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A LOOK through scholarly journals and books leaves little doubt that the subject of the nonnative speaker has gained prominence in professional writing. Of particular interest is the extent to which nonnative speakers can acquire very advanced, even nativelike foreign language abilities. While many publications have shown a strong theoretical bent—examples are investigations of the so-called critical period (see Bialystok and Hakuta) or of the ultimate attainment by nonnative speakers (Birdsong; Coppieters)—the topic of the nonnative speaker also has eminently practical implications for the FL field. Most notable among these implications are insights into the extent to which instructed second-language (L2) learners can or cannot reach levels of performance that are associated with research and teaching at the university level and, related to that, into the programmatic sites and conditions that learners require to attain such levels.
Foreign language departments play a pivotal role because of their interests in and educational responsibilities toward their nonnative speaking graduate students. Yet few devote explicit attention to them, despite long-standing calls for incorporating aspects of advanced language learning in graduate education (e.g., James; Swaffar). Typically such efforts are thwarted by privileged content demands as graduate programs prepare their students to become competent researchers and scholars as well as by the pervasive belief, despite overwhelming counterevidence, that academic L2 abilities should somehow have been acquired by students in their undergraduate studies.
To contribute to a much-needed discussion, we propose a specific way in which graduate programs might begin to address this problem. Taking up the well-known dictum that one comes to know and understand what one is challenged to teach, we suggest exploring the opportunities for advanced L2 learning that the teaching of upper-level undergraduate courses might present for nonnative graduate students. Our proposal does not merely involve graduate students’ teaching of upper-level content classes as they currently exist. Instead, it emphasizes the need to reconceptualize these courses substantially in such a way that they can serve the dual purpose of enhancing undergraduate students’ language and content learning while also enhancing the teaching abilities and L2 learning of graduate students. At present, prevailing practices pay scant attention to ensuring that content courses beyond the language sequence involve pedagogies that include a well-conceived language acquisition component. However, if the teaching-learning nexus that we propose is to have merit, then it must be possible to envision just such an explicit and valid link between content and language form, broadly interpreted, and between teaching and upper-level L2 learning. More important, it must be possible as well to realize this vision in practice. Our paper explores these possibilities.
We begin by considering existing notions of advanced abilities along two axes, first in terms of how these notions accommodate central features of academic language use, second in terms of their transferability into an instructional environment. Our examination strongly suggests that the profession needs a more expansive conceptualization of advancedness than that which now dominates our practices. After presenting an alternative way of modeling advanced language use, we offer two views on what this modeling might mean for instructional practice. The first is a curricular perspective that sees upper levels of language teaching and learning as critically dependent on a carefully conceived long-term instructional trajectory. Its general framework for an integrated curriculum1 provides the context for the second perspective, two pedagogical case studies of upper-level teaching and learning by nonnative graduate student teachers. One, a fifth-semester course taught by Cori Crane, has a genre—and discourse—focus that interprets advanced language teaching and learning as facilitating interlanguage development into the socially constituted discourses of public life. A second case study, a course taught by Katherine Sprang, locates advanced language teaching and learning at the intersection of vocabulary and grammar and identifies this intersection as a place to develop cognitive fluency in the L2. We conclude by considering the consequences of our proposal for the profession.
It is a well-known fact that advanced L2 abilities figure prominently during faculty hiring, even though interpretations of the ubiquitous demand for near-native speaking abilities differ significantly between hiring committees and applicants, who are typically graduate students (Koike and Liskin-Gasparro). While that fact has many implications, we choose to read it as an urgent call for graduate departments to adopt a teaching-and-learning perspective in their programs rather than an assessment perspective on the language abilities of job candidates, who typically come from other programs. Not surprisingly, the graduate students in Dale Koike and Judith Liskin-Gasparro’s survey took exactly this view as they told their linguistic life stories, often with “spirited and emotionally negative reactions to questions about the attention paid to their language proficiency development during their graduate studies” (59). In other words, a useful discussion of nativelike abilities begins with the question of whether departments can come to understand and then specify the nature of upper levels of performance in a second language in a fashion that translates into comprehensive programmatic, curricular, and pedagogical actions in departments’ specific educational settings.
Nonnative graduate students in particular would stand to benefit from such a reorientation, for a number of reasons. First, they face challenges and opportunities with respect to their language abilities; these challenges and opportunities take the form not merely of a fixed performance goal or a product that the students do or do not possess but also of a continuing engagement with the process of L2 learning, a process to which they must attend strategically throughout their graduate student careers and, indeed, throughout their academic careers. Second, they face challenges as apprentice teachers for undergraduate students, especially if they are to teach classes beyond the introductory levels, an opportunity they should have in order to enhance their teaching in their specialized fields. Third, as apprentice researchers in literary-cultural studies they must achieve high levels of general academic-intellectual and very specific linguistic abilities, both prerequisites for competent analytic and interpretive language use in those studies. Finally, as future members of the FL profession, they face a constantly present though rarely acknowledged credibility deficit vis-à-vis their native-speaking peers, a problem that becomes acute when the patent irreversibility of their nonnativeness runs up against both some cavalier behaviors and a certain helplessness and inability on the part of the FL profession to advise nonnative speakers on concrete ways for attaining and maintaining high levels of L2 competence.
In the light of these considerations we pose the following set of framing questions: What conceptual resources, both ideational and experience-based, might enable departments to rearrange their graduate curricular and pedagogical actions and goals in such a fashion that advanced language learning is actively supported instead of being a by-product by default or the sole responsibility of the students? What specific features of advanced L2 learning should and can be highlighted and targeted? Finally, what proposals or models exist that attempt to incorporate these insights into curricular and, even more important, into pedagogical practices at the college level?
Expressing the Nature of Advanced Language Abilities: Intuitive and Proficiency-Based Approaches
In providing a general description of what we mean by advanced levels of performance in an L2, we do not refer to research findings but instead deliberately probe commonsense knowledge, since change in departmental practices must begin there.
Advanced levels of acquisition have not been a prominent concern in the FL profession, partly because of the absence of a long instructional sequence and partly because of the well-known split between language and content courses in most college L2 programs: at the very point when opportunities for developing and needs for using upper levels of language ability come to the fore, professional discussion on appropriate pedagogies either ceases altogether or takes on ad hoc qualities. An example is the much advocated bridge course, which attempts to accomplish in a single semester what an entire program would struggle to achieve, namely, the acquisition of sophisticated L2 literacy by our students.
There are other incongruities. On the one hand, part of the profession has a sense of the advanced learner that is strongly influenced by the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the assessment of oral proficiency through the OPI. In fact, extensive familiarity with the proficiency construct has directed a whole way of imagining all aspects of language performance and language development.2 With regard to upper levels of performance, the descriptors that earn a nonnative speaker a Superior rating have achieved near-ritualistic status, for example, the ability to
explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy. [Speakers at the Superior level] explain their opinions on a number of topics important to them, such as social and political issues, and provide structured argument to support their opinions. They are able to construct and develop hypotheses to explore alternative possibilities. When appropriate, they use extended discourse without unnaturally lengthy hesitation to make their point, even when engaged in abstract elaborations. (Breiner-Sanders et al. 14)
On the other hand, these categories find little resonance among faculty hiring committees, who define academic L2 performance in terms of the ability to discuss literary theories or to lecture and lead discussions and in terms of remarkably traditional notions of perfect grammatical usage, nativelike pronunciation, and ease in the language (Koike and Liskin-Gasparro; Tesser).
The question is not so much the correctness of one or the other of these descriptions of advancedness. It is whether they can provide a sufficiently elaborated and robust foundation for creating an instructional program at the college level that specifically targets competent language use in a range of situated social tasks, particularly those that are central to the conduct of business in collegiate FL departments. In view of the continued difficulties that FL departments have with graduating very advanced L2 speakers, notwithstanding a communicative or proficiency orientation and significantly expanded opportunities for language contact and exposure, including technology and study abroad, one is justified in suspecting that these descriptions of advancedness cannot provide that foundation.
The suspicion is corroborated by the striking parallel between the challenge of reaching advancedness in an L2 and the challenge of high levels of L1 literacy that regularly surfaces in educational policy debates and that specialists have examined in various educational contexts (e.g., Christie, “Language Development”; Egan; Gee, “What”; and Hasan, “Literacy”). Frances Christie speaks of the pervasive Western tradition in linguistics that separates knowledge and intellectual work from the language patterns that manifest them; the tradition therefore interprets the use of language as though language and knowledge or content were independent of each other. When this paradigm is taken to its logical conclusion, language use is not so much the result of choices that observe the symbiotic relation of meaning to forms as it is the correct application of an abstract system, the language, that accords to use no more than “a merely instrumental function in relation to content” (“Language Development” 166).
In the context of L1 schooling in the primary grades, acquiring appropriate language use becomes a “kind of etiquette” that children need to learn (161), where rightness and wrongness are determined by normative standards and where preexisting knowledge and one’s ability to understand one’s world and to interact with it exist as a fixed product somewhere outside language use. In FL instruction, this same framework manifests itself in endless debates about the role of grammar, where both sides, for all their overt differences, nevertheless assume that advanced language abilities arise from mastery of grammatical and phonological features of the language, though these considerations are now expanded into what is referred to as a discourse-based perspective.
Exploring Functional, Genre-Based Approaches to L2 Use and Development
Where might we turn for notions of grammar beyond the existing paradigm of essentially structuralist and formalist linguistics? According to M. A. K. Halliday, what is needed is “a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English” (Introduction xv). He pursues this aim with his functional grammar, which interprets language as “a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized.” Instead of focusing on language forms and asking which meanings are attached to them, “the question is rather: ‘how are these meanings expressed?’ This puts the forms of a language in a different perspective: as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves” (xiv). As a result, “language is not a domain of human knowledge [. . . but] the essential condition of knowledge, the process by which experience becomes knowledge” (Halliday, “Theory” 94).
Such an approach has extensive instructional implications for the development of literacy at any level (see particularly Christie, “Language Development”; Hasan, “Literacy”; Martin, “Mentoring”; Rothery). But its impact is most striking if advanced levels of language ability are the goal, in L1 as well as L2 (see Christie, “Genre Theory”; Hasan, “Disempowerment Game“; Hyon; Johns, “Teaching”; Jones et al.; Miller). Understanding language as situated and purposeful action leads to interpreting language use and language development as discursively realized semiosis. With its particular emphasis on genre, defined by Christie as a “staged, purposeful activity” that serves important social goals (“Genre Theory” 760) and an understanding of literacy as “a set of discourse practices, that is, as ways of using language and making sense both in speech and writing [. . .] tied to the particular world views (beliefs and values) of particular social or cultural groups” (Gee, “Orality” 719–20), this approach provides “a model of text in context—of discourse in relations to grammar and lexis and to those semiotic systems which language itself realizes” (Martin, “Process” 249). On that basis one can explore the relation between meaning and form in three major ways: in terms of field, which refers to particular content or subject matter areas; in terms of tenor, which acknowledges the dynamics of particular communicative settings with a range of participants and participant relationships; and in terms of mode, the particular construing of processes, participants, circumstances, and relations that a speaker employs in decisions that affect the entire text, even as the text is affected by the communicative channels being employed (e.g., oral, written, interactive, monologic).
For graduate programs in literary-cultural studies it is noteworthy that Halliday’s systemic functional grammar shows a striking similarity to the dialogic approaches chosen by Mikhail Bakhtin as a way of explicating the phenomenon of language use in society and, particularly, the notion of genre. Therefore, taken together, a Hallidayan functional linguistics and the societal situatedness of stable forms of linguistic actions, the Bakhtinian genre, offer a way of imagining any advanced L2 performance in a single conceptual framework. When one highlights, as Richard Kern does, the global and organizational aspects associated with particular genres, a genre approach can serve to enhance the kinds of interpretive comprehension abilities as well as the situated choices in language production that characterize the advanced learner.
With the insight of Bakhtin’s observation that “to use a genre freely and creatively is not the same as to create a genre from the beginning: genres must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely” (80), we can begin to provide learners instructional supports throughout their language learning experience, supports whose dynamic is directed toward the ability to make meaning-driven genre-based choices. For example, to enable learners ultimately to discuss literary theory as the academy expects that to be done, we must from the start teach language as a socially situated practice. Similarly, to enable them to have a personal voice in the communicative situation of formal presentations followed by a question-and-answer period we must first ensure that they have acquired the confident use of that genre. In this fashion we can begin to overcome the current situation where even the best of our learners, unaware of the complex meaning-form symbiosis instantiated in genre, tend to be both correct and incorrect at the same time, in the formal aspects of their language use as well as in the meanings it conveys. Instead, learners can begin to find their voices and identities in diverse L2 genres and celebrate their status as multicompetent speakers at a high level of performance.
To summarize, with a broader understanding of the nature of language, the nature of language instruction, and the nature of language learning such as that provided by a genre-based functional linguistics, graduate programs can develop and sustain curricular and instructional practices that facilitate the development of academic levels of L2 ability. Such an understanding imagines advanced abilities not primarily in terms of an increase in accuracy, complexity, and fluency of language use over a greater range of topical areas with a greater range of vocabulary but as situationally appropriate use of genres, which Bakhtin describes as “relatively stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types of utterances.” The advanced speaker is one who commands a range of “generic styles for certain spheres of human activity and communication,” where “each sphere has and applies its own genres that correspond to its own specific conditions” and has “particular styles that correspond to these genres” (64).
We now turn to how these insights might translate into action in graduate FL departments.
The Teaching-Learning Nexus
When graduate students teach beginning language courses, they focus on language that James Gee refers to as the primary discourses of familiarity (“What”). That is, they commit significant amounts of attention and reflection to a level of language that poses neither much of a challenge nor much of an opportunity for growth in their own L2 abilities. Simultaneously, undergraduate and graduate student learners alike confront in their content courses the kind of language use that Gee refers to as the secondary discourses of public life, including the discourses of the academy. However, they engage with them mostly through interpretive reading while being permitted to transact their spoken and many of their written L2 contributions in the primary discourses of familiarity, the conversational forms with which they are thoroughly comfortable and of which they have a good command.
Halliday identifies two major forms of human meaning making, which are reminiscent of Gee’s primary and secondary discourses. He relates them to two modes of grammar that characterize the competent linguistic adult, “the dynamic mode of the everyday commonsense grammar and the synoptic mode of the elaborated written grammar.” According to Halliday, “any particular instance, of any kind of phenomenon, may be interpreted as some product of the two. [. . .] The one foregrounds structure and stasis, the other foregrounds function and flow. [. . .] This dynamic/synoptic complementarity adds a final critical dimension to the adolescent learner’s semantic space” (“Theory” 112). Competent language use, then, is not a matter of formal ability in and of itself but rather a matter of construing a process or property by emphasizing either the flow or the thinginess (the object quality and otherness) of experiences (111) and of making these choices in an appropriate manner in given contexts.
Creating a Curricular and Instructional Context
When we explore the teaching-learning consequences of these insights, the following characteristics of advanced L2 learning stand out: first, comprehension does not readily translate into productive capabilities, particularly not at the upper performance levels, where students’ language use easily satisfies the vast majority of ordinary communicative needs; second, high levels of academic literacy require explicit, multiply focused, and repeated attention over long periods of time, even in the first language; third, the efficacy of a literacy- and genre-based approach to teaching and learning depends on the existence of a coherent curricular progression as contrasted with a cameo appearance in a single course (Byrnes, “Constructing”).
As a result, enhancing upper levels of ability demands the following attributes:
A trajectory for long-term, balanced language development of all aspects of language performance and use. This orientation differs from the intuitively plausible but otherwise undifferentiated notion of sheer length of instruction (see Skehan).
Inclusion of diverse aspects of language use in a range of oral and written genres that belong both to the primary discourses of familiarity and to the secondary discourses of public life. This attribute differs from the heavily interaction- and negotiation-driven understandings of the development of communicative abilities at the beginning stages of learning, which is the focus in much empirical work and in most pedagogical recommendations.
Focused attention on formal aspects of language in an otherwise content- and meaning-oriented instructional environment, in order to facilitate continued effective and efficient (and that means carefully balanced) development of accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language use. This attribute differs from two opposing approaches, a bias toward fluency that is unable to attend to accuracy and, alternatively, an overemphasis on grammatical accuracy that thwarts development of fluent speech. Both approaches leave essentially unexplored the facilitative role of the complexity of language use that characterizes the secondary discourse genre as a way of triggering language development.
To realize the desired long-term development of L2 abilities, departments would first and foremost have to overcome the traditional split between language courses and content courses, something that requires a conceptual framework that links these programmatic levels (see Swaffar). We have suggested a systemic-functional approach as particularly promising. When it is expressed in terms of genres and connected to the insights that the new literacy studies offer (e.g., Gee, “What”; Kern; New London Group) and, furthermore, when it incorporates notions of multicompetence as Vivian Cook has developed them for the second language learner (“Evidence” and “Going”), this approach can offer broad criteria for selecting and sequencing curricular units, for enabling materials choices, and for recommending pedagogical actions (see Byrnes, “Languages”). A first attempt to realize such a programmatic model in the collegiate FL context is the curriculum created by the German Department at Georgetown University, the educational context that also motivated the two case studies this paper describes (Developing).
In addition, the project has benefited from pedagogical notions expressed in socioculturally oriented forms of pedagogy in L1 and L2. These consider language learning not as an application of rules but as a form of appropriating culture. Therefore they favor modeling and scaffolded action where more and less expert learners collaborate in acquiring certain abilities (Wells). We have also referred to the Focus on Form (FonF) literature (see Doughty and Williams), notably its central notion of task, which we have deliberately located at the intersection of genre, content, and those L2 processing phenomena that are known to be conducive to learning (Skehan). In this fashion, meaningful language use produced in the framework of accomplishing a task at a given time can translate into language development over time, particularly with regard to the interrelation among accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language use at different points of the acquisitional sequence.
Interlanguage Development as Discourse Awareness
Turning now to the first case study, we observe that an emphasis on larger units of discourse has been advocated for some time, both by SLA research and in teaching practice (e.g., Chafe; Gallimore and Tharp; Hanks). However, the space provided for students to engage with paragraph-level discourse is often void of a link to its societal context; this lack can lead to misinterpretation or cursory understanding. Moving beyond the sentence level becomes profitable only when L2 instruction considers the role of discourse, that is, the text and its surrounding context. A genre-based approach serves as a particularly favorable means for directing learners’ awareness to context, as it takes into account both the social and cognitive processes that frame texts. Additionally, it provides an occasion for greater reflection on the learner’s personal contribution to the process of meaning making. It goes without saying that the pedagogies arising from such an approach can address the concerns of graduate students both in their capacity as teachers in advanced content-oriented courses and as L2 learners interested in advancing their own L2 abilities.
At the same time, instructing learners at the advanced level makes obvious that success in the target language involves a certain intuitiveness of appropriate language use. As Kern states, “[Becoming literate] does require an intuitive sense of the ways in which the formal characteristics of verbal expression can vary across spoken and written contexts of language use” (26). This intuition is further complicated when one considers the various linguistic and nonlinguistic contextual factors that give language shape and direction. For Gee the notion of a literate language user extends beyond simply possessing knowledge of the what and how of expression. It includes an understanding of the user’s identity and role(s) as well as awareness of the actions the user engages in while voicing such expressions. In essence, “getting the whole thing right” comes about through an “enculturation [. . .] into a certain social practice” (Linguistics 45). Seen in this light, being successful in a second language denotes an understanding—at least implicit—of the ins and outs to being a member (or being perceived as a member) of a particular discourse community. It would involve the notion of a Discourse, as understood by Gee, that “integrate(s) language, thinking, values and ways of acting and interacting” (73). Possessing the appropriate, and often dominant, Discourse of a particular community is often the only way one gains access into that community (Gee, “What”).
In other words, the issue frequently is not whether advanced L2 users do or do not succeed in expressing and interpreting communicative intentions. The concern is directed rather at the levels of meaning that nonnative speakers can access and eventually call on in their interpretations and language production. This accessing presents a challenge for nonnative speakers not privy to the social practices of particular discourse communities associated with the target language. Claire Kramsch discusses this very point, acknowledging the privileges attached to the native speaker in academic foreign language communities (“Privilege”). Yet, focal to her discussion are also the many possibilities the nonnative speaker has in exploring levels of meaning and finding forms of expression that a monolingual speaker may not have access to. Working from this position, the nonnative speaker has the additional, unique opportunity to uncover the inner workings of culturally ingrained knowledge of the L2, knowledge that may be otherwise implicit or appear unavailable due to its interwoven nature in the practices of the target language.
Identifying and analyzing specific genres, especially those that appear in our primary discourses, can reveal complicated layers in common and seemingly familiar genre types. In fact, this assumption of similarity among genres across different cultures may contribute to divergent readings of particular texts in the L2.3 Through careful work with genre features of texts it is possible to avoid the cultural miscommunication that, as interactional sociolinguists have repeatedly shown, can arise between speakers of different language backgrounds precisely because their knowledge of the language system in use does not take into account pragmatic considerations (Gumperz; Schiffrin; Scollon and Scollon).
We have already referred to the potential for uncovering contextualized meanings that the framework of sociocultural literacy and genre theories affords. Drawing on the various definitions presented in the literature, Ann Johns characterizes genre in terms of its sharedness, a quality that allows it to become a standardized and known practice of language use. Specifically, under genre, participants share “communicative purposes, knowledge of roles, knowledge of context, knowledge of formal text features (conventions), text content, register, cultural values, and awareness of intertextuality” (Text 20–37). These features all relate back to the user of the genre in terms of expectations evoked. It is this evocation of particular genres that allows listeners and readers to create schemata in their minds and make sense of the language presented before them. In turn, this knowledge activates a framework, both conceptual and linguistic, that serves as a model for the learners’ speech or text construction (Fillmore). To summarize, a genre approach highlights, as a common thread, the social, cognitive, and linguistic aspects of language use, particularly those revealing patterns of membership and identity.
In an advanced-level (fifth-semester) German class whose content focus is the period of German history from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, an awareness of text structures and the expectations attached to them gave rise to a rethinking of pedagogical approaches. After observing that students had difficulty interpreting a formal interview with the citizen’s rights activist Bärbel Bohley, a text presented in written form, Crane considered the impact the genre might have had on students’ understanding.
At first glance, the layout of the interview genre may appear straightforward, with two obvious roles: an interviewer and an interviewee. Yet, when examined more closely, the interaction between these two speakers resembles less the prepared question-and-answer scenario one might expect in an interview and more a form of speech in which both participants build their utterances on each other’s. In particular, the use of cohesive devices by the speakers creates a highly contextualized dialogue, rich in authentic turn taking and back-channeling strategies. For that reason, some of the central ideas of the text are not located in adjacent question-answer pairs or even at any one particular point. Rather, meanings evolve over many utterances: Bohley's discussion of the impact of her childhood on her later commitment to social issues occurs over a total of three pages and must be traced accordingly.
Most likely students are not unfamiliar with the genre of formal interviews in their L1s. But their familiarity is different from a knowledge grounded in explicit reflection on the nature of these text structures. Such knowledge allows the reader to explore issues such as author-speaker intentionality, various roles in the framework of the genre, contextual factors of the discourse community, and the various linguistic and stylistic conventions used to create coherence of meaning or create cohesion between participant utterances. Thus, in approaching the Bohley interview text, students were first directed to uncover their own background knowledge of the formal interview—for instance, its purposes and the roles typically involved, including the role of an outside audience, which would naturally entail the L2 readers. They were also asked to consider the context surrounding the formal interview and finally the role of various viewpoints in the discourse communities represented in the interview. By activating links among their textual knowledge; that of the genre to be addressed; and that of content from previously discussed, related course materials, the students were able to see that they could interact with the text with a higher degree of sophistication than that asked of them in factually oriented comprehension checks of reading.
After reflecting on their expectations of what constitutes the genre of a formal interview, students related their individual and group findings to the interview text. They examined the interview in light of such questions as, What kind of thematic content is handled in the questions posed? What linguistic forms are used to frame the questions? To what extent do the questions build on the interviewee’s language? What purposes does the interviewer’s language serve? What kinds of devices does the interviewer use to create a coherent whole? Only after reflecting on their background knowledge of the interview genre and comparing this information with the patterns of interaction uncovered in the text did the students begin to approach the answers that the interviewee, Bohley, provides her audience.
In short, the examination of textual structure in terms of genre with careful scrutiny of the role of context can help learners as well as nonnative teachers get to privileged meaning beyond the sentence level. This knowledge should reveal part of the mystery of moving toward the goal of being a member of the L2 discourse community of choice. Further, by treating a text as a social phenomenon, students may begin to understand the contextual factors, including those they themselves contribute as readers, that augment the multiple layers of meaning inherent in all texts. Viewing texts as whole units with which to interact serves to develop the nonnative teacher’s expertise in approaching reading tasks. With the support of a genre-based approach, nonnative teachers are given the opportunity to observe how their unique insights as L2 users contribute to meaning making.
Advanced Learning at the Intersection of Vocabulary and Grammar
A second example for establishing a teaching-learning nexus is Sprang’s experience of teaching an even higher-level course, Text in Context, an experience that exemplifies the development of what functional linguistics calls a lexicogrammar. This term is used to refer to expressive capabilities at the intersection of grammar and vocabulary that involve various forms of semifixed chunked or formulaic language, including idiomatic expressions, and what is known as lexical sentence stems. Before teaching the course, Sprang observed it for two semesters, which enabled her to become familiar with its carefully scaffolded learning environment. As the semester unfolds, learners interact with texts in three content areas with three major performance goals, which are recycled and refined continuously. To reach these goals, students are required to produce
To accomplish these general goals while developing more elaborated, situated expressive capabilities, learners first read a text for initial comprehension and then go back to it to locate targeted language features that were used by the native speaker author both to provide logical structure and to convey meaningfulness. Thus, learners are required to read the same text a number of times to accomplish a series of pedagogical tasks, such as creating semantic fields by identifying phrases and clauses associated with thematic content; using lexical sentence stems identified as conventionalized expressions for discussing texts; and producing and then using a text matrix as a scaffold for complex, accurate, and fluent performance.
Each of these pedagogical tasks is context-driven and requires learners to allocate focal attention to linguistic features crucial to successful performance (Schmidt). Furthermore, each is designed to promote cognitive fluency, in that students are required to shape meaning at the lexicogrammatical level, a skill quite different from temporal fluency because it attempts to capture the intricate link between meaning making and formal choices in the act of language processing. In general, fluency has primarily been associated with three behaviors: rate and lack of hesitation during speech (temporal fluency), the ability to speak coherently and cohesively in an extended discourse (discoursal fluency), and knowing the right thing to say in a given situation (sociopragmatic fluency). From these types of fluency Norman Segalowitz differentiates what he calls cognitive fluency, which
refers to the efficiency of the operation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying performance. This efficiency reflects the particular balance that is struck between automatic processing and attention-based processing. [. . .] A change in cognitive fluency refers to a change in this balance, say, a shift away from reliance on attention-based processes toward greater reliance on automatic processing. Performance fluency, in comparison, refers to the observable speed, fluidity, and accuracy of the [. . .] performance. (202)
Not surprisingly, students involved in the pedagogical tasks mentioned above, which are designed to foster all these aspects of fluent performance, struggled to pull their performances out of the primary discourses that they were accustomed to and comfortable with into the secondary discourses that they needed to be able to imitate and ultimately control. In thinking through these tasks before performing, learners were encouraged to plan their speech at the level of the clause rather than, as is more traditionally expected, build their meanings word by word. Such planning is based on the understanding that “fluent and idiomatic control of a language rests to a considerable extent on the knowledge of a body of ‘sentence stems’ which are ‘institutionalized’ or ‘lexicalized.’ A lexical sentence stem is a unit of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed; [. . . these are] regular form-meaning pairings” (Pawley and Syder 191–92).
Just as in L1 production, L2 learners need to become comfortable with building up and using a variety of lexical sentence stems that are appropriate to specific functions or situations. In Text in Context, these lexical sentence stems crossed the traditional boundaries between vocabulary and grammar in at least two important ways. First, the choices that students made during production required intensive on-line syntactic reorganizing of the idea units that composed the text matrix. Second, the words that students extracted from the texts for production of semantic fields and text matrices were understood in the contexts in which they were situated rather than as individual units. When tested, students could often use the word or phrase in the same context as they had encountered it or in a similar context; however, they could not define the word outside a context. They reported that their recollection of the context in which they had encountered the word was critical to their recognition of the word and their ability to create a sentence using that word.
A discursive and genre-based environment may be necessary for this important aspect of advancedness to develop, an ability quite different from the standard view that upper levels of ability require a broadened vocabulary (Parry; Nation and Waring). Over the course of the semester, as the dual focus on language performance and language development that characterized the tasks had its effect, learners became more confident and comfortable performing in the higher registers that the classroom tasks targeted. Many of the task demands became routinized and automatized, and their aspects that promoted cognitive fluency and that initially required great effort gave way to temporal and discoursal fluency.
The two-semester observation period also allowed Sprang to collect individual student data on vocabulary development and to test how well students knew the vocabulary they had used in their class presentations. They were tested directly after their in-class performances and again thirty to forty-five days afterward. Two findings stand out. First, procedural knowledge of the vocabulary—that is, knowing how to use the word or clause appropriately—was critical to its retention (Robinson). To the extent that learners were able to remember a context in which the word had been used, they could produce appropriate sentences with that word. Many students needed to produce a sentence (i.e., remember a context) before they could define the word. Procedural knowledge was used to construct declarative knowledge online. Second, students consistently asked for help in understanding the meanings of the German inseparable prefixes, known for their capacity to effect subtle yet important meaning changes. As these queries challenged the instructor’s own knowledge, they ultimately became the focus of her dissertation research, which explores different levels of instructional intervention to determine the most facilitative treatment for the systematic acquisition of prefixed words among advanced learners of German.
A major responsibility of the instructor was to model the level of performance to which the students had to aspire. Not surprisingly, the instructional scaffold set in place to support student growth also offered a support system for their instructor’s performances. Although the course was designed to meet advanced learners wherever they are situated in their interlanguage development and to push them forward from that point, the students’ unusually broad span of language abilities presented a particular challenge. The course met this challenge, since its pedagogies encouraged each side, learners and teacher, to draw from it those textual features that were most appropriate for their continued language growth.
No matter how well prepared a nonnative speaker instructor may be for each class, impasses are impossible to avoid. Yet, echoing the positive evaluation graduate students in the Koike and Liskin-Gasparro study had given their nonnativeness, Sprang reported they felt empowered by the teacher’s occasional “performance gaps.” The knowledge that their nonnative teacher was struggling with issues similar to those that they faced encouraged them to persevere.
Without a doubt teaching at the advanced level in this manner is hard work for nonnative instructors, who must spend substantial amounts of time preparing for class, rehearsing the modeling of presentations of a given text with the aid of its matrix to guide and support their own performance, and studying the list of lexical sentence stems needed to enable them to address issues of textual organization and analysis. But the experience can be particularly fulfilling: with less and less scaffolding, Sprang was gradually able to perform on a par with educated native speakers, to describe and discuss texts elegantly, fluently, and cohesively in ways that had not been possible before. As a result the comments of the vast majority of students on their end-of-semester course reviews, that the experience was strenuous but deeply satisfying, also described the instructor’s experience.
Courses that explicitly link content and language learning are rare in the pedagogical practices of FL departments, and they are able to foster advanced L2 abilities—what our department’s goals call the development of multiple literacies—only when they are embedded in a total curricular environment. All other evidence aside, a look at the extensive support that education in the native-language environment provides should convince us of several things. First, these abilities do not simply occur naturally as part of language development. Second, they cannot be handled with only one course. Third, they constitute a complex configuration of both general cognitive and knowledge-based abilities and language-specific features. In other words, they cannot be presumed to transfer readily into a second-language environment without carefully considered instructional interventions that reside at the discourse level.
Given that curricular contexts are missing, we explored intellectual resources that departments might draw on for such a reconsideration of their programs. We found a particularly conducive environment in systemic-functional linguistics with an emphasis on genre and a broad orientation that takes the development of multiple literacies as a worthy encompassing intellectual and practical goal for collegiate FL education, at the undergraduate and the graduate level. A short-term and highly specific benefit would be to enhance both undergraduate learning and the graduate students’ teaching abilities as well as their second language learning. That a genre approach at the same time provides a comprehensive framework for all the profession’s work recommends it all the more strongly for its long-term consequences, among them a way of overcoming the often bifurcated educational setting so typical of graduate departments, even when most institutions where these graduate students will find employment respond to different institutional dynamics.
While we hope that our proposal is read as meritorious in and of itself, our interests extend into these larger professional issues. We wish to contribute to a discussion whose final outcome is not only that college FL programs explicitly acknowledge and take on the responsibility of leading their students, undergraduate and graduate, to advanced levels of performance but also that those programs become whole internally and in the view of the public, as they embrace, with intellectual creativity and professional responsiveness, the current societal context for foreign language education, a context that critically includes the development of multiple literacies in multicultural societies.
2A useful summary of this matter is provided in Koike and Liskin-Gasparro. The authors relate some of the research on the construct of near-native performance ability and also lay out the complex history of its gaining currency in the FL profession through the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) proficiency level descriptors and assessment practices. Having been used for quite some time in the Foreign Service Institute, these descriptors provided the foundation for the development of the ACTFL proficiency scale; its mode of assessment of speaking abilities; and, most important for our discussion, the extensive transfer of those experiences into nearly all FL curricular and instructional contexts where language learning, narrowly construed, was at issue.
3See Kramsch (“Constructions”) for an interesting look at how ESL learners of varying language backgrounds interpreted the purpose of a summary differently in a writing assignment.
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