Updating the Foreign Language Agenda

Abstract

At the founding of the National Foreign Language Center in 1987, several major structural problems facing the field of foreign language (FL) instruction were identified in an editorial in The Modern Language Journal. These broad architectural issues are part of a national agenda for change, both here and abroad, and have been the focus of the NFLC's activities since its establishment. The agenda issues identified in the article are: evaluating language competency; articulating instruction across educational levels and the different contexts in which FLs are taught; increasing the range of languages taught and studied; achieving higher levels of language skills; promoting language competency and use among adults; expanding research and maximizing its impact on FL teaching and learning; and assessing and diffusing new technologies in instructional practice, with particular attention to Internet communication, machine translation, and distance education. The article briefly indicates the nature of these challenges and notes the progress that has been made.WHEN THE NATIONAL FOREIGN LANGUAGE Center (NFLC) was founded in the fall of 1986 some fundamental architectural problems in our foreign language (FL) instructional system were identified. To quote the case statement for the establishment of the center (Lambert, 1987):(1) the skills it imparts are too low and too scholastic;(2) the languages taught were appropriate for the nineteenth century but not for the twenty-first; 3) the ways of measuring skill acquisition are outmoded; 4) the levels of instruction are totally unarticulated so that the cumulative aspect of skill acquisition by a student is unattended and accidental; and 5) no one knows or seems concerned about how much of early foreign language training survives to be available for adult use. (p. 1) At the time, a number of the professional language associations found this diagnosis overly critical (Franklin, 1986;Jacobson, 1986). A better description would have been short-term. Whatever its accuracy in 1986, over the years since then great progress has been made on a number of the issues raised. It may be helpful to note that progress and to indicate what remains to be done in each of those aspects of the national agenda. These national agenda items are discussed below under the headings of: evaluation, articulation, upper-level skills, adult language learning and use, language choice, research and innovation, and technology. EVALUATIONOn one of the agenda items, the need for a common evaluation metric, great progress has been made through the remarkably successful national effort to adopt the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency ratings and testing technology. This effort has not only brought us closer to a single common metric, but the effect of the diffusion of the ACTFL standards on the modernizing of language pedagogy has been impressive. It is uncertain what the impact of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standards will have on FL teaching, and, in ...

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