coherence, and integrity.
A higher degree of individuation and learner-centeredness does not mean catering to student egos and appetites. On the contrary, it calls for a different kind of content rigor, one in the spirit of general education and not just of FL learning. Indeed, this proposal is informed by the need to help students learn how to learn, a goal that undergraduate institutions typically desire for every bachelor degree recipient. The agenda aims to create self-directed learners who are autonomous, competent, and effective in general ways.
This proposal is inspired in part by the work of Alexander Astin, who sees “talent development” as the central mission of an undergraduate curriculum. The spirit of Astin's model is to address the whole student and the full range of students' intellectual capacities, skills, values, attitudes, interests, and behaviors. His goal is to develop autonomous learners characterized by self-directedness, general competence, and overall effectiveness as problem solvers (16). I am not proposing that the existing FL learning agenda be aborted but that linguistic skill development should also include a general kind of undergraduate talent development.
The underpinnings of this proposal have other sources as well. I draw on Frederick Weaver, who argues for more “inquiry education.” Students in general education, says Weaver, need more practice in learning, using, and revising ideas, concepts, and constructs. Curricula should promote independence and initiative and aim to engage students self-consciously and critically in the process of their own learning (4). John Chaffee observes that “critical thinking is rarely taught explicitly and systematically. …[T]eaching behavior in most high school and college classrooms tends to focus on the lowest cognitive level of knowledge, the dispensing of facts, at the expense of higher intellectual operations such as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation” (25). And the foreign language educators Jane Harper, Madeleine Lively, and Mary Williams make a compelling case for the intentional and concomitant development of conversational and cognitive abilities. Concurring with Astin, Weaver, Chaffee, Harper, Lively, and Williams, I call for greater attention to the life of the mind as the ideal extension to the linguistic skill building that now serves as the raison d'être of the intermediate level.
The goal is to work toward autodidaxy, that ideal condition we envision for all graduating students. In the course of their general education students must make the transition from teacher-directed to self-directed learning. If they have not learned how to learn, then the teachers have succeeded only in transmitting a finite measure of knowledge and a discrete set of skills. The teachers have not empowered them in any true sense.
The thrust of the learning subsets proposed below is inquiry into language, its dimensions, variations, purposes, operations, and uses. The goal is to engage students in these subsets, to create a sense of collaboration and connectedness. These subsets will also have built into them a great deal of self-reflection, an examination of the very learning process in which the students are engaged. There is an emphasis on epistemology, on how one knows. Students have clearly signaled that they want to use their linguistic skills to get to know native speakers of the target language. One could say that their learning goal is to operationalize fully the verbs kennenlernen, conaître , and llegar a conocer . My proposal does not reject the students' agenda but expands it to include sich kennenlernen, se connaître, and llegar a conocerse . The goal of the new model is to produce learners who are more self-conscious and self-motivated and who have an emerging appreciation of the rigor, coherence, and integrity of language-related inquiry.
The following list of inquiry subsets is not a proposal to do all of them. It is meant instead as a repository of options and opportunities. Other versions, more local or novel, can fit this curricular vision as well, as long as they too cohere in the spirit of inquiry and learning how to learn.
This inquiry helps students learn about language learning. Typical intermediate students have logged hundreds of hours of seat time in high school and college language programs, yet they still have little or no understanding of the complex cognitive and developmental process in which they have been involved. Too many students see languages simply as constructions and sets of rules to be memorized. Indeed, 60% of Horwitz's respondents said that language acquisition is basically a translation process. Why not stimulate these students by representing languages as infinitely flexible and fascinating systems that shape our reality? By teaching them to become more process-aware and self-aware, instructors can persuade them to take charge of their own learning above and beyond classroom activities and to set themselves realistic goals.
The sample syllabus I propose runs parallel to the existing linguistic skill-getting syllabus. This secondary focus on inquiry education cannot be comprehensive, of course; one can only partial-teach a topic as broad as second language acquisition. The syllabus might have the following contours. In week 4 or 5, the instructor lectures, if possible in the target language, on L2 acquisition: how languages are learned, how competence develops, and so on. Students begin a language-learning journal in which, as homework, they reflect on their own L2 acquisition process, using the concepts and vocabulary provided by the teacher. The entries are written in English or the L2. The teacher collects the journals and provides feedback.
In-class work follows the teacher's original agenda. After three weeks of journal keeping, students prepare to interview native speakers, refining or expanding a set of basic interview queries provided by the teacher. The interviews focus on the native speakers' own experiences of learning and using a foreign language (probably English). As the students go off to interview the native speakers either solo or in teams, the journals and the normal language teaching agenda continue. After four or five weeks of journal keeping and two weeks of native-speaker interviews, the class gathers in plenary session for a debriefing on the insights gained. The normal syllabus then resumes and runs its course for the final four or five weeks of the semester.
This inquiry subset has proved manageable and effective at Earlham College, which has been experimenting with it in second-year Japanese, German, French, and Spanish courses. We know it works, are encouraged by the results, and hope to report on our experimentation in a future publication.
Although survey results indicate that intermediate students are not interested in developing reading proficiency, an inquiry subset focused on the reading process can serve as an antidote to student negativity.
This subset considers the act of reading per se and theorists who view readers sa active cocreators of meaning rather than as passive consumers. Teachers cannot fill all the linguistic, social, and cultural gaps students have, but they can make students aware of how readers accept an author's invitation to become responsible partners in the making of meaning. Students may then be provided with introductory training in metacognitive strategy use. I agree with Kern, Swaffar, and Swaffar and Bacon that the ability to deploy metacognitive strategies seems to count as much as language level in shaping a reader's understanding of a text.
The syllabus I propose is similar to the subset on language acquisition: lectures, discussion, and dialogue journals, which retain a self-reflective character. Again, we can only partial-teach the topic, for a secondary learning strand cannot introduce and inculcate all contemporary research insights and strategy suggestions. But it can do more than deal only with generalities; its content can be rigorous. The goal is to sensitize students, to open doors on new dimensions of language and its use. Nearly every intermediate text today at least nods in the direction of interactive models of the reading process. Students are patient when assigned the prefaces to textbooks in which the authors contextualize the structure of each learning unit with their prereading, while-reading, and postreading activities. Why not provide even more embeddedness and heighten degree of the learners' self-reflection by adding an entire learning-to-learn subset to the course?
College-age students typically have acquired the basic visual vocabulary needed to understand a feature film, but few of them comprehend what they see and hear beyond the general audience level. Despite years of television watching and moviegoing, few students have an understanding of how films speak to us. And students rarely have any experience with non-Hollywood film traditions or with films as sophisticated narratives that are more than entertainment. Harlow and Muyskens report that from a list of nineteen classrooms activities intermediate students ranked films and video as their fourth most favorite (147). Teachers can exploit this interest but not by screening feature films as ambience or as repositories of authentic culture and up-to-date colloquial usages. They should instead provide a basic understanding of film narrative, steering clear, however, of a comprehensive introduction to film language and of esoteric contemporary film criticism.
A syllabus could in fact be created around questions derived from the subset on reading. There are theories of narrative film that parallel the meaning-making theories of reading (see Bordwell; Ruppert). Again, such a syllabus could rely on lectures, discussions, and dialogue journals, and films are nowadays so readily available on laser disc and videotape that outside-of-class screenings are feasible. The self-reflective character of the students' work should be retained as students take the first tentative steps in analyzing films and film viewing. By introducing them to non-Hollywood traditions and sophisticated films, teachers prepare a whole generation of FL students who will be more responsive to the use of FL cinema across the entire FL curriculum. Thus teachers can create the clientele for a departmental FL film festival and sensitize students for a lifetime of more aware and intelligent moviegoing. This is an ambitious goal, but much can be accomplished in five or six weeks.
Student surveys may tell us to keep our texts to ourselves, but like parents we insist. This insistence, however, must be done in a way to model the power and pleasure of texts, avoiding the arid practice of teacher-led text analyses. The goal is not to introduce taxonomies of genres or motifs, essential working vocabulary, critical tools, bibliographic methods, or analytic approaches. The goal is to amaze and delight, to expose students systematically to the sound of poetry, the potency of aphorisms, the calculated compactness of short stories, and figurative usage in general; to expose them to literature as discourse that pleases, instructs, puzzles, surprises, and persuades; to expose them to literature as Logos, the discourse that suggests and organizes the universe.
For help in conceptualizing a subset that addresses students' intellect, emotions, and creativity I refer readers to Hans Guth and Gabrielle Rico; Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; and Emily Spinelli and Shirley Williams. Here too I suggest, again, a pedagogical blend of lecture, discussions, and dialogue journals.
At the intermediate level it is standard procedure to introduce shorter pieces of literature from the target culture, a practice often justified by the traditional claim by people in the humanities that it is the teachers' curricular duty to acquaint students with literary “high culture” and to prepare them for upper-level course work. But not-yet-competent readers are still trapped within the confines of their interlanguage, and teacherly expectations almost always exceed their abilities. FL departments could solve the problem by banishing belles letters from the intermediate classroom, but most are reluctant to abandon their loyalty to texts from the humanities.
I propose an inquiry subset that goes beyond the traditional goals of comprehensively teaching the central meaning of a short story by Julio Cortazar, for example, or a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Such a focus is familiar to most upper-level language students who through much of their secondary and postsecondary careers have followed their instructors' lead in discovering and clarifying the key elements of a text or who have worked on their own to determine the text's central meaning. Students and instructors alike spend a great deal of time in texts, understanding what the texts mean and how they mean. Cumulatively, this exhaustive reading does indeed make students more competent and confident readers. But how appropriate is such a curricular assumption when one is working with intermediate FL students?
I propose a subset that uses texts to teach about texts, in pursuit of literacy. The curricular challenge lies not so much in developing the materials and methods needed to raise student cognition to this metalevel as it does in counteracting the negative affect that so many students bring to the study of literary texts. Could such a syllabus be organized around themes like canon formation, feminist theories, reader reception, and so forth? It would be appropriate to plan it around whatever issues seem tuned to the climate and culture of a particular campus. This subset might also be appropriate for an intermediate section made up exclusively of students who have declared a major in literature. For help in conceptualizing a learning-to-learn subset that contains a high degree of self-reflection, see Sylvie Debevec Henning, David Richter, Peter Schofer, Mary Lee Bretz, and Barbara S. Jurasek and Richard Jurasek.
Students, even those with outstanding FL skills, almost never read the FL magazines and newspapers available in campus libraries. Although these periodicals offer perceptive news stories from a variety of non-United States perspectives, students browsing in a university's current periodicals and newspapers are typically confined to their local newspaper or to Time or Newsweek . I think the problem is not merely linguistic but comes from a lack of appreciation for print media in general.
Further, there are the international electronic news media, which are now at flood tide and which range from live satellite transmissions to electronic bulletin boards and the World Wide Web. Should we enable our students to plug in without leading them in inquiry into the communications character of such media? Also, most intermediate FL programs use anthologies of TV advertisements, and many contemporary textbooks include print advertising, but I doubt that there is much purposeful inquiry into the rhetorical and psychological character of those texts. To treat advertising merely as useful nuggets of contemporary language is to neutralize what begs to be problematized.
In this subset, instructors can introduce key concepts about media and their genres in lecture format and lead the class in analyzing sample texts. In their journals students can keep track of their responses to and reflections about media as communications phenomena per se.
To focus on cultural literacy is to acknowledge a fundamental tension between culture as content and culture as process. On the one hand there is E.D. Hirsch's definition of cultural literacy as the background knowledge that is generated and shared by the literate members of a community. On the other is Linda Crawford-Lange and Dale Lange's call teach culture as process and not as transmittable knowledge. Both approaches are valid, because target cultural literacy should stress both content and process, especially for FL majors or learners who study abroad. However, I am not sanguine about the possibility of transforming the intermediate level into a delivery system for all the content learning students need to be fully competent in the target culture. The agenda is too vast for the instructional time available at the intermediate level.
In contrast, a focus on culture as process is a manageable and teachable agenda that also fits the inquiry education theme. In a learning-to-learn subset on culture students can be introduced to cultures as perceptual systems, as elaborate webs that members of the culture themselves spin and in which they are embedded. The conceptualizing of culture as a collective meaning-making process is related to many of the other proposed subsets. As in the subsets on reading, film, and literature, learners will make progress not because they have memorized and mastered what instructors told them but because they have reflected at a metacognitive level. An inquiry subset on culture as process is very much in the self-reflective and student-centered pattern of this overall proposal.
In addition to a reflective journal, students could do out-of-class projects such as modest ethnographies of various campus cultures. For help in conceptualizing such a subset, see Heidi Byrnes, Crawford-Lange and Lange, and Richard Jurasek.
The proposed subsets are meant as examples; the actual range of possibilities is limited only by the need to retain the learning-to-learn character. I am not saying that an FL department should develop across the board all these proposed subsets. Instead, I suggest that inquiry subsets be grafted on to one section, several sections, or all intermediate sections. Alternatively, in a given year all intermediate sections could include, say, a reading subset; the following year could feature a film narrative subset, the next year a language acquisition subset, and so forth.
Do the proposed subsets add rigor to the intermediate-level curriculum? Yes, they constitute a discrete value-added content that is unique, exploratory, and compelling. True, to commit instructional time to inquiry education is to commit less time to the language-learning agenda, but I think the benefits speak for themselves. The linguistic and inquiry agendas are in fact complementary. Language becomes far more than an inert medium when it is used to perform analytic tasks, and linguistic performance is enhanced by inquiry as performance. Both Wilga Rivers and Marilla Svincki argue that content with a self-reflective and intuitive dimension is a rich source of intrinsic motivation. I predict that the content of the subset will be well received.
Does inquiry education enhance coherence? Yes, it coheres in the sense of the mission of general undergraduate learning. Foreign languages are often required or recommended as part of general undergraduate development. With the addition of inquiry subsets, which are themselves in the spirit of general learning, the coherence effect can only be multiplied. The expanding of students' horizons will suggest to them the language-defined character of all communication and linguistic expression. The inquiry subsets anticipate the critical thinking and sensitivity required of them in the upper-level FL curriculum and thus tighten the continuity of the undergraduate experience. Finally, students gain essential training in thinking as an educated adult.
Will inquiry learning encourage integrity? Learning-to-learn subsets, referring to a world beyond the syllabus and the academy, establish connectedness in the classic general education sense (Gaff 52). There is also a multiplication effect derived from the integration of classroom and beyond-the-classroom learning (Nunan 107; Astin 21). Finally, integrity is serve in the way the proposed subsets are a manageable and measurable kind of learning.
Will inquiry subsets solve the intermediate-level attrition problem? I think that proposal heeds Nunan's call for a more learner-centered curriculum (10–41), and that the emphasis on autodidaxy, learning self-management, self-reflective inquiry, talent development, purposefulness in addition to linguistic development will in fact make a difference. Instead of simply transmitting our knowledge and insights to students, we have made it possible for them to generate their own knowledge. This may not solve the attrition problem, but it will surely generate more intellectual and affective assent and make a dent in troublesome enrollment patterns. At the very least, it is an experiment worth conducting.
The author is Professor of German and Associate Academic Dean at Earlham College. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 15–17 June 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina.
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© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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