A Forecast for Tertiary Foreign-Language Education in the United States

AbstractThe paper suggests that among reasons for the difficulties collegiate foreign language (FL) programs in the United States (and most likely elsewhere) encounter in assuring that their students attain the kind of upper-level multiple literacies necessary for engaging in sophisticated work with FL oral and written texts may be the fact that prevailing frameworks for capturing FL performance, development, and assessment are insufficient for envisioning such textually oriented learning goals. The result of this mismatch between dominant frameworks, typically associated with communicative language teaching, and the goals of literary cultural studies programs as humanities programs is that collegiate FL departments and their faculty members face serious obstacles in their efforts to create the kind of coherent, comprehensive, and principled curricula that would be necessary for overcoming what are already extraordinary challenges in an educational environment that provides little support for long-term, sustained efforts at language development toward advanced multiple literacies. The paper traces these links by examining three such frameworks in the United States: the Proficiency framework of the 1980s, based on the ACTFL oral proficiency interview, the Standards framework of the 1990s, part of a more general standards movement in U.S. education, and the most recent document, by the Modern Language Association (MLA), which focuses on the need for new curricular structures in collegiate FL education. Specifically, it provides an overview of the U.S. educational landscape with an eye toward the considerable influence such frameworks can have in the absence of a comprehensive language education policy; lays out key characteristics that would be necessary for a viable approach to collegiate FL education; probes the complex effects the three frameworks have had in collegiate FL programs; and explores how one department sought to counter-act their detrimental influence in order to affirm and realize a humanistically oriented approach to FL education. The paper concludes with overall observations about the increasing power of frameworks to set educational goals and ways to counteract their potentially unwelcome consequences.

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National Standards: Research into practice

Language Teaching ◽

10.1017/s0261444812000249 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 45 (4) ◽

pp. 515-526 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Eileen W. Glisan

Keyword(s):

Foreign Language ◽

Language Learning ◽

Course Design ◽

Foreign Language Learning ◽

Language Education ◽

The United States ◽

Foreign Language Education ◽

Language Instruction ◽

National Standards ◽

The Impact

The Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (SFLL) (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project [NSFLEP]), originally published in 1996, were envisioned by many as the panacea for providing a new and exciting direction for foreign language education in the United States. The perceived impact of these National K-16 Student Standards has been witnessed throughout more than a decade by scholarly works that have acknowledged their role as ‘a veritable change agent’ (Sharpley-Whiting 1999: 84), ‘a vision for foreign language education in the new century’ (Allen 2002: 518), and, more recently, as ‘a blueprint and framework for change’ (Terry 2009: 17). The research that has been done on the Standards since their inception has attempted to provide concrete ways for the field to embrace this new framework and thereby realize a Standards-based curriculum and perhaps even revolutionize language education. This work has consisted largely of (1) implementational research (both with and without experimental design) that proposes specific strategies for addressing the Standards in planning, teaching, and assessment (Schwartz & Kavanaugh 1997; Abbott & Lear 2010); (2) survey research that analyzes self-reported information regarding teachers' pedagogical beliefs about the Standards and ways in which they claim to be addressing Standards in their classrooms (Allen 2002; ACTFL 2011), and (3) White papers that disseminate opinions and insights by leaders in the field regarding the impact that the Standards are having in areas such as language instruction, curriculum and course design, and educational policy (Sharpley-Whiting 1999; Donato 2009; Glisan 2010).

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The Modes of Governmentality in Language Education

Interactive Media Use and Youth ◽

10.4018/978-1-60960-206-2.ch009 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 149-167

Author(s):

Neriko Doerr ◽

Shinji Sato

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Foreign Language ◽

Language Learners ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Language Education ◽

The United States ◽

Foreign Language Learners ◽

Language Class ◽

Teacher Student

This chapter discusses the validity of incorporating blog activities in language education classes as an equalizing practice. The authors examine blog activities aimed at providing a way for foreign language learners to communicate in a space free from any teacher-student hierarchy as part of a Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language class at a university in the United States. The authors show that a teacher-student hierarchy still seeps into the blog space, albeit in a different form. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of modes of governmentality, they analyze how the blog’s postings and readers’ comments define the space of a particular blog by evoking modes of governmentality of schooling and of “native” vs. “non-native” speakers. They suggest the importance of acknowledging the existence of relations of dominance in what was initially perceived to be a power-free online space and encourage educators who use blogs in classes to involve learners in the understanding and transformation of such relations of dominance.

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Research Directions and Implications

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0267190500003160 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

pp. 241-249

Author(s):

G. Richard Tucker

Keyword(s):

Foreign Language ◽

Language Education ◽

The United States ◽

Foreign Language Education ◽

Industrialized Countries ◽

Language Attrition ◽

Research Directions ◽

Primary And Secondary Education ◽

Broad Domain ◽

Demographic Patterns

A variety of factors will converge during the latter part of the 1980s which lend urgency to the need to continue to implement a series of research agendas within the broad domain of bilingualism. Among these, changes in demographic patterns with the resultant movement of peoples across national, political, or linguistic boundaries; pressures toward universal primary (and secondary) education—particularly in ethnolinguistically heterogeneous developing countries, and pressures for improved foreign language education in industrialized countries—particularly in the United States—will lead us to want to examine thoroughly the array of factors associated with second language teaching or learning and with the personal and social correlates and consequences of bilinguality or language attrition.

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