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TALK about the “perils of disjunctures” (Welles 1) is a hot topic in education these days, so hot in fact that the Spring 1995 issue of the ADFL Bulletin was dedicated in its entirety to the disjuncture antidote: articulation. Composed of thought-provoking articles on transinstitutional collaboration and articulation, this issue nonetheless, fails to address in depth the intrainstitutional disjuncture that plagues many of our college and university foreign language programs. That a breach indeed exists is the assumption underlying the topic of this article. The title of the seminar session at which I gave an earlier version of this paper was “Innovations in the Curriculum: Focus on the Bridge Course.” To speak of that title is to acknowledge that there exists a gap in our foreign language curriculum that requires a bridge: that is, a course designed to take our students from where they are to where we want them to be in relation to study for the major.
My comments are based on the type of institution and program with which I am most familiar—a large state university (25,000 students) and a PhD-granting department with 70 graduate students, 2,000 undergraduates, and, last year, 12.5 FTEs. Having also taught at a private liberal arts college, I am aware that there are major differences and that much of what I say here may apply only tangentially to these kinds of institutions.
A recent article by Linda Harlow and Judith Muyskens situates the gap in the foreign language curriculum at the intermediate level where students “‘mark time’ before getting to the real material—the third- and fourth-year content courses.” Because this level is a bridge to advanced study Harlow and Muyskens argue that it should “play a central role in any well-articulated language program where goals, teaching approaches, and testing are consistent” (141). In order to arrive at priorities for this level, they conducted a survey in French and Spanish classes that was designed to identify and rank student and instructor goals for this level of language study. It should not surprise us that the highest-ranked goal, for both instructors and their students, was speaking the language or the “acquisition of the ability to communicate in social, travel, and job situations” (145). Low in the student rankings were the reading of literature, the knowledge of culture, and writing, the very goals that function as the cornerstone of the major curriculum.
The question we need to ask ourselves in the light of this survey is, How can we prepare students for advanced study if they are not interested in the basic tenets of the enterprise? One approach we might consider is giving students more of what they believe they need and want at this level. That is, continue as intensively as possible the development of language proficiency and self-confidence in speaking the language. Now, I am not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Oral communication strategies should be complemented with appropriate reading and writing activities, and the study of culture, but we ought to eliminate the anxiety associated with the notion that second-year study of foreign languages is the last-ditch opportunity to prepare students for advanced-level study.
Clearly this suggestion begs the question, But how will students survive in major courses? At my own institution, we have begun by giving up on the idea that intermediate-level courses in Spanish can, or for that matter should, be expected to deliver students who are ready to tackle the required courses for the major. Acknowledging that the acquisition of a second language is a continuous process, extended over time and best realized through coherent sequential ordering, we have placed the infamous gap at the end of second-year study; subsequently we have made our first major core course, rather than the intermediate courses, the bridge designed to ease the passage from language study to content-based courses.
But this approach is not necessarily new. That so many programs have traditionally required an advanced grammar and composition course after the second year and as the first step in the major curriculum is telling. This course has, in fact, long served as the articulatory juncture between language study and the study of the real stuff of the major.
This was certainly the sort bridge course offered by my department several years ago. The rigorous fifth-semester grammar and composition course was in effect the gateway to the major, and while many were called, few were chosen, and some chose not to: the not-chosen failed the course and moved on to another departments; others became so frustrated or weary of grammar that they too chose a new major. As director of the native speaker track in our department, I was particularly concerned about those students who couldn't get past the gate, since many of them had come through my program. (These students had strong heritage-language oral skills at the informal level and virtually no literacy skills. Their formal language learning experience thus had been geared toward the development of literacy and of bidialectalism. Those of us who have taught in these programs know that the acquisition of a second dialect, like the acquisition of a second language, is complex and requires more than two to four semesters of study.)
I was, at the time, a junior faculty member and one of only two professors in our department who taught language courses in addition to major and graduate courses. We began to campaign to convince our colleagues that it was time to revamp our major curriculum, particularly in view of the transformations that were taking place SLA theory and pedagogical practices. It was obvious to all that we were in dire straits; our meager enrollments in the third and fourth year were forcing us to cancel scheduled classes, and our dean was casting the most ominous of glances in our direction, especially at our budget. We began to work on our chair, who, though a bit out of touch with recent developments in foreign language education, was interested in bringing our department up to date. Part of our strategy was to invite her to presentation by Steve Krashen at the local state bilingual conference. This event truly proved providential. She was elated when we left the conference site, and on our return trip to campus we not only designed a new bridge course but also dreamed up something called a second major. Within a couple of years, our upper-division program began to thrive.
The rationale for our new fifth-semester course was based on the painful but honest recognition that, to achieve proficiency, our students needed directed study of language beyond the fourth semester. But equally important, they also needed to feel intellectually challenged and excited about course content just as they might in their history or political science courses. Our new bridge course would therefore have as its major objective the continued development of communication skills in the target language, both oral and written, through the comprehensive study of culture. Its generic title was Topics in Hispanic Culture. The actual content of the course was to be determined by individual instructors, most of whom would be tenure-track faculty members. To ensure some uniformity across the board array of bridge offerings, we stipulated that the course must include some lecturing; lots of discussion; the reading of authentic materials but not exclusively literary texts; individual and group oral presentations; a variety of writing tasks, including formal essays; at least two exams to test knowledge of content; and a final project that include a written component. Optional activities such as keeping journals and creating multimedia projects for display at a cultural fair were recommended but not required. We capped enrollments at twenty so that these activities could take place in the classroom.
The following is a partial list of topics offered during that last four years: The Other in Spanish Culture; Culture and Oral History in New Mexico; De lo Castizo a lo Mestizo en Nuevo México; Arts and Politics in Latin America; Latin American Caribbean Culture; Spanish in the United States; La Cultura Chicana; Latin American Women: Race and Class; Conquest and Civilization; Witchcraft and Magic in Medieval Spain; Latin American Culture through Film; Spanish Culture through Film; and Medieval Show and Tell.
You are probably wondering how we define culture. As our department is tolerant of ideological differences, we leave that decision to the instructors. I can say that our approaches are as varied as our topics. Feminist, ethnographic, discursive, humanistic, historical, and subaltern approaches are all common. This variety provides students the opportunity to relate what they are studying in their Spanish core courses to the content and analytical frameworks explored in other disciplines. The most popular of these offerings has been the ethnographic course on Mexican culture, which includes a weeklong trip to Chihuahua and Tarahumara country during spring break.
The bridge course was linked up with two additional curriculum innovations. The first was the institutionalization of a second major. (At the moment it consists of twenty-four semester hours or any eight courses beyond the fourth semester of language study. The first major requires thirty semester hours, including a core program of seven specific courses in phonology, syntax, culture, and literature and a fourth semester of another foreign language.) We agreed that students choosing the second major would be allowed to repeat the cultural-topics course as many times as they desired provided they took a different topic each time. The rationale here was that these students were primarily interested in developing their language skills and in expanding their knowledge of the target culture in order to shore up a first major. A foreign language and culture component would enhance their career options and enrich their lives through a greater appreciation for self and other. Since they were not likely to pursue graduate study in Spanish, we reasoned, there was no need to require them to follow the more traditional major sequence.
First majors could repeat the topic course three times, each time expanding their comprehensive knowledge of another facet of Hispanic culture. This option added a horizontal dimension to our traditionally vertical curriculum. Because the topics course was a prerequisite for all courses beyond that level, it was still a gateway course for the regular major; however, students did not need to move up the ladder until they felt secure about their language skills.
Although repetition looked like a good plan on paper, in practice it became problematical. Since there are always students entering the pipeline from fourth-semester study, the approach produced an unwieldy heterogeneity of skill levels. We began to question the wisdom of having regular majors spend a third semester of study in classes with students who were just entering the bridge course. We dealt with this problem first by limiting to two the number of bridge courses accepted for the regular major; last year, we reduced that number to one. And just in case students' writing skills still aren't up to par, we have revived the old composition course. We now call it Developing Writing Skills in Spanish and require it of all regular majors, although they may take the bridge course first. I would rather have allowed students to take the bridge course two times instead of requiring them to take the more circumscribed composition course. On this issue, I agree with Wilga Rivers, who states that “so long as the students are hearing, seeing, and using the language in ways that interest and involve them, they will progress in language control” (28). A number of colleagues, however, continue to believe that a composition course a good major makes; lamentably, the same professors are not the least bit eager to teach this course!
I expect that we will eventually also restrict the number of bridge courses accepted for the second major, though currently most second majors take at least half of their courses beyond the bridge, including core courses for the first major or upper-division electives in regional studies, folklore, literature, and film. This limitation will mean offering fewer bridge courses, thereby freeing faculty members to teach more of the kinds of courses that will make both majors more rigorous and will offer a broader variety of educational experiences during the senior year. Three such offerings that we are currently considering are a required senior seminar for first majors, a directed-readings option related to the primary area of emphasis of our second majors, and, for both, internships that would take them into the broader community and allow them to use their language skills in the real world. We have not yet formally implemented foreign languages across the curriculum at our university, but other departments there teach a handful of courses in Spanish. We are certainly in a position to move in that direction.
The accompanying table shows a dramatic increase in our major enrollments since the creation of the bridge course. (Even as our enrollments have increased, our FTEs have decreased, forcing us to lift our caps to twenty-five; yet each semester we have to turn away dozens of students because we cannot offer enough 300- and 400-level sections to meet the demand.)
Can we draw a correlation between these increases and the changes in our curriculum, specifically the introduction of the bridge course? Certainly not a direct one. Enrollments in Spanish have soared in the last several years, and our increase may just be part of a national trend. However, we cannot help thinking that the bridge course has had something to do not only with attracting students to our program but also with keeping them. These courses truly excite students and make them come back for more. I suspect that the cap of twenty-five students is also a determining factor. A small class can be a refuge from alienation at a large state university, particularly for freshmen and sophomores, who often must take enormous lecture classes to fulfill their distribution requirements. And we do get a fair number of freshmen who are native speakers, as well as nonnative speakers who have already studied six to seven years of Spanish.
Spanish is a heritage language for at least fifty percent of our majors and second majors. Earlier I mentioned that these were the students who were not getting past the gateway grammar and composition course. A “major” attraction for this group of students has been the offerings of bridge titles such as New Mexican Hispanic Culture, La Cultura Chicana, Mexican Culture, and Spanish in the United States. We have found that the possibility of
| 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First majors | |||||||
| Spanish | 30 | 56 | 57 | 52 | 59 | 60 | 66 |
| Portuguese | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| Second majors | |||||||
| Spanish | N/A | 23 | 23 | 25 | 39 | 44 | 44 |
| Portuguese | N/A | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Total | 31 | 81 | 82 | 79 | 103 | 108 | 115 |
adding to self-knowledge goes a long way toward piquing their interest in Peninsular and Latin American cultures as well.
Another positive effect of our bridge course has been that we have been able to attract nontraditional students who might not sign up for a course called La Generación del '98 but who will certainly take a class entitled Latin American Culture through Film or New Mexican Culture provided they are offered after work hours. Next semester we are offering a concurrent-enrollment bridge course, Mexican Culture, for advanced students at local high school. Needless to say, our dean is very much pleased that we have been able to contribute to the university's commitment to “meeting the needs of the community.” And I am pleased that his pleasure means additional resources for the department.
I would like to acknowledge that we cannot take the dramatic increases in our enrollments as indicators of success or quality in and of themselves. The real test lies in the answers to the following questions: To what extent has the bridge course improved the educational experience of our students? To what extent has it contributed to their preparation for living in an increasingly multicultural society? We are being compelled to answer these questions as we begin to map out our first plan for outcomes assessment. In the meantime, our bridge course, while not a cure-all for the disjuncture malaise, has proved to be a step in the direction emphasized by Claire Kramsch, who recommends that as we plan our foreign language curriculum, we ask ourselves, “What do I believe is in the best interest of my students in my school, community, or state, knowing what I know about how the students got to be the way they are?” (10).
The author is Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 22–24 June 1995, in Eugene, Oregon.
Harlow, Linda L., and Judith A. Muyskens. “Priorities for Intermediate-Level Language Instruction.” Modern Language Journal 78.2 (1994): 141–54.
Kramsch, Claire. “Embracing Conflict versus Achieving Consensus in Foreign Language Education.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 7–12. [Show Article]
Rivers, Wilga. “Developing International Competence for a Centripetal, Centrifugal World.” ADFL Bulletin 26.1 (1994): 25–33. [Show Article]
Welles, Elizabeth. “From the Editor.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 1–3. [Show Article]
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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