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IN AN article on comparisons--one of the new foreign language Standards (4.1)--Alvino E. Fantini writes:
While interculturalists value non-judgmentalness, the fact is that we always attempt to make sense (and therefore make judgments) of every situation we encounter. However we must be aware of this bias, since it is nearly impossible to set it aside. We need to recognize that we always see things through our own cultural lenses. [. . .] Interculturalists highlight this phenomenon by distinguishing between etic and emic perspectives, i.e., interpreting another culture from the outside as a foreigner (the etic) versus how members of other cultures explain themselves (the emic). In most cases, etic and emic perspectives do not match, but insiders are not always necessarily more accurate in portraying their own culture either. [. . .] Awareness on the part of both insiders and outsiders, then, aids mutual understanding and for this reason is essential to positive intercultural interactions. (185-86)
This essay looks at American foreign language education from the standpoint of an "outsider" and compares it with foreign language education and teacher preparation in Russia. Despite all the dramatic changes that have taken place in my native country since the time I left in the early 1990s, the educational system created in the Soviet Union on the basis of the old Russian educational tradition remains essentially unchanged today. For this reason, the names Russia and the Soviet Union are used almost interchangeably in this essay. The education I received in the Soviet Union in foreign language teaching methodology, coupled with my teaching experience and involvement in teacher and TA preparation in both Soviet and American university settings, has provided me with a singular opportunity to see, compare, and analyze the differences in the philosophy, theory, and practice of teacher education, foreign language education, and language teaching research in Russia and the United States. In addition, during the course of nine years' experience as a language instructor in the United States, I have gained a new and better perspective on my own culture; it has deepened my professional self-awareness and enabled me to reflect on my home country's educational traditions. This essay owes its appearance to Bill VanPatten, whose recently published article in the ADFL Bulletin has been extremely helpful in conceptualizing this paper and has enabled me to compare the two systems of foreign language education according to each system's views of teaching, relation to neighboring disciplines, administrative and research status, language versus literature issues, and main research questions.
I come from an educational system where students begin learning a foreign language in the fifth grade and continue studying it through four years in college. In specialized schools, known in Russia as English schools, German schools, and French schools, students begin learning the foreign language in the second grade, and most other subjects are taught in that language as well. Since proficiency in foreign languages is a highly valued and respected ability and learning a foreign language is deemed beneficial for a child's development, some kindergartens have established foreign language classes, sponsored by parents.
Teachers are trained at five-year pedagogical universities--highly specialized schools of higher education where required courses constitute the bulk of the curriculum. The decision to become a foreign language teacher must be made rather early in life; most university entrants are seventeen or eighteen years old. Competition is keen, and most students accepted to foreign language departments were straight-A students in secondary school and successfully passed entrance examinations in a foreign language of choice, history, and Russian language and literature.
Craft or Profession?
Among the biggest surprises awaiting a Russian teacher in the United States are the diversity of views (overt or implicit) regarding the place of teaching among other occupations and the discovery that some question the classification of teaching as a profession and view it as a craft or art.
According to Harry S. Broudy, the difference between craft and profession lies in "the role theory has for each and in the degree to which both the theory and the practice are united in a worker" (424). He notes that a calling becomes professionalized when it demands that its prospective members master a body of theoretical knowledge as a prerequisite of membership and that training for crafts tends to emphasize apprenticeship and the practice of a skill under a master (425). As Rod Ellis points out, however, when teaching is seen as art, the logical outcome is that a teacher's individual skills and personality are emphasized rather than knowledge (83).
Teaching in Russia is regarded as a profession since the public demands that teachers provide a type of service that is professional rather than craftlike. As a result, the amount of formal schooling (five years) that leads to a degree, equivalent to an MA in education, is considerably longer in Russia that in the United States. Before being exposed to classroom training, students in a pedagogical university are expected to master a body of theoretical knowledge. The Russian educational system, in general, tends to emphasize the priority of knowledge and theory over the practical application of knowledge.
A good grounding in linguistics is the main qualification of the foreign language teacher in Russia. Yearlong courses in theoretical grammar, phonetics, lexicology, the history of language, and so on constitute the backbone of the university curriculum. The theoretical element of teacher preparation is also represented by courses in psychology, sociology, philosophy, theory of education, the literature of the target language, and foreign language teaching methodology in conjunction with twenty hours of weekly practice in different aspects of language study (analytical reading, practical grammar, conversation, writing practice, etc.). Courses in linguistics (theoretical grammar, lexicology, the history of the language, etc.) are given in the foreign language. An apprenticeship teaching program lasting three or four months concludes the university course. It includes observation classes and teaching of two foreign languages under the supervision of the master teacher at the assigned secondary schools. Although academically rich, such a system has some shortcomings: too often theory outruns practice, and the delayed exposure to classroom experience may lead some students to discover that much of what they learned was too far removed from the reality of public school teaching or that teaching is not their calling.
Teacher certification (a process unique to the United States), created in the late nineteenth century to ensure a standard of quality among the increasingly diverse educational institutions of the time, does not exist in Russia. Teacher preparation is conducted in state-run universities scattered all over the country and is very uniform. Almost all pedagogical universities have a foreign language department, comparable in size and infrastructure to American university "schools" (of humanities, law, engineering, etc.). Most departments (schools) of foreign languages prepare prospective secondary school teachers to teach two of the four most commonly taught foreign languages in Russia: English, German, Spanish, and French.
There are two different words in the Russian language that distinguish between kindergarten and secondary school teachers: uchitel denotes a secondary school teacher with a university diploma, and vospitatel denotes a preschool teacher and a graduate of a two-year vocational, "pedagogical" school.
Until recently, the concept of a "native speaker" was virtually extraneous in Russia. Most university faculty members are people born in the Soviet Union. Interestingly enough, few of my former university professors at A. I. Gertsen Pedagogical University in Saint Petersburg had ever been abroad. When I was a student in the early 1970s, out-of-country language immersion programs were a rarity or nonexistent: only a very few students with politically impeccable records were sent abroad under the strict supervision of a faculty member, which made any informal contact with their peers in that foreign country almost impossible.
Bridges with Neighboring Disciplines
Another noticeable difference between the two systems is found in the extent to which interdisciplinary links exist between language teaching and fundamental or "neighboring" disciplines. Without doubt, the relation between second language acquisition (SLA) and language pedagogy in the United States is quite problematic, since SLA has virtually declared its independence from language teaching. Thus, for example, in an article on the relationship between SLA and language pedagogy, Ellis concludes, "To avoid any misunderstanding of the arguments I have advanced [. . .] I want to stress that I see no obligation for SLA researchers to attend to pedagogic issues. Many SLA researchers [. . .] have no interest in pedagogy, the focus of their attention being on developing SLA theory for its own sake" (88). While discussing a book by Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig and Beverly Hartford, which emphasizes the importance of bringing together various experts in SLA, psycholinguists, pragmatics, and so on, to create a core of what prospective teachers should study, VanPatten predicts (with a somewhat somber note) that such a major change in teacher education will hardly take place in the near future (51). This is very unfortunate since the successful development of foreign language teaching is rather unlikely unless it goes along the interdisciplinary lines suggested by Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford.
Foreign language teaching theory in Russia is an interdisciplinary field. The ties between Russian foreign language methodology and the neighboring disciplines have been extremely strong. The analogy with medicine seems to be particularly suitable. Like medicine, which relies on the data and knowledge accumulated and provided by the fundamental sciences (biology, organic chemistry, anatomy, etc.), foreign language teaching methodology openly admits that, as an applied science, it depends on information gathered from such disciplines as education theory, general psychology, learning psychology, psycholinguistics, educational pedagogy (didactics), and linguistics. In fact, foreign language methodology sees its mission as transforming knowledge from other fields into practical teaching; thus the field's primary concern is practical application of the data provided by other disciplines.
The interdisciplinary character of foreign language teaching is reflected in the required format of doctoral dissertations in foreign language teaching methodology, which should include three sections: linguistic issues, psycholinguistic issues, and a description of the candidate's research (methodological issues). The research must be based on pedagogical classroom experiments and must be theoretically justified in the previous sections.
The ties with psychology are especially strong. Foreign language methodology is often defined as applied psychology, a scientific study of the ways in which general psychological principles can be used to facilitate the assimilation of foreign languages by learners. Crucial to the development of foreign language teaching in Russia are Lev S. Vygotsky's theories of egocentric speech; Sergei L. Rubinstein's memory and learning psychology; Nikolai I. Zhinkin's theory of code transformation; Petr I. Galperin's theory of the progressive development of mental operations; the entire domain of the psychology of teaching foreign languages represented by Boris G. Anan'ev, Viktor A. Artemov, Tikhon G. Egorov, I. V. Karpov, Boris V. Beliaev, Dmitry N. Bogoiavlensky; Alexi A. Leontiev's psycholinguistic theory of verbal behavior; and Lev Landa's contrastive algo-heuristic theory.
An outside observer cannot but notice that the links between psychological research and language teaching in the United States are not as pronounced as they are in Russia. SLA researchers themselves confirm this omission. For example, Graham Crookes, in sharing his personal experiences, points out that until the 1970s linguistics remained the only important source discipline for SLA, while psychology was almost totally excluded. As a student, he found the absence of explanations about human learning and language acquisition very frustrating (98).
The development of foreign language methodology in Russia has also been profoundly influenced by the ideas of the renowned Russian linguist, Lev V. Shcherba. Shcherba's ideas about the role of consciousness, the mother tongue, and the philological approach in foreign language education have been extremely influential in shaping the "conscious-comparative" method. One would find the following two quotations in almost every Russian textbook on the methodology of teaching foreign languages:
A complete mastery of one's native language (I mean, of course, of its higher literary form), an adequate appreciation of its wealth, of its various means of expression, and understanding of its potential can only be obtained through the study of a foreign language because nothing can be understood without terminus comparationis. (44; my trans.)All the efforts of the direct method were aimed at creating in students a pure bilingualism by means of total expulsion of the mother tongue from the entire process of learning foreign languages. The experience, however, showed that one can expel the mother language from the teaching process--and thereby weaken it because it will not provide the students with the arms for self-defense against the influence of the mother tongue--but it is impossible to expel the mother tongue from students' minds. (56; my trans.)
Independent Field
Foreign language teaching methodology established itself as a science in the late 1940s (Miroliubov). The field is based on the recognition that foreign language teaching is a research field that investigates teaching, learning, and acquisition processes and rationalizes teaching practice. It is a field in its own right, with its own metalanguage and discourse. The history of Soviet foreign language methodology up to the end of the 1960s was characterized by persistent struggle between the two main approaches to foreign language teaching: the aforementioned "conscious-comparative" method (Rakhmanov; Tsvetkova; Miroliubov; Shcherba) and various "Russian" modifications of the "direct" method that were very popular at the beginning of the twentieth century. The debate led to the advent of the "conscious-practical" method developed by Beliaev. The theoretical foundation of the method is traced back to the ideas of Vygotsky.
The 1960s and 1970s were very important decades, marked by renewed interest in foreign language methodology spurred by school reform in the mid-1960s and the introduction of a new, more communicatively oriented approach to teaching. In fact, something similar happened in the United States in the 1970s after the President's Commission on Foreign Languages.
While foreign language teaching in the United States grew from applied linguistics (VanPatten 51), the methodology of teaching foreign languages in Russia makes up a part of general pedagogy (educational theory), a science of education that comprises the theory of instruction (didactics) as its most essential component. In other words, foreign language methodology is a component of pedagogy rather than linguistics. Foreign language methodology is subdivided into general foreign language methodology and various branches that deal with one particular language.
The autonomy of the field is reflected at the university administrative level. As noted earlier, foreign language university departments in Russian universities are comparable in size to American university schools and comprise a number of subdivisions equivalent in size and structure to American university departments, each forming an independent administrative unit--for example, Department of English Language, Department of German Language, Department of English Philology, Department of Spanish Philology, and so on. While language departments (English, German, French, etc.) in Russia are in charge of teaching practical language skills, the "philology" departments provide courses in the scientific study of the origin and development of languages. Like other departments, the Department of Methodology of Teaching Foreign Languages constitutes an independent administrative unit. The demand "publish or perish" refers equally to all faculty members irrespective of the nature (theoretical or practical) of the discipline they teach. Research in the methodology of foreign languages in Russia is deemed scholarly by the university administration, and the field has the status of a science. Foreign language methodology and language departments engage in rigorous research. Consequently, there is no distinction between nonresearch and teaching tracks.
While language education in the United States appears to be anachronistically embedded in the traditional literature-oriented departments, language departments in Russian universities are only language--not language and literature--departments. The literature departments form separate administrative units outside the Department (school) of Foreign Languages and are part of the School of Russian Language and Literature, which trains secondary school teachers of Russian. This administrative structure has been set up from time immemorial and rests on the tacit recognition that departments of literary studies, on the one hand, and language departments, on the other, represent entirely different domains of knowledge (paralleled by the fact that their faculty members inhabit entirely different social worlds), with their own goals, research procedures, systems of values, and so on. The study of the language is not a prerequisite for the study of literature. Teaching a foreign language is as prestigious an endeavor as teaching literature is--if not more so.
Research Culture, Research Questions
Different countries create different research cultures, and Russia and the United States represent two notably different research approaches in foreign language education. The foreign language methodology research tradition in Russia is similar to the European model and tends to be more theory-driven, whereas the American research culture draws on the positivistic quantitative paradigm, which only partially took root in Russia. That is why theoretically driven proposals (Vygotsky, Beliaev, Rakhmanov) related to practical foreign language teaching are considered to be as valid as those derived from research. While American research in foreign language acquisition is dominated by an analytic orientation, the Russian methodology of teaching foreign languages seems to bend more toward a holistic perspective concerning the same issues. On the whole, the field seems to have more historical awareness; contrastive linguistic analysis, for example, seems to have survived better in Russia.
VanPatten's article has been very helpful in defining the areas where the two fields of research overlap or diverge. Careful reading of the article reveals that many of the questions that SLA strives to answer are the focus of foreign language methodology in Russia. Thus, the issues of error analysis and language interference and transfer are investigated by foreign language methodology rather than by psycholinguistic research, which is more akin to SLA in its methods and procedures. Foreign language methodology focuses on classroom language acquisition and on the effect of instruction on language learning and, in this respect, sides more with language teaching, in VanPatten's classification. The topics that have been of particular interest for the field of foreign language methodology are as follows:
teaching foreign languages at the elementary stage
oral introductory courses at the elementary stage
teaching foreign languages to non-language professionals
teacher education
professional competencies of a foreign language teacher ("professiogramma")
componential structure of foreign language competence
language skills versus language habits
interrelation of habits, skills, and competence
conscious-contrastive principle of teaching foreign languages
communicative approach to teaching foreign languages
bilingualism
passive versus active grammar and vocabulary
receptive versus productive language competencies
selection of grammar and vocabulary for specific purposes ("grammar and vocabulary minimum")
discursive reasoning and consciousness-raising in
teaching different aspects of language study
language interference and positive transfer
error analysis
progressive development of mental operations in
language teaching
contrastive linguistics and its implications for teaching
contrastive algo-heuristic theory: algorithms in teaching foreign languages
Basic Notions and Principles
The concept of the inseparability of language and thought--that is, the belief that language and thought are bound together and that language is the immediate actuality of thought--forms the philosophical foundation of the methodology of foreign languages. Central to the methodology of foreign languages is the notion of habits (subskills) and skills. The notion of the habit--a series of connected acts that have become automatic or semiautomatic as the result of repetitions--is consonant with John R. Anderson's ACT theory (Adaptive Control of Thought), the theory of skill development. Acquisition of a cognitive habit (a skill in Anderson's theory) includes cognitive involvement at the initial stage, sometimes verbalization, and proceeds from the first "awkward" performance to a state of high automatization where it no longer requires a cognitive element. Here the verbalization of the habit may drop out. At the autonomous stage, the habit is automated, which entails its rapid and error-free performance. The development of habit-skill theory has been one of the key themes of Russian foreign language methodology and one of its most controversial issues.
Foreign language methodology derives its fundamental principles from didactics--the science of teaching. Some of these principles, such as awareness (consciousness), communication, recognition of the role of the learner's mother tongue, active involvement of the students in classroom activities, and the individual approach, all seem to be somewhat consonant with the new foreign language standards.
This overview of the system of foreign language education in Russian and the attempt to compare it with that in the United States are in no way complete or exhaustive. Nor should they be perceived as completely accurate, since the comments are largely impressionistic and are based on the perceptions of an "outsider." I would like to conclude this overview with some thoughts that seem to be logical outcomes of the foregoing survey.
It should not come as a surprise that for a language teacher educated in a Russian pedagogical university, training of foreign language teachers in the United States would seem to lack the quality of profoundness, both in depth and in length of schooling--important attributes of what is considered a "profession" in both countries. It may not be stated overtly, but the behavioral, craftlike model of teacher preparation seems to be prevalent. In this respect, one cannot but agree with the opinion expressed by Crookes, who writes, "The literature on professionalism in teaching, my own experience as an ES/FL teacher, and observations I have made of S/FL teaching in a number of countries in the last 20 years, all lead me to believe that [. . .] training of many S/FL teachers [in the United States] is unsatisfactory" (94). I hope, however, that the latest developments in the area of foreign language teaching--the introduction of new foreign language standards and renewed governmental interest in quality teacher preparation--will bring about much needed and welcome changes. A lot can and should be done by the university language departments (see, e.g., Franklin; Spinelli; Olsen). In this respect coterminal degrees, offered jointly by the education and the language departments, which could provide language and linguistic courses and courses in foreign language teaching, seem like a viable solution.
An "outsider" would also find a number of inconsistencies and discrepancies in the way American universities treat and organize foreign language education. It is hard to comprehend, for example, why, despite all the lamenting about the gap or chasm and other irreconcilable differences between the literary studies faculty members and language instructors, they still live under the same roof. In my opinion, such an administrative arrangement is a serious impediment to the development of university-based research in language teaching since, by definition, language instructors are not expected or encouraged to do research in their field. In this respect, it is hard to resist the temptation to slightly expand the metaphor aptly used by VanPatten by saying that a "peaceful and friendly divorce" might be a desirable outcome of the "current default marriage" (53).
The author is Lecturer in Russian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Stanford University.
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© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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