No abstract

No abstract

This is a revised version of a paper presented within the lecture series National Standards and Instructional Strategies for Foreign Language Teaching, held at the Language Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 19 October 2006. Curricular articulation and the integration of cultural knowledge with language development over extended sequences are among the most persistent challenges for contemporary language teaching and learning. The paper examines the nature of those challenges in light of theories of language and culture while using as the site of investigation the culture standards that have been developed within the framework of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning, a key document for L2 education in the United States, particularly at the K-12 level. Taking four perspectives, it suggests ways in which simultaneous content and language teaching might be tackled through a genre-based way of constructing extended curricula and by using genre-based tasks for informing pedagogical decisions. In this fashion, learners might be able to progress toward a competent cultural literacy that is language-based.

The article argues that prevailing approaches to educating graduate students as teachers need to be broadened conceptually and in practice. In particular, it suggests that preparing graduate students to teach constitutes only one component of a two-fold responsibility of graduate programs: to educate their students both as researchers and as teachers. To establish this linkage, graduate departments require a comprehensive intellectual-academic center that touches upon all practices of its members, faculty, and graduate students, in research and teaching. The paper suggests that a carefully conceptualized, integrated 4-year, content-oriented and task-based curriculum with a literacy focus provides such an intellectual core. By overcoming the traditional split of language and content, it invites a reconsideration of current practices in teaching and in the relationship of teaching and research. The article elaborates these issues through a case study in one graduate department, focusing on the implications of a reconfigured departmental culture for graduate students' education as teachers and for their socialization into the profession. It concludes with observations about the nature and conditions of change in higher education.AS LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING in collegiate foreign language (FL) departments have become more professionalized, the preparation of graduate teaching assistants (TAs), too, has followed this path. It has done so by emphasizing language acquisition theory and research, the pedagogical consequences brought on by communicative language teaching, and program planning, administration, and assessment, as well as by carefully supervising students as they perform diverse instructional or programmatic tasks.Great strides have been made as a result of these changes. However, further advances run up against two inherent limitations. First, they confront the reality of academically and structurally bifurcated FL departments divided into a "language" and a "content" portion. Second, because of this split, supervisors, coordinators, and directors of FL programs who are responsible for improving the preparation of graduate TAs for teaching cannot pursue the range of possibilities that best practice in adult FL pedagogy and in the education of future teachers suggests, nor can they generally affect language-learning goals and pedagogies in non-language classes, even though language learning is expected to take place in that environment.These structural and positional realities highlight a deep indecision within the profession over the relationship between knowledge and language and, by extension, the nature of language learning. On the one hand, both traditional literature and cultural studies departments assert an intimate, even symbiotic relationship between knowledge or culture and language. Indeed, FL departments are defined by the fact that their students are, in complex ways, simultaneously knowledge acquirers and language learners, in the first language (L1) and the second language (L2). On the o...

No abstract