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THE situation in Russian and other difficult and less commonly taught languages (LCTLs)—limited time, limited choices in textbooks and other materials, limited or nonexistent computer and video resources, limited resources in general—has provided more than its share of frustrations, but it has also, in the peculiar way that adversity focuses energy, shone the light more strongly on issues of planning and prioritizing, of using limited resources effectively. Until recently Russian instructors could not rely on a textbook to provide a complete package of language instruction, at least at the elementary level, and options are still limited. As a result generations of Russian and other LCTL instructors have become accustomed to shaping their courses as instructors of the more commonly taught languages have not had to do, producing dozens if not hundreds of pages of supplementary materials. I focus here not on the success of these self-shaped courses but on the opportunity this situation has provided—to analyze some of the planning components that go into a language course and the choices that they present.
Commonly taught language courses in many departments are subjected less to intensive planning than to a kind of scheduling. Unlike literature courses, which are typically created by each individual instructor and which can vary considerably from year to year depending on the instructor's interests, language courses seem to be perceived as relatively stable entities that can be passed from one instructor to another, varying not so much in what is taught as in how . At least at the elementary level the textbook is at the core of the language course, and for many instructors planning goes no further than setting a goal of finishing the textbook. On several occasions I have supervised nonfaculty instructors (mostly teaching assistants) in a variety of languages, and in planning meetings I have frequently asked them to characterize the content of their courses and what they expect their students to accomplish. Surprisingly often, these instructors are at a loss. They pause, they acknowledge that the question is difficult, and then frequently they confess that “the textbook is really quite good” or “we cover the textbook.” Instructors of advanced courses without textbooks are often at an even greater loss. They talk about reading and discussing and learning vocabulary, but they may not be able to articulate what it is they expect the students to learn. Both groups of instructors make the basic error of mistaking the tools for the goals. Language materials are often judged by how much they will do, by their ability to relieve the instructor of as much work as possible—often because language teaching is not the highest priority of instructors engaged in it. We may be sympathetic—teaching language successfully without good materials is an enormous amount of work. Still, in our eagerness to find the perfect materials, we have sometimes lost sight of creating courses that are appropriate to our students, our institutions, and our educational goals.
I summarize here the considerations behind one type of planning process. It is driven by one factor, shared by all languages but felt acutely by the difficult languages: the acute shortage of time. We have far less time than we need, and that shortage forces us to make choices—to look at what we would like to accomplish and then to make realistic choices about what we can manage, given the time and resources available. The time pressure challenges instructors to be efficient, to economize, and to avoid wasting precious time. So before we can begin to plan, we must ask two questions: How much time do we have? and How much time do we need?
Whatever we decide to do, we have to fit it into the time available. This seems obvious, but few instructors seem to have given this necessity much thought. In a college course we have a certain number of hours in class, usually three to five classes a week for a semester or a quarter, plus study time outside of class. How much time students spend outside of class seems to be rather vaguely determined. Instructors of different courses at different institutions I have talked to estimate homework for their courses at anywhere from half an hour to three or four hours a night. It might seem practical to determine each course's share by taking total study time and dividing it by the number of courses—for example, a forty-hour week divided by five courses would mean eight hours per course, but faculty members differ on how much time per week students devote to their studies: forty to sixty or even eighty hours a week. The point is not that we need a specific answer to this question but that the question should be asked. If you can't fit what you want to do into a reasonable period of time, you will only end up with frustrated students and a frustrated instructor. An estimate of the total time available will be essential information for the process of prioritizing.
Two sets of calculations dramatize the problem. The most extreme is offered by James Asher, who has calculated that by age six (at 8 hours a day) children have listened to their native language for 17,520 hours. If they have talked for only 1 hour a day, they have talked for 2,190 hours. By comparison he calculates listening in the classroom at 320 hours and speaking for 10 minutes per class at 27 hours. Asher's figures are generous; most university courses have only 100 to 140 hours of class in a year, not 320, and in a traditional class each student speaks for considerably less than 10 minutes. But still, if we use his figures, he says:
if we expect the student in the classroom to have the fluency of a six-year-old child, the student should listen to the foreign language for 55 years of college instruction and the student should have the opportunity to vocalize in the foreign language for 81 years of instruction. (qtd. in Met 471) 1
At my institution, given its class hours, students would have to listen for 125 years and vocalize for 95 years!
Of course, our students don't learn as children; we have the advantage of teaching adults. But calculations like these point to how little we can leave to chance. We don't have time to just “let it happen.” We have to plan carefully for the few hours we have.
Even when time is carefully planned, we still don't have enough. If we compare the Foreign Service Institute's expectations for oral proficiency relative to instructional time with the instructional time available in college programs, we have a less dramatic but still telling illustration of the problem. The FSI estimate for an average learner of Russian to reach the oral proficiency level of 2+ (Advanced, not yet Superior) is 1,320 hours (Liskin-Gasparro). Even if we could make our combined class and homework time as efficient as the specialized and intensive FSI classes, if we could ensure that students spend 10 hours a week of every week of every semester on Russian, and if the students didn't forget anything over the summers, it would still take us at least five years of college instruction to enable them to reach the level of 2+. And that would cover only oral proficiency—we have also to consider listening, reading, and possibly writing.
Of course, except for graduate students, most of our students will not study Russian for five years, and many study for only one, two, or three years. So the question becomes, If we have so little time and if our students are unlikely to reach the Advanced level of proficiency, let alone Superior, what shall we do? What will be meaningful for students in the first, second, and third years of Russian instruction? What will be intellectually stimulating, what will relate to the rest of their studies, and what will they be able to carry with them when their study of Russian ends? How can we accommodate students' typical desire to develop fluency in Russian given the reality of how long developing fluency takes? How can we give them a steady sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of genuine achievement? How can we do the most that we possibly can with the relatively little time that we have available?
This situation might seem hopeless, but I don't believe it is. Just because students cannot become professional historians in two to four courses does not mean that we would deny them the experience of studying history. And how many of the students who take our literature courses will reach a high level of competence in literary criticism? But to answer the question of what we can accomplish, we have to consider the wealth of language knowledge and skill to be learned, from which we will have to make our difficult choices.
Of course, language is no longer considered a matter of mere grammar and vocabulary. For convenience I characterize the content of language learning in terms of two four-part categories. On the one hand, we are trying to develop four skills, the familiar speaking, listening, reading, writing. On the other, we need to teach to students at least four kinds of knowledge, for which I borrow three of the familiar competences of Michael Canale and Merrill Swain (as modified by Canale): grammatical competence, or knowledge of basic grammatical and lexical structures and how they function to convey meaning; sociolinguistic competence, or the ability to use language in a manner appropriate to a situation; and discourse competence, or knowledge of the construction of oral and written discourse. In place of Canale and Swain's last competence, strategic, I propose cultural literacy—the factual knowledge of history and culture that is essential to language comprehension (Hirsch). 2 Of course, the lines between these competences are not neat, and there is much overlap, but keeping them in mind help us keep track of the kinds of knowledge we need to teach explicitly, in addition to the development of skills, and prevents us from forgetting that skill without knowledge is not language learning. To return to the question of educational goals, I also want to consider what students can be expected to retain. I hope that the knowledge they gain in a language class will remain with them long after their skills have become rusty.
If we have so little time and so much to do, where do we start? Not at the beginning, but at the end. One of the most useful questions we can ask is what we want students to have to show at the conclusion of their program of study. We need to ask this question not about individual courses but about an entire program, and we must ask it at typical exit points from that program. Language acquisition is cumulative, and knowing the shape of the superstructure will tell us what kind of foundation needs to be built, so that students can make consistent progress toward realistic and coherent goals. Too often language courses are planned independently of one another, as when elementary and intermediate courses focus strongly on oral skills and are followed by advanced courses in which students are suddenly expected to be able to read and discuss literature. The advanced-level instructor blames the elementary and intermediate courses for not teaching the students what they need to know, and the elementary and intermediate instructors fault the advanced-level courses for unrealistic expectations. The students, caught in the middle and confronted with what they cannot do, feel frustrated and discouraged (see Ke).
Frustration can be greatly reduced and planning facilitated by Backward Planning, a mnemonic for two points: (1) the value of achieving consensus in a program on realistic goals for different courses and levels of language instruction and (2) the usefulness of the process of tracking backward the steps leading to those goals as a source of insight into both the practicality of the goals and the possible shape of a language sequence. Suppose, for example, that students in the fifth semester will be expected to read and discuss literature—what will that take? How much reading experience will they need before the fifth semester? What kinds of vocabulary will they need to have mastered? What terminology will they require? What will they need to know about the construction of discourse? Will they be expected to debate questions among themselves? Will they need to be able to agree and disagree, to advance an opinion and support it, to summarize and paraphrase, and so on? What basic knowledge of approaches to literature, if any, is expected? Will these skills be expected at the beginning of the course, or will they constitute part of the content of the course? How much writing experience will be expected, and what kind?
The answers to these questions will in turn dictate necessary content for the fourth, third, and even the first semester of instruction, and that is just the point. If there is insufficient space in those courses for all the necessary preparation, something has to give. Either the content and expectations of the earlier semesters need to be modified, or the fifth semester's goals need to be redefined. Although the process of planning and discussion may at times be a bumpy road, when members of a department begin to identify their priorities and acknowledge the limitations they face, they can begin to confront these difficult choices (Haggstrom).
Backward Planning needs to be applied not only to the major but to each potential exit point for students. We should be concerned for students who will take only two years of language, or only one year—to make sure that even that limited exposure will be a meaningful educational experience. The old view, that early instruction should be devoted to basics with the “good stuff” promised for later is not likely to hold impatient or wavering students. We need to ensure that elementary language is as rich and rewarding an experience as the more advanced levels and that students are exposed to some of the intriguing questions of language and culture that demonstrate the importance of language study. In first-year Russian, for example, we raise questions about the relation between grammatical gender and social attitudes (for example, after the Russian Revolution there was a linguistic response to the effort to redefine women's place in society), between linguistic verbal aspect and cultural perceptions of event structures and time frames, between verbs expressing motion and ethnic Russian attitudes toward movement across boundaries. It turns out to be no accident that exile, or a one-way trip to a distant place, has remained a principal form of punishment over centuries of Russian history (Moyle). We try to demonstrate to students the nature of a lexicon by illustrating prototypes and mental schemata with concrete objects, and then we extend the analogy to more abstract vocabulary with illustrations contrasting American and Russian historical experience. We introduce original literature through poetry, short story, autobiography, fairy tale, and music as we introduce the central role of literature and the arts to Russian culture. Of course, other choices are possible, but the point is that we choose what to teach. There is undoubtedly a logic to certain sequences of presentation, but there are probably infinite possibilities for creative combinations and options. The content and structure of language courses are no more rigidly fixed than those of other kinds of courses. We may need to apply Backward Planning to our ideas to see how much we can expect to accomplish at each step, and we need to subject our ideas as well to some practical experience to test student interest and reception, but we have many choices in creating courses that will be coherent and meaningful experiences for students at every level.
Implicit in the concept of distribution of content is the need to prioritize. If the basics-only approach may bore students, too much of the “good stuff” without the necessary basics not only will not seem good but will not build the proper foundation. There needs to be balance and a place for all things—except that there is not time for all things, and that is why it is essential to prioritize.
For example, take the typical elementary-level topic of dining. In many foreign language textbooks the unit on dining is constructed around going to a restaurant. Students learn the names of common dishes and learn how to order, get the check, pay, and so on. To practice the topic they may role-play restaurant scenes, taking the parts of waiter or waitress and diners. This approach to the topic is fairly standard fare, but should it be our first priority for the food topic? For many cultures, including Russian, probably not. First, one can manage to order a meal in a restaurant with relatively little language facility, and even if the performance is faultless, it is unlikely that there will be any acknowledgment, let alone the reward of a compliment, “Ah, you speak Russian so well!” Second, restaurants are public places, and a mistake is not likely to cause personal offense. Third, the kind of role-play that accompanies topics like this one frequently requires students to play roles they are not likely to play in real life—here as waiters and waitresses. Students may simply not know what to say in certain situations, or in an effort to be creative they may play the roles inappropriately. Knowing what a waiter will say is valuable for language comprehension, but how much effort should be expended on speaking such roles?
Reflection on Russian culture suggests that the most important dining topic may be guest behavior in a Russian home—knowing what is expected; how to request and, very important, how to decline food; how to toast and respond to toasts; how to pay compliments; and how generally to be courteous guest. Food and conversation go together naturally in Russia, and long hours may be spent around the kitchen table. For Russian guest behavior seems a far more logical first priority than restaurant language, especially since improper guest behavior can indeed result in personal offense.
Another example is learning to ask and give locational directions, an intermediate-level skill in the proficiency guidelines. Asking and comprehending directions is certainly important, but giving directions? How much classroom time should we expend on this task, which in Russian is linguistically complex, requiring imperatives and shifts to the future tense? By the time students know a foreign location well enough to give directions, they will likely have picked up the necessary patterns without the need for specific classroom institution.
A glance at the proficiency guidelines raises many questions about priorities. For example, content at the Intermediate level centers on travel situations—transportation, lodging, shopping, health, and so on. Given the limitations on our time, should these topics be treated in the sequence implied by their Intermediate-proficiency status, with practical topics to be covered before more abstract (Advanced) topics?
For our Russian students to have rewarding in-country experiences, much more will be required than the ability to manage travel tasks. They will need the vocabulary and expressive means to engage in meaningful conversations with Russian acquaintances—on politics, current events, national attitudes, and broad cultural issues. Moreover, these topics are likely to be more important to students' deriving personal satisfaction from communicating in Russian than many of the practical topics now commonly covered.
In our program we have decided to prioritize these topics slightly differently from the implied priority of the proficiency guidelines and related curricular planning proposals (e.g., Omaggio Hadley). Beginning in the second year of college study, which typically corresponds approximately to the Intermediate-Low level of proficiency, our primary goals are higher-level topics such as education, work, history, politics, cultural and moral issues, and objectives that include narration in all tenses, hypothesizing, expressing and supporting opinions, and speaking in paragraphs. Accuracy is not neglected, as it is fundamental to continuing progress (Ke). We incorporate practical situational topics as parallel objectives when appropriate, but overall they receive less time and effort. The results of this decision have been very encouraging. To monitor progress we have administered oral proficiency tests to compare course sequence with student progress on the proficiency scale, and recently we tested two sections of students during their fourth semester of Russian study. Of twenty-one students, fifteen were rated at Intermediate-Mid, two at Intermediate-High, and four at Intermediate-Low. These results are respectable, and they do not suggest that students have made less progress because of our decision. On the contrary, we believe they have gained from it. Many of these students demonstrated progress (though inconsistent) into the Intermediate-High and Advanced levels, even in only four semesters.
Moreover, had we focused specifically on practical situational (Intermediate-level) topics, I suspect that our results would not necessarily have been better, yet at the cost of a much narrower exposure to Russian life and culture. If students leave Russian study at the end of the third or fourth semester, they will still have encountered questions and topics of intellectual interest that will remain part of their educational experience independent of their level of language performance.
Prioritizing as I have described it results in economies of time, in that the time spent on topics becomes proportionate to the instructor's evaluation of the importance of the topics and language knowledge required. Another form of economizing can be called the kill-two-birds-with-one-stone principle, which means that whenever it is reasonable, foreign language tasks should have more than one purpose.
Take, for example, pronunciation, which too often is practiced with mindless lists of words or phrases illustrating particular sounds. Why not replace the lists with something of cultural value, such as children's rhymes, which often repeat sounds or sound combination, or poetry or songs, all of which are meant to be recited (or sung) aloud?
And let's choose not just any rhymes or poems or songs but the ones that are known best by native speakers, that form part of the cultural literacy of those speakers. Students can still be working on pronunciation while they recite material that native speakers also recite, thus gaining knowledge of greater value than pronunciation practice alone would provide.
Similarly, grammar practice need almost never be simply grammar practice. We might combine grammar with discourse competence by reshaping exercises into agreement and disagreement, interruption, or paraphrase. We might increase the cultural-literacy content of our exercises by reference to major figures or historically important (to the target culture) dates and events. We might embed vocabulary review in culturally significant narratives or in varying interpretations of original texts. Of course, the selection of factual information depends on the language and culture, but it is important that students understand that there is no such thing as “just language.” Language as used by educated speakers is inseparable from their cultural and historical experience, so that to understand language is to understand the significance of events and texts and the associations with them that speakers retain today. Content-rich exercises can at least point to the kinds of information students will need to acquire to be literate readers and speakers.
When we combine grammar with sociolinguistic or discourse-competence goals, such as the ability to express agreement and disagreement, to interrupt, to question, and to paraphrase, we can do even better than killing two birds with one stone. By restructuring structural and lexical exercises into patterns typical of naturally occurring dialogue, we give students experience with peer exchanges and reduce the proportion of teacher-led exchanges. As Claire Kramsch has demonstrated, teacher-led dialogue includes many features of authority, including control of turn-taking, topic management, and focus on form and correction, that are not characteristic of naturally occurring conversation (“Interactive Discourse”). Pair work contextualizes linguistic practice in a peer dynamic that mimics natural discourse rather than in the uneven power dynamic of the traditional teacher-led classroom.
Pair work should include even the most routine types of exercises (Chaput, “Conversation-Based Dills”). Traditional language classes spend a great deal of time on exercises in which the teacher or textbook provides a cue, which students transform or answer in a single sentence response. Since most of these exercises follow patterns, they can usually be practiced in student pairs (or threes) in which participants take turns cuing and responding. If all pairs work together simultaneously, individual speaking time is dramatically increased. Teacher-led practice has its purpose, but it is greatly overused in most language classrooms. By simply converting routine exercises to pair work, we could give every student significantly more speaking time.
LCTL teaching encourages one more kind of choice. Our student populations, our students' various needs and interests, and our instructional resources suggest opportunities for language instruction beyond the traditional language-literature pattern. In East Asian departments it is not uncommon to find historians housed along with specialists in literature, linguistics, and language. Although we will not normally find historians in Slavic departments, there has always been a close relation between Slavic literatures and history and politics. In our program this tradition has given us a great advantage in eliminating barriers to diversifying the content of our courses, so that we have developed special-topic courses on film, the media, current political events, history, nationality issues, national attitudes, and business (Chaput, “Revitalizing”).
These courses have attracted new populations of students who might never have taken a literature course but who want to work with the language of these content areas and inevitably with the content as well. To teach these courses, we have language specialists who come not only from literature or linguistics but also from areas including history, demography, and theater and who are excited by and often passionately involved in the content they teach. These courses have added new depth to intermediate- and advanced-level study as well as breadth in vocabulary and discourse structures.
By taking a few steps back from the familiar patterns established by textbooks and tradition, we can see opportunities for economy and diversity that we might otherwise have missed. The process of planning itself, of setting priorities and making choices, presumes that there is more than one choice to be made—that no one program design (or course design) will satisfy the many populations of instructors and students (Kramsch, “Embracing”). And that is as it should be. Language courses are open to the subjective shaping and definition characteristic of any college course. There is no one way to teach literature, history, economics, or any other subject matter at the college level. Colleges thrive on the diversity of their faculties, on controversy, on multiple approaches. These elements are the foundation for creativity and innovation.
Language teaching should be no different, because it imparts not only skill but also knowledge. How that knowledge is defined and conveyed is an essential part of language teaching's definition. The difficult languages provide telling evidence of the limits on what we can accomplish—and of how much more we can manage through creative planning. But there is no getting around the fact that there will always be more to do than we have time for, and the priorities we set, the choices we make, will unquestionably always be difficult choices.
The author is Professor of the Practice of Slavic Languages and Director of the Language Program at Harvard University. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 15–17 June 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina.
1 Asher's quotation is from Learning Another Language through Actions: The Complete Teacher's Guide (Los Gatos: Sky Oak, 1997) 1.
2 The strategic competence is essentially a performance skill, the knowledge portion of which would assign to discourse competence.
Canale, Michael. “From Communicative Competence to Communicative Language Pedagogy.” Language and Communication. Ed. Jack C. Richards and Richard W. Schmidt. London: Longman, 1983. 2–27.
Chaput, Patricia R. “Conversation-Based Drills for Beginning Russian.” Teaching, Learning, Acquiring Russian. Ed. Sophia Lubensky and Donald K. Jarvis. Columbus: Slavica, 1983. 95–112.
———. “Revitalizing the Traditional Program.” Language and Content: Discipline- and Content-Based Approaches to Language Study. Ed. Merle Krueger and Frank Ryan. Lexington: Health, 1993. 148–57.
Haggstrom, Margaret Austin. “ A Chacun Sa Pédagogie: Reconciling Instructors' Styles and Approaches to Foreign Language Teaching.” ADFL Bulletin 25.1 (1993): 36–40.
Hirsch, E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton, 1987.
Ke, Chuanren. “Aspects of Accuracy in a Proficiency-Oriented Program.” ADFL Bulletin 26.2 (1995): 28–35. [Show Article]
Kramsch, Claire. “Embracing Conflict versus Achieving Consensus in Foreign Language Education.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 6–12. [Show Article]
———. “Interactive Discourse in Small and Large Groups.” Interactive Language Teaching. Ed. Wilga Rivers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 17–30.
Liskin-Gasparro, Judith E. ETS Oral Proficiency Testing Manual. Princeton: Educ. Testing Service, 1982.
Met, Myriam. “Decisions! Decisions! Decisions! Foreign Language in the Elementary School.” Foreign Language Annals 18 (1985): 469–73.
Moyle, Natalie. “Spacey Soviets and the Russian Attitude toward Territorial Passage.” Folk Groups and Folklore Genres. Ed. Elliott Oring. Utah State UP, 1989. 87–97.
Omaggio Hadley, Alice. Teaching Language in Context. 2nd ed. Boston: Heinle, 1993.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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