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A Collaborative Project
An intense and searching collaboration between the National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NASILP)1 and the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC)2 will be concluded during the spring 2000 semester. This collaboration is the result of a two-year National Security Education Program (NSEP)3 grant, "Infrastructure Enhancement for Critical Languages--A National Strategy," awarded to the NFLC for 1998-99, with a continuation to the year 2000. The award came at a fortuitous time for the growth and development of both the NFLC's and NASILP's capabilities and for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) in general.
The NSEP-NFLC grant involved both NASILP and the American Association of Community Colleges, originally, in an effort to create an exponential increase for LCTL learner access to examiners through Web sites and listservs. Twenty examiners for twenty-two languages have been planned; Hindi-Urdu and Serbo-Croatian are conflated to two Web sites since frequently asked questions (FAQs) will be addressed to the consulting examiner of each site in the Latin alphabet. Of the twenty4 languages, six were selected for more intensive treatment with links to graded material on the Web to assist with sustainment: Arabic, Chinese/Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Portuguese. At present, so that a Web site consulting examiner's time is used more efficiently, access has focused on availability to other examiners or to tutors with the permission of an examiner and a program coordinator or director in the target language. The permission of a coordinator or director is necessary to maintain NASILP's long tradition of collegiality.
Another task of the NFLC grant was to develop a NASILP consultative Web site for member institutions and potential members. Coincidentally, NASILP had already begun the implementation of a Web site--both an open one, for institutions interested in membership, and a passworded one, for the present membership (http://www.nasilp.org). The Web site, in operation since 1998, has essentially reduced--although not replaced--many initial telephone consultations with potential NASILP institutional members. The passworded sites (for directors or coordinators, examiners, and tutors) have become invaluable consultative tools for institutional members since they contain a plethora of NASILP documents, pedagogical and organizational. For example, they include all the forms and documents necessary for the initial implementation of a NASILP program at a given institution. NASILP had also planned a board of directors and an institutional members listserv; these have been operational since the spring of 1998. In addition, it is now possible to register for the annual NASILP conference in the Washington, DC, area and for member institutions to submit their annual language and materials inventory online.
A brief synopsis of NASILP, its development, participation in the NSEP-NFLC grant, and its benefits to the community of less--and least--commonly taught languages is instructive.
North America's First LCTL Professional Organization
NASILP is the result of a confluence of events, needs, and technical developments that arose in the middle and late 1960s. World events were creating a demand for the dissemination of an increasing number of languages (LCTLs) that were not usually offered by traditional college and university "foreign" languages departments. Russian was exotic enough, not to mention Japanese and Chinese--they were then barely blips on the statistical scale. Yet the need for the greater curricular availability of these languages--mostly African and Asian--was growing. The tape cassette and the small, light portable recorder that played it--as opposed to the heavy and cumbersome reel-to-reel recorder that was ubiquitous until that time--was the technical development that helped catalyze the concept behind NASILP. The cassette recorder greatly expanded the venues for tape-oriented language learning beyond the confines of the language laboratory. Thus, the need and the technical means were complemented by the next ingredient--the instructional materials. The texts, and especially the tapes that accompanied the text, would be crucial to NASILP's emphasis on contextual audiolingual pedagogy. This crucial pedagogical ingredient was partially provided by Foreign Service Institute texts and tapes that are, to this day, distributed on a commercial basis. The instructional and institutional catalyst that eventually brought all these ingredients together was NASILP, incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in 1976. However, NASILP itself was an outgrowth of an idea by Peter Boyd Bowman of the State University of New York, Buffalo, who conceived of the tutor-examiner-coordinator or director functional relationship. The final ingredient that gave academic validity to the NASILP Critical Languages Program (CLP) was the final exam for prochievement.
Prochievement
From its very beginnings, NASILP's approach was a practical and realizable one, an approach that relied on a native-speaker tutor at the CLP's institution, an examiner with full-time teaching credentials in the target language from another institution, a coordinator or director to supervise the program, and a national organization, NASILP, that systematized and monitored the standards of the programs. Prochievement was the assessment tool that was developed and promulgated by several NASILP examiners at a 1976 conference at the Educational Testing Service campus in Princeton. It was a means of evaluating learner achievement in terms of successful audiolingual contextual manipulation of the target language, based exclusively on material covered by the tapes used in the tutorials. In short, could the learner speak the language effectively at a given level determined by the examiner? Eleanor Jorden, NASILP Distinguished Director and one of the developers of prochievement testing, describes it as "an achievement test in a proficiency modality."
For academic verification, only examiners were to conduct the midterm (a diagnostic) and the final exams. Since the emphasis is on oral communication for the first two years, it is only the final exam grade that matters, and it is that grade that is entered on the learner's record. (A more detailed description is available on the NASILP Web site.)
Not a Horseless Carriage
With the development of CD-ROMs and the proliferation of personal computers and laptops, NASILP arrived at a new exponential level of development for LCTL instructional courseware: courseware with instant access to any part of a CD, incorporating text, audio, and video and allowing interactivity on a more intensive and accurate basis than with the bothersome rewinding of either audio- or videotape.5 This interactivity between several different communicative modes (text, audio, video) in combination with several different exercises creates a new instrument. On one CD-ROM one can see the text, hear the text--and see it spoken by native speakers--while interacting with the material in a sequence most convenient for the learner. It is no longer a combination of ingredients, it is a new ingredient altogether. It is not a horseless carriage, it is an automobile!
Benjamin Bloom, an eminent taxonomist of the University of Chicago's College of Education, felt that the way to teach physics, for example, was to find a minimum number, say, twenty experiments, that would give learners a fundamental understanding of its basic laws. The physical manipulation of the problem--conducting the experiment--would lead to an experiential understanding allowing learners to build on personally acquired and actively manipulatable knowledge. Bloom's approach is one of the inspirations for the new synergistic CD-ROM lessons that are not textbook, workbook, audiotapes, and videotapes in separate units but one interwoven unit that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The NSEP-CLP proposal (the Critical Languages Series) was the result of a growing collaboration between the University of Arizona's Critical Languages Program (UA/CLP) and its Computer-Aided Language Instruction (UA/CALI) group that produced prototypes of beginning Korean and Turkish lessons for a server. Later available on CD-ROM, these lessons became the basis for a successful project proposal to NSEP. Entitled "Courseware Development for Less Commonly Taught Languages," the project is based on NASILP's quarter-century of LCTL experience, a decade's research and development work by UA/CALI, and the UA/CLP's decade-long pedagogical experience with over twenty LCTLs.
Originally CALI's work was sponsored by a series of United States government grants to create an interactive audio- and text-based series of exercises that enabled each user of the program (located on a server) to complement textbook materials. The Department of East Asian Studies used this program in conjunction with an existing textbook of Chinese-Mandarin for a period of five years. The program was dubbed MAXAUTHOR by Richard Demers of the University of Arizona's linguistics department and one of CALI's principals. Demers was instrumental in developing templates, in collaboration with the UA/CALI group, that would create cloze, pronunciation, multiple-choice, audio flashcard, and listening dictation exercises. The pedagogical plan was to progress from hearing a spoken dialogue or narrative to the successful mastery of a given lesson through a series of interactive audio and textual exercises that can be repeated as often as necessary (the TIRELESSTUTOR) by the learner until mastery is achieved.
The Road Ahead
Second language pedagogy and its dissemination are not an ave atque vale; rather, "There is no last number," as one of Evgeny Zamiatin's characters states in his novel, We. And so the Web site and the CD-ROM projects are not horseless carriages or "last numbers" but vehicles on the continuum of an integrated interactive second language acquisition journey. Improvement will come with ever-advanced technology and research sensitive to the many different paths of second language learning. In future days, these advances in research will create ever-better vehicles that will take it to greater vistas on the road ahead.
Alexander Dunkel
The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Languages and Founding Director of the Critical Languages Program, College of Humanities, University of Arizona, Tucson. He is also the Executive Director of NASILP.
1NASILP is headquartered at the Critical Languages Program, College of Humanities, University of Arizona, Tucson http://www.nasilp.org.
2NFLC is headquartered in Washington, DC http://www.nflc.org.
3The National Security Education Program of the National Defense University is headquartered in Rosslyn, Virginia. The following statement is a requirement of an NSEP grant: "This effort was sponsored by the National Defense University, National Security Education Program (NSEP). The content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred."
4The languages are Arabic, Armenian, Cantonese, Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
5Mari Noda, of Ohio State University, was instrumental in developing a state-of-the-art CD-ROM for the study of the Japanese language that was produced before the NSEP project discussed here. The development of the Japanese language CD-ROM, using professional actors in their native settings, was supported by the Annenberg Foundation.
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