Overcoming Curricular Bifurcation: A Departmental Approach to Curriculum Reform¹

Abstract

The collegiate foreign language profession has become increasingly aware of the unnecessarily detrimental effects of bifurcated curricula on student learning and departmental governance, yet there have been few instances to date of departments that have been able to achieve unified, articulated programs of study. This article presents one foreign language department's initiatives and activities to do just that. We describe the collaborative process that the German Studies Department at Emory University underwent in its full-scale revision of the undergraduate curriculum. The chairperson begins the description by explaining his role in the reform process. Other faculty members continue the description by outlining the institutional and department context, the impetus for reform, the curriculum's theoretical framework, and the different curricular levels. An ongoing, multi-year project, the revised curriculum has placed demands on students and faculty but also indicated promise for enhanced departmental identity and student learning. § It is no secret that collegiate foreign language (FL) education has been leading a bifurcated existence for decades. The divided departmental structure that characterizes much of the profession has been documented, discussed, and deconstructed in leading professional journals, including the ADFL addressed and problematized this curricular and structural bifurcation. Perhaps the central characteristic of this division is the separation between so-called "language" courses at the lower level and so-called "content" courses at the upper level, which manifests itself further through the divergent pedagogies (communicative approaches vs. literary and cultural analysis) and competencies (speaking vs. reading/writing) that are prioritized at the two levels. Such differences reflect, in turn, differing notions of language and language acquisition. Whereas lower-level instruction frames lan-1 1 A shorter version of this article was presented at the 2010 AATG Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. MAXIM, HÖYNG, LANCASTER, SCHAUMANN, & AUE: OVERCOMING CURRICULAR BIFURCATION 3 3Although not necessarily focused on collegiate FL education, Systemic Functional Linguistics (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), particularly in its work on genre, provides promising research and theoretical frameworks that have important applications for supporting articulated FL curriculum construction. 4 The German Studies Department at Emory offers a major and minor in German Studies and currently graduates each year roughly 15 majors and minors combined. In the past five years, total enrollment in German classes has averaged around 200 students each semester. The department typically offers each semester 5 sections of first-year German, 3 sections of second-year German, and 1 section each of Level 3, 4, and 5.

Global simulation as a mediating tool for teaching and learning language and culture as discourse

“…These more recent views of literacy have called for foreign language (FL) pedagogies that promote language learning as processes of coming to recognize the sociocultural, historical, and ideological contexts of the production and dissemination of texts, the individual and situated interpretations of texts, and the ways in which meanings are expressed through multiple communication modes. In recent years, scholars in applied linguistics and FL education have sought to bring these nuances to light, calling for increased attention to the ways in which culture and language are bound together and expressed through discourse (Kern, ; Kramsch, ) and advocating for language and literacy development through text‐centered curricula and critical reflection on language choice in processes of textual interpretation and production (Allen, ; Allen & Paesani, ; Byrnes, ; Byrnes, Crane, Maxim, & Sprang, ; Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, ; Maxim, ; Maxim, Höyng, Lancaster, Schaumann, & Aue, ; Paesani, ; Swaffar & Arens, ). Such projects have aimed to move beyond what many scholars have articulated as limitations to the three‐decade‐long predominant approach of communicative language teaching in lower‐level collegiate FL instruction (Byrnes et al, ; Kern, ; Kramsch, ; Magnan, ; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, ; Schulz, ; Swaffar, ), where the focus is primarily on transactional, oral language usage with little attention to the situated and variable nature of all language use.…”

Student and faculty perceptions of writing in a foreign language studies major

“…Changing practices in higher education is laborious: "[n]ew directions evolve slowly … and … major adjustments in educational vision, goals, and curricula are difficult to accomplish" (Byrnes et al, 2010, p. 11). Despite repeated calls for curricular change and isolated reports of successful curricular revision projects (Byrnes et al, 2010;Maxim, Höyng, Lancaster, Schaumann, & Aue, 2013;Paesani, 2017), substantive changes in the field as a whole have not occurred (Levine, Chavez, Crane, Melin, & Lovik, 2008;Lord & Lomicka, 2018). Swaffar (2014) highlighted the need for "a unified effort" to bring about change, and while the participating program has begun this process, findings point to the need for additional work in order for the articulated outcomes to substantively modify long-held practices.…”

Researching literacies and textual thinking in collegiate foreign language programs: Reflections and recommendations

“…The curriculum, which adopts a literacy‐ and genre‐based approach, is organized into five levels that progressively develop students’ advanced language abilities through interaction with texts representing a range of personal (e.g., personal narratives, casual conversations) and public (e.g., documentaries, academic articles) genres. The empirical work arising from this project has been widely cited in applied linguistics scholarship and has inspired course‐level and curricular change in a variety of contexts, including the second noteworthy model: the retooled undergraduate German curriculum at Emory University (Maxim, Höyng, Lancaster, Schaumann, & Aue, ). The construct of genre was also applied in this context to develop a holistic and articulated undergraduate curricular sequence whose goal is to develop “advanced, culturally literate users of German who would be able to function successfully in a range of professional contexts” (Maxim et al, , p. 5).…”

“…The empirical work arising from this project has been widely cited in applied linguistics scholarship and has inspired course‐level and curricular change in a variety of contexts, including the second noteworthy model: the retooled undergraduate German curriculum at Emory University (Maxim, Höyng, Lancaster, Schaumann, & Aue, ). The construct of genre was also applied in this context to develop a holistic and articulated undergraduate curricular sequence whose goal is to develop “advanced, culturally literate users of German who would be able to function successfully in a range of professional contexts” (Maxim et al, , p. 5). Finally, a third and smaller‐scale curricular model is the introductory French program at Wayne State University (Paesani, ).…”