This is part of whatI have been trying to do away with. There *can* be a conection between the language teacher sat the university level and the tenured faculty.
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19 Feb 15
Courtney GlaitProblems with how foreign languages are taught in the US
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National defense and security agendas, which often arise during times of crisis, tend to focus the goals of language study narrowly. The standard configuration of university foreign language curricula, in which a two- or three-year language sequence feeds into a set of core courses primarily focused on canonical literature, also represents a narrow model.
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Foreign language instructors often work entirely outside departmental power structures and have little or no say in the educational mission of their department, even in areas where they have particular expertise.
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- Achieve enough proficiency in the language to converse with educated native speakers on a level that allows both linguistic exchanges and metalinguistic exchanges (that is, discussion about the language itself).
- Have a solid command as well as an analytic knowledge of specific metaphors and key terms that inform culture.
- Understand how a particular background reality is reestablished on a daily basis through cultural subsystems
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But to attract students from other fields and students with interests beyond literary studies, particularly students returning from a semester or a year abroad, departments should institute courses that address a broad range of curricular needs. Most students studying abroad do not major in departments of languages and literatures, but they can be drawn to courses where they continue to develop their language skills and enrich their cultural knowledge.
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- Encourage departments to set clear standards of achievement for undergraduate majors in speaking, reading, writing, and comprehension and to develop the programming necessary to meet these standards.
- Establish language requirements (or levels of competence) for undergraduate students majoring in fields such as international studies, history, anthropology, music, art history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and linguistics, as well as for students preparing for careers in law, medicine, and engineering.
- Encourage departments to enforce language requirements in doctoral programs and to provide courses that enable students both to acquire genuinely usable linguistic skills and to apply those skills in research.
- Work with colleagues in the social sciences and in policy-oriented departments to strengthen language requirements in the design of their majors and graduate programs and encourage these colleagues to recognize the limits monolingualism imposes on research.
- Enhance and reward graduate student training in languages and in language teaching. Teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning. Ensure that doctoral programs include funding for research abroad and language work.
- Encourage foundations to insist on language expertise when projects require it and to fund language acquisition when it is needed for research purposes; that is, make it possible to build language learning into a grant application.
- Promote faculty learning of new languages and increased competence in languages already in use. Encourage administrations to fund tutors or subsidize summers abroad for faculty members whose research projects call for language expertise. Encourage the National Endowment for the Humanities and other granting organizations to make fellowships available for this purpose.
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- Promote alliances between K–12 educators and college and university faculty members to strengthen language learning at all levels and to foster collaboration.
- Develop programs for gifted learners, especially in the precollegiate years. Push for enriched, intensified programs for those learners on college campuses.
- Broaden the range of languages taught. In particular, add locally spoken languages to the curriculum. Seek out heritage learners and design a curriculum that meets their needs. Encourage heritage speakers to learn additional languages.
- Adopt and promote best practices for heritage-language teaching such as those developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics.
- Develop programs in translation and interpretation. There is a great unmet demand for educated translators and interpreters, and translation is an ideal context for developing translingual and transcultural abilities as an organizing principle of the language curriculum.
- Develop intensive courses and, whenever possible, language-intensive or immersion semesters during which students take multiple courses in the major simultaneously.
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- Insist on study abroad whenever possible and require courses in the target language. Push administrators to develop financial aid support for study abroad. Provide appropriate courses for students returning from abroad.
- Increase the number of guest speakers on campus who lecture in languages other than English.
- Make sure campus media centers feature television programs and newspapers in languages other than English. Feature (subtitled) foreign language films for broad campus audiences.
- Through a language center or other structure, develop a forum for the exchange of ideas and expertise among language instructors from all departments. Such structures prove invaluable in boosting the morale of teachers and improving the quality of professional and intellectual life.
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27 May 13
Stephanie BeckThe MLA discusses new goals for language education in the United States. The proposed changes call for a greater involvement in interdisciplinary approaches and transcultural understanding.
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Competence
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Translingual
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Transcultural
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In the course of acquiring functional language abilities, students are taught critical language awareness, interpretation and translation, historical and political consciousness, social sensibility, and aesthetic perception. They acquire a basic knowledge of the history, geography, culture, and literature of the society or societies whose language they are learning; the ability to understand and interpret its radio, television, and print media; and the capacity to do research in the language using parameters specific to the target culture.
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One possible model defines transcultural understanding as the ability to comprehend and analyze the cultural narratives that appear in every kind of expressive form--from essays, fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, humor, advertising, political rhetoric, and legal documents to performance, visual forms, and music.
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- Achieve enough proficiency in the language to converse with educated native speakers on a level that allows both linguistic exchanges and metalinguistic exchanges (that is, discussion about the language itself).
- Have a solid command as well as an analytic knowledge of specific metaphors and key terms that inform culture.
- Understand how a particular background reality is reestablished on a daily basis through cultural subsystems such as:
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cross-cultural reflection
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The presence of linguists and second language acquisition specialists on language department faculties is also an essential part of this vision.
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Linguists enrich the foreign language major through their ability to offer courses in second language acquisition, applied linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, history of the language, and discourse analysis. In addition to learning the history and underlying structure of a particular language, students should be offered the opportunity to take general courses in such areas as language and cognition, language and power, bilingualism, language and identity, language and gender, language and myth, language and artificial intelligence, and language and the imagination. These courses appeal broadly to students who major in languages as well as to those who do not.
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structure in which all members contribute to defining and carrying out a shared educational mission.
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it is crucial that tenure-line faculty members have a hand in teaching language courses and in shaping and overseeing the content and teaching approaches used throughout the curriculum, from the first year forward.
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instructors who are able to develop and teach broad-based courses aimed at producing the translingual and transcultural competencies described above.
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graduate studies should provide substantive training in language teaching and in the use of new technologies in addition to cultivating extensive disciplinary knowledge and strong analytic and writing skills.
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04 Apr 13
Bobby WhiteThe Modern Language Association supports a broad, intellectually driven approach to teaching language and culture in higher education. To study the best ways of implementing this approach in today's world, the MLA Executive Council established an Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, chaired by Mary Louise Pratt, who served as the association's president in 2003
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<!--googleon: index-->Home > Professional Resources > Surveys, Reports, and Other Documents > Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World
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25 Oct 12
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25 Feb 12
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18 Jan 12
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28 Nov 11
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20 Nov 11
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16 Jun 10
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30 Apr 10
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13 Jan 10
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07 May 09
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08 Apr 09
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11 Feb 09
LRC MHCThe Modern Language Association supports a broad, intellectually driven approach to teaching language and culture in higher education. To study the best ways of implementing this approach in today's world, the MLA Executive Council established an Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. The committee was charged with examining the current language crisis that has occurred as a result of 9/11 and with considering the effects of this crisis on the teaching of foreign languages in colleges and universities. This summary of the committee's and the Executive Council's deliberations offers background and context for the association's recommendations regarding the challenges and opportunities facing language study in higher education. While the recommendations address issues specific to the United States, they may be applicable to other contexts and countries.
mla foreign languages language education world languages higher education
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29 Dec 08
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31 Aug 08
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04 Aug 08
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, "the need to understand other cultures and languages" was identified by Daniel Yankelovich as one of five imperative needs to which higher education must respond in the next ten years if it is to remain relevant. "Our whole culture," Yankelovich says, "must become less ethnocentric, less patronizing, less ignorant of others, less Manichaean in judging other cultures, and more at home with the rest of the world. Higher education can do a lot to meet that important challenge."
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The goals and means of language study, however, continue to be hotly debated.
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The two-tiered configuration has outlived its usefulness and needs to evolve.
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Replacing the two-tiered language-literature structure with a broader and more coherent curriculum in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuous whole, supported by alliances with other departments and expressed through interdisciplinary courses, will reinvigorate language departments as valuable academic units central to the humanities and to the missions of institutions of higher learning
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The idea of translingual and transcultural competence, in contrast, places value on the ability to operate between languages.
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Students are educated to function as informed and capable interlocutors with educated native speakers in the target language. They are also trained to reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture. They learn to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies and to grasp themselves as Americans--that is, as members of a society that is foreign to others. They also learn to relate to fellow members of their own society who speak languages other than English.
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In the course of acquiring functional language abilities, students are taught critical language awareness, interpretation and translation, historical and political consciousness, social sensibility, and aesthetic perception. They acquire a basic knowledge of the history, geography, culture, and literature of the society or societies whose language they are learning; the ability to understand and interpret its radio, television, and print media; and the capacity to do research in the language using parameters specific to the target culture.
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One possible model defines transcultural understanding as the ability to comprehend and analyze the cultural narratives that appear in every kind of expressive form--from essays, fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, humor, advertising, political rhetoric, and legal documents to performance, visual forms, and music.
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Language departments will need to undertake a similar mapping of content to produce unified, four-year curricula that situate language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames; that systematically incorporate transcultural content and translingual reflection at every level; and that organize the major around explicit, principled educational goals and expected outcomes. A curriculum should consist of a series of complementary or linked courses that holistically incorporate content and cross-cultural reflection at every level.
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12 May 08
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07 May 08
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At one end, language is considered to be principally instrumental, a skill to use for communicating thought and information. At the opposite end, language is understood as an essential element of a human being's thought processes, perceptions, and self-expressions; and as such it is considered to be at the core of translingual and transcultural competence.
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university and college foreign language departments tend to emphasize the constitutive aspect of language and its relation to cultural and literary traditions, cognitive structures, and historical knowledge
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Add Sticky NoteAt doctorate-granting institutions, cooperation or even exchange between the two groups is usually minimal or nonexistent. Foreign language instructors often work entirely outside departmental power structures and have little or no say in the educational mission of their department, even in areas where they have particular expertise.
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It would be difficult to exaggerate the frustration this rigid and hierarchical model evokes among language specialists who work under its conditions. Their antagonism is not toward the study of literature--far from it--but toward the organization of literary study in a way that monopolizes the upper-division curriculum, devalues the early years of language learning, and impedes the development of a unified language-and-content curriculum across the four-year college or university sequence.
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The more autonomous group--the literature faculty--may find it difficult to see the advantages of sharing some of its decision-making power over the curriculum as a whole. We hope to convince this group that it is in our common interest to devise new models.
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Replacing the two-tiered language-literature structure with a broader and more coherent curriculum in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuous whole, supported by alliances with other departments and expressed through interdisciplinary courses, will reinvigorate language departments as valuable academic units central to the humanities and to the missions of institutions of higher learning.
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Add Sticky NoteIn our view, foreign language departments, if they are to be meaningful players in higher education--or, indeed, if they are to thrive as autonomous units--must transform their programs and structure.
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Esatto!
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One possible model defines transcultural understanding as the ability to comprehend and analyze the cultural narratives that appear in every kind of expressive form--from essays, fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, humor, advertising, political rhetoric, and legal documents to performance, visual forms, and music
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- Understand how a particular background reality is reestablished on a daily basis through cultural subsystems such as:
the mass medialiterary and artistic works as projection and investigation of a nation's self-understandingthe social and historical narratives in literary texts, artistic works, the legal system, the political system, the educational system, the economic system, and the social welfare systemlocal instances of major scientific and scholarly paradigmssports or other leisure activities, the cultural metaphors these have created, and their relation to the national imaginationstereotypes, of both self and others, as they are developed and negotiated through textssymbols or sites of memory in the broadest sense, including buildings, historical figures, popular heroes, monuments, currency, culture-specific products, literary and artistic canons, landscapes, fashion, and cuisinemajor competing traditions such as views of the nation that are secularist or fundamentalist or religiouslocal historiography
- Understand how a particular background reality is reestablished on a daily basis through cultural subsystems such as:
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situate language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames
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incorporate transcultural content and translingual reflection at every level;
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organize the major around explicit, principled educational goals and expected outcomes
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But to attract students from other fields and students with interests beyond literary studies, particularly students returning from a semester or a year abroad, departments should institute courses that address a broad range of curricular needs
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Interdisciplinary courses are typically taught in English, but a credit-bearing discussion module taught in the target language can be added with the support of programs such as foreign languages across the curriculum
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Add Sticky Notefaculty members participating in team-taught courses could be encouraged to lead these discussion sessions as part of their teaching load
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This is perfect for Penny's course with Snowden
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This approach should appeal to administrators who wish to promote interdisciplinary courses, particularly those taught by several faculty members
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While language faculty members are expected to use methodologies that develop students' competencies in reading, writing, and oral expression as preparation for upper-level courses, it is crucial that tenure-line faculty members have a hand in teaching language courses and in shaping and overseeing the content and teaching approaches used throughout the curriculum, from the first year forward
-
graduate studies should provide substantive training in language teaching and in the use of new technologies
-
Promote alliances between K–12 educators and college and university faculty members to strengthen language learning at all levels and to foster collaboration
-
Develop programs in translation and interpretation. There is a great unmet demand for educated translators and interpreters, and translation is an ideal context for developing translingual and transcultural abilities as an organizing principle of the language curriculum
-
Add Sticky NoteDevelop intensive courses and, whenever possible, language-intensive or immersion semesters during which students take multiple courses in the major simultaneously
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Insanely important!
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Add Sticky NoteInsist on study abroad whenever possible and require courses in the target language. Push administrators to develop financial aid support for study abroad
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Also insanely important!
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Add Sticky NoteProvide appropriate courses for students returning from abroad.
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We need to do this!
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03 May 08
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03 Mar 08
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28 Nov 07
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inability to communicate with or comprehend other parts of the world became a prominent subject for journalists, as language failures of all kinds plagued the United States' military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and its efforts to suppress terrorism
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sense of crisis around what came to be called the nation's language deficit
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As recent world events have demonstrated, deep cultural knowledge and linguistic competence are equally necessary if one wishes to understand people and their communities
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The standard configuration of university foreign language curricula, in which a two- or three-year language sequence feeds into a set of core courses primarily focused on canonical literature, also represents a narrow model
-
At doctorate-granting institutions, cooperation or even exchange between the two groups is usually minimal or nonexistent. Foreign language instructors often work entirely outside departmental power structures and have little or no say in the educational mission of their department, even in areas where they have particular expertise
-
Their antagonism is not toward the study of literature--far from it--but toward the organization of literary study in a way that monopolizes the upper-division curriculum, devalues the early years of language learning, and impedes the development of a unified language-and-content curriculum across the four-year college or university sequence. This two-track model endows one set of language professionals not only with autonomy in designing their curricula but also with the power to set the goals that the other set of professionals must pursue. In this model, humanists do research while language specialists provide technical support and basic training. The more autonomous group--the literature faculty--may find it difficult to see the advantages of sharing some of its decision-making power over the curriculum as a whole. We hope to convince this group that it is in our common interest to devise new models.
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the ability to operate between languages
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This kind of foreign language education systematically teaches differences in meaning, mentality, and worldview as expressed in American English and in the target language. Literature, film, and other media are used to challenge students' imaginations and to help them consider alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding things. In the course of acquiring functional language abilities, students are taught critical language awareness, interpretation and translation, historical and political consciousness, social sensibility, and aesthetic perception. They acquire a basic knowledge of the history, geography, culture, and literature of the society or societies whose language they are learning; the ability to understand and interpret its radio, television, and print media; and the capacity to do research in the language using parameters specific to the target culture.
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We expect that more students will continue language study if courses incorporate cultural inquiry at all levels and if advanced courses address more subject areas.
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organize the major around explicit, principled educational goals and expected outcomes
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A curriculum should consist of a series of complementary or linked courses that holistically incorporate content and cross-cultural reflection at every level
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This approach should appeal to administrators who wish to promote interdisciplinary courses, particularly those taught by several faculty members. Focused, for instance, on a period, an issue, or a literary genre, these courses would present an in-depth study of cross-cultural influences. Examples include courses on the Crusades in the Middle Ages; the Silk Road; literature and opera; the sonnet across four national literatures; turn-of-the-century Vienna, Paris, and London; literature and science; and interconnections between Germany and the United States. In addition to attracting majors from other disciplines, such interdisciplinary team-taught courses would encourage learning communities, forge alliances among departments, and counter the isolation and marginalization that language and literature departments often experience on American campuses. To those who may think it unrealistic to expect collaboration involving language and literature teaching, we would point out that strategies in place at many institutions, like team teaching and linked courses, prove that such collaboration works
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The new courses and programs we recommend should not be developed exclusively by tenure-track scholars trained primarily in literature. The work of revamping and unifying the language department curriculum can only be carried out through a sustained collaboration among all members of the teaching corps, including tenure-line faculty members and those with contingent and long-term appointments in all related fields, such as linguistics, literature, and language pedagogy. Faculty members trained in fields such as media, area studies, performance studies, film, religion, and art history are increasingly part of foreign language department hiring patterns. This trend, along with joint appointments between language departments and related departments and programs, supports the kind of change proposed here
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While language faculty members are expected to use methodologies that develop students' competencies in reading, writing, and oral expression as preparation for upper-level courses, it is crucial that tenure-line faculty members have a hand in teaching language courses and in shaping and overseeing the content and teaching approaches used throughout the curriculum, from the first year forward. This vision requires departments, in both tenure-track and non-tenure-track searches, to look for instructors who are able to develop and teach broad-based courses aimed at producing the translingual and transcultural competencies described above
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Four-year language majors often graduate with disappointingly low levels of linguistic ability. Opportunities to study abroad and to do course work in the target language are eroding in favor of short-term study in which courses are in English. In addition, the need to work prevents many students from studying abroad at all
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Encourage departments to set clear standards of achievement for undergraduate majors in speaking, reading, writing, and comprehension and to develop the programming necessary to meet these standards
-
Enhance and reward graduate student training in languages and in language teaching. Teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning. Ensure that doctoral programs include funding for research abroad and language work
-
Promote faculty learning of new languages and increased competence in languages already in use. Encourage administrations to fund tutors or subsidize summers abroad for faculty members whose research projects call for language expertise. Encourage the National Endowment for the Humanities and other granting organizations to make fellowships available for this purpose
-
Promote alliances between K–12 educators and college and university faculty members to strengthen language learning at all levels and to foster collaboration
-
Develop intensive courses and, whenever possible, language-intensive or immersion semesters during which students take multiple courses in the major simultaneously
-
Through a language center or other structure, develop a forum for the exchange of ideas and expertise among language instructors from all departments. Such structures prove invaluable in boosting the morale of teachers and improving the quality of professional and intellectual life
-
Public Stiky Notes
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