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IN THE following discussion I suggest some of the ways American institutions of higher education are changing and how those changes affect the way we, as a profession, need to think about the third and fourth year of language instruction in our colleges and universities. I am framing my observations in the context of increased demands on institutions of higher learning for accountability in two significant realms: the mastery of our fields and the application of language skills in the workplace after graduation as extensions of cultural and literacy learning from the FL curriculum.
As humanists, some academics deplore these demands as antithetical to our mission. It is often rightly observed that critical thinking skills and cultural awareness are the sine qua non of training in language and literature, the unique capabilities our discipline can offer students as preparation for life. Such learning, it is argued, occurs only when pedagogical focus is on analyzing the literatures read as the high culture of the language taught. To teach popular texts, to introduce sociological, historical, and anthropological readings, to present architecture, music, and the fine arts in conjunction with that literature, many feel, may diffuse students' focus and vitiate existing programs.
This paper suggests ways to accommodate these objections by recognizing the pragmatic concerns of the 1990s as keys to the ways in which these sign systems redefine the identity of the humanist in the United States. Even when the highest knowledge standards are upheld, no humanist can deny that a global economy coupled with rapid technological changes has altered very basic assumptions about what educated people can and should do with their learning. Consider, for example, the mission of education two decades ago: students were presented with clearly identifiable career or vocational opportunities, choices that rendered narrowly defined content for our own discipline—foreign language instruction—a responsible objective. Our mission at that time was to prepare teachers for high schools and colleges or to prepare foreign language majors for graduate work in language as well as other professional fields.
That mission, appropriate in the past, has shifted with changes in American education itself. We are no longer training only professionals and teachers. Our responses to that shift have been signaled to this point by the emergence of content-based instruction, the advent of business or engineering programs in foreign language departments. After a sharp decline in the 1980s, the number of students learning languages in the high schools, with the exception of Spanish, has not increased in the 1990s. Consequently, despite recently stabilizing enrollments, available new positions for teacher candidates in German and French have declined. Increasingly, students recognize that a foreign language major must involve more than preparation for teaching.
Yet even for Spanish, the “what to prepare for” issue looms large. A Texas situation exemplifies the growing dilemma of new and different accountabilities: the standards for Spanish introduced in the Texas Oral Proficiency Test (TOPT) have revealed that traditional preparation in the third and fourth years does not necessarily prepare non-Hispanic college Spanish majors adequately. About half of all non-Hispanic students who wish to qualify by achieving the advanced ranking fail to do so. 1 In short, the pedagogies of past decades may not suit the divergent discursive needs of the present. The market for FL instruction in general has become marginal for most languages, sustained principally by general education requirements. For Spanish, the language where teachers are still sought, upper-division college programs may be failing to prepare students for today's desiderata.
Social and economic changes also further call our traditional mission into question. Today the notion of a lifetime career seems more chimerical than real. The exorbitant expense of a college education frequently leaves a graduating senior burdened with debt and interested in immediate job opportunities. Legislators' and parents' interest in “getting their money's worth” translates into pressures for public accountability and for “practical majors” that are decried in the academy as eroding our cultural norms. Such pressures have been acknowledged by our professional organizations in conferences and revised standards for the gamut of fields in higher education. Notable among these, the American Association of Higher Education has held a series of national conferences to explore with administrators and teachers productive institutional responses to public demands for accountability: portfolios to assess teaching and student performance, standards to guide curriculum revision, mission assessments based on student and community demographics.
For foreign language departments, this new institutional climate is gradually resulting in a changed consciousness about student needs and about curricular practices that will help us meet those needs and remain accountable to our fields and to our students. Perhaps the most significant document to emerge in response to these changes has been Standards for Foreign Language Learning , the list of professional standards adopted by most state agencies, the American Associations for Teachers of Spanish, French, and German, and ACTFL—the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. At the ACTFL conference in Nashville in November 1997, the presenters acknowledged that while the standards were originally designed for grades 1 through 12, they address both the needs and the pedagogical solutions to those needs manifest in college FL departments in the United States. The chart below illustrates how the standards can serve as guides for departments interested in curricular development at the postsecondary level.
The picture presented in this application of our professional standards points to a new way of conceiving our enterprise that does not compromise our disciplines while nevertheless rendering ourselves accountable in new ways. Spiraling both content and language in a systematic and meaningful program necessitates a holistic curriculum in which the right hand knows what the left is doing and where all the activities of the typical department are conceived of as a coherent package. 3 To develop a coherent and accountable program, FL faculties must work together, exchanging and sharing ideas about subject matter, pedagogical strategies, and assessment.
Such a process, commonsensical and obvious as it seems on paper, may pose our biggest challenge to rethinking the curriculum. The notion of any FL department pooling its resources to build a coherent language program challenges deeply held beliefs and feelings about such sensitive issues as academic freedom, classroom autonomy, individual scholarship, and the nature of humanist learning. Consequently, any quest for responsible revision of a foreign language program commences with a forth-right discussion of traditional ideas about academic individuality and humanist learning, especially in the light of any program's future.
As someone who has consulted with faculty members in my institution and others across the country, I am familiar with the tenor of objections raised when professors consider working together to construct a program responsive to the profession's national standards for itself and its students. For many professors of literature, this project of joining learning and skills signals the death of humanism, a pandering to professional and vocational pressures and a consequent decline of learning, values, and critical thinking. These dire predictions reflect a sign system that has dominated professional thinking in the twentieth century, a set of values that have defined the humanist. As such, they must be addressed before any further departmental undertaking is possible.
Curricular needs of students in an upper-division college language program
Pedagogical solutions needed to implement these objectives in a curriculum
The chief argument can be summed up as follows: Literature must be taught because students lack knowledge about and appreciation for the Western tradition of aesthetic and social values. The diction supporting this position employs some of the weightiest rhetorical weapons in the arsenal of the academy.
Viewed as a signifying system, however, that diction is less a call for quality than it is an index of the slippage in signifiers of higher education in America. Three decades ago the signifier “American students” still signified a learning audience for whom terms such as World War II, the Golden Age of Greece, Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and the Romantic era ushered up specific centuries and geographical locales, names of notable scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers. Today these same terms, when mentioned to college juniors and seniors in many institutions, may elicit only blank faces or statements that reveal major misapprehensions: World War II was fought between Cubans and Spain in the 1500s; Peter the Great was an American president before the Civil War of 1812. The signs of the times have lost their referentiality.
Three decades ago, the signifier “literature” signified “natural” and “essential” Western ideas disseminated by college language and literature departments in the United States. Consequently, these “Western landmarks” were defined by presumptions about the knowledge base of the student audience that may now, in retrospect, elicit nostalgia about a fictive student preparation. Literature, both mirror and resignifier of cultural contexts, could be read then as such because its readers presumably possessed sufficient knowledge of the appropriate historical contexts with which to perceive and articulate its cultural significations.
Yet now the sign “American students” has been displaced, and so “teaching of literature” must be commensurably displaced. In other words, with the slippage of what has been called sufficient knowledge to what is now called insufficient knowledge, the signifier “American students” displaces the signifier “teaching of literature” as well. It renders these older definitions of our tasks a contradiction in signifieds. The result is a tautology—we cannot teach literature anymore because literature has not been taught.
Now I must add to this contradictory, and in that sense extremely arbitrary, conundrum posed by a past sign system. Several other and competing signifiers have been only marginally evident in the larger semiotic of curricular dilemmas in the United States to this point because they are located on different segments of the larger institutional playing field and frequently have been obstructed by disciplinary difference. Note two battles that are tacitly signaled but not overtly engaged in most FL departments: In the habitus of literary criticism, for example, the experts of textual interpretation do battle with proponents of reader response. In the corner designated for applied linguistics the proponents of formal learning debate with those in learner-centered instruction.
Yet these two groups, the teachers of upper-division and the teachers of lower-division classes, rarely compare their pedagogies to realize the similarity of their professional dilemmas. These individual dilemmas actually represent two poles of the same problem: both are debating about the text as a literate artifact or the text as used by its consumers, be that text literature or other expressive uses of language. Both deplore the change in our students' capabilities and interests. Moreover, both sets of experts are questioning how to teach the products of language use, and they despair because our students now lack knowledge about the traditional status of these objects.
Instead of despair, we need to face the fact that books and rhetoric no longer represent the sole indexes of literacy as they did in the last two centuries. We need to remember that language use still does. To recognize the resignified signs of our times, we must start by resignifying what our students know. By many indexes, it can certainly be argued that today's students are not without knowledge. While SAT averages may drop overall due to the greater number of student participants, a larger proportion of high-scoring students take the test than ever before. Students coming to our universities possess command of factual data; they can use computers, access the Web, recognize the stereotypes and spins of the postmodern condition. In other words, these students have extensive information at their fingertips, but it is knowledge that has not been organized overtly or literately enough to make it as accessible as that organized in books or conventional rhetorics.
Consequently, what such students lack is knowledge as power. They cannot take control of random racial stereotypes, historical events, or cultural anthropology to argue a position or attack a contrary point of view. They lack command over the information they possess. The data they access are overwhelming, inchoate, random, perhaps because the institutions of our culture have not taught students how to organize those data. Yet virtually every student has images of fascism's racial stereotypes or communist ideology. These images, often anchored in media depictions, may well, on balance, exceed their professor's knowledge base about such sources. Students possess information products; they have not learned how to process them or to integrate that information with the great knowledge and databases of the past.
What I am suggesting here is that students know a great deal more than our traditionally product-oriented system acknowledges. What they do not know how to do is to render the information bits they have mastered in the information explosion of the late twentieth century communicable to themselves and to others. Thus any program predicated on training information per se fails to recognize the training today's students need—training in the strategies represented in the FL standards, training in the skills it takes to become knowledgeable, to make sense of exploding, often inchoate cultural input.
Foreign language departments must teach processes, not products. To do so, they must adopt a language curriculum that identifies core topics from history, culture, and literatures—limited number of literary works and a variety of texts that inform that literature; they must teach learning strategies with which to approach reading a text as a cultural artifact and reading as a historical practice; they must identify a range of roles or speaker positions from which students must articulate different intentionalities vis-à-vis text information. Using Standards and its institutional mission as guides, faculty members must spiral these topics, learner strategies, and articulatory roles, repeating them at different levels across the curriculum. Faculty members must implement a coherent pedagogy of tasks and language materials as their students proceed through their FL curriculum. Departmental training must build sequentially to enable students to identify and apply the multiple literacies of literature. We must teach the learner, not the artifact, lest our artifacts molder in museums rather than nourish the life of our students' hearts and souls.
The author is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. This paper is based on her presentation at the 1997 MLA convention in Toronto, Canada .
1 Liskin-Gasparro reports that in 1994–95, 87 percent of the TOPTs were taken in Spanish. The percentage of teacher candidates who passed the TOPT was low, however. True, 83 percent passed, but when that statistic was broken down by self-reported ethnicity, the passing rate for Hispanics was 87 percent, for non-Hispanics only 57 percent. In 1995–96, the most recent complete year for which data are available, the passing rate for Hispanic candidates remained a very high 88 percent, but for non-Hispanics it had dropped to a very disturbing 35 percent.
2 For discussions about the general applicability of Derrida's concept for curricular planning, see Berman. For examples of implementation, see Swaffar.
3 For an extensive discussion of how the guides in Standards apply to curricular development that focuses on reading, see Swaffar and Arens.
Berman, Russell A. “Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula, and Culture.” ADFL Bulletin 26.1 (1994): 13–15. [Show Article]
Liskin-Gasparro, Judy. “Testing in an Age of Assessment: Theoretical and Practical Considerations.” U of Texas Spanish Second Language Acquisition Symposium. Austin. 4 Oct. 1997.
Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century . New York: Natl. Standards in a Foreign Lang. Educ. Project, 1996.
Swaffar, Janet. “German Studies as Studies of Cultural Discourses.” Teaching German in America: Shaping Forces in the Twentieth Century . Ed. David P. Benseler, Craig W. Niekisch, and Cora Lee Nollendorfs. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, forthcoming.
Swaffar, Janet, and Katherine Arens. “Going the Distance.” AATG and Goethe House Distance Learning Project. <http://www.utexas.edu/courses/swaffar/distance/>.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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