Department of German

Session sponsored by the Division on Teaching as a Profession

Session Title: Preparing the Future Professoriat

MLA 2002, New York
December 30, 2002

The Future Professoriat in Foreign Languages: Between Competence and Performance

Heidi Byrnes
German Department, Georgetown University

Introduction

Within the overall topic of this session I will address the preparation of the future professoriat in the foreign language field.

I am guided by these considerations: future faculty will lead their professional lives in enormously varied institutional contexts and under significantly different intellectual and sociopolitical conditions signs than those that shaped past professional conduct, indeed contributed to the construction of our "profession" in the first place. Even then two desiderata hold: they should be enabled to lead intellectually and personally rewarding and fulfilling lives in the two primary forms of practice and engagement that characterize college faculty, research and teaching. Therefore graduate programs must take care to educate them to make valued, long-term contributions to the work of departments, institutions, and a changing FL profession in a range of scholarly areas; and they are to educate them to make knowledgeable and competent choices in the full range of teaching contexts they will encounter.

To the extent that professional discussion has not addressed these concerns, we are challenged to take a more encompassing perspective. I will come to call this a multiple literacies perspective that makes central construct of genre. My reflections are devoted to laying out the motivation for such an approach and how it might resituate the intellectual and praxis-oriented preparation of the future foreign language professoriate in a less dichotomous space than the one most of us currently occupy, a site "between competence and performance."

An overview of outstanding issues

Over the last decade or so, considerable unanimity has developed about the major issues that foreign language professionals in U.S. higher education must address in relation to the content of their discipline and in relation to their status as members of a "profession," - a unanimity that, in our field, can all too easily become a substitute for inaction because it creates the impression that a solution has indeed been found. Leaving aside for the moment the obvious contradictions that inhere in redoing others, particularly those for whose education one bears responsibility, namely the graduate students, while one is struggling to redo oneself, it is useful nevertheless to survey the landscape of our field that the graduate students as future faculty already face now and will face with even greater urgency in their future academic careers.

Let me highlight five points:

• First, intellectual, historical, and demographic changes that relate to economic globalization, political regionalism at various levels, migration, and multiculturalism and multilingualism. These inherently undermine notions of language and language use that were originally developed and ideologized in the emerging 19^th century nation-state with its peculiar linkage to a standardized and normed single national language, the creation of an officially sanctioned monolingual citizenry through the educational system, and therefore, inherently, the creation of the native and the foreign.
• Second, a move from a near exclusive focus on national literatures to a cultural studies focus. As we are now much more keenly aware, that focus, too, was tied to the secular nation state and its need for encompassing ideational underpinnings while simultaneously suiting well the increasingly secular education establishment in the modern languages with its desire for intellectual and moral anchors and its claims for contributing to an enhanced human culture through the teaching of literature (Scholes). While recent developments have resulted in a generally welcome expansion of the literary canon and have produced considerable intellectual interest, not least because of their possibility for diverse interdisciplinary linkages (e.g., to philosophy, anthropology, sociology), among the major drawbacks of a cultural studies approach is its English monolingualism which, as Doris Kadish (1999) puts it "disregards linguistic difference in both its targeted audience and its subject matter", its heavy emphasis on theories that are both location and language-independent (Berman, 1998), and, ultimately, its lack of definition and coherence.
• Third, the programmatic split into a language learning and teaching component with little discernible content and a content focus, however defined, with little discernible attentiveness to the existing and the yet to be developed language abilities of students. The embrace of both communicative language teaching with its oral focus and also of language-independent often sociologically-based literary theorizing (Byrnes, 2002) have only heightened this already highly problematic dichotomy. Indeed, it has recently become institutionalized through the creation of Language Centers which are, to varying degrees, independent of the foreign language departments. The intention is to upgrade language instruction and learning for all students across a campus, a move that is to assure the presence of content beyond literature and also a pedagogical focus geared toward students' acquiring a kind of basic oral communicative ability in diverse personal and professional settings.
• Fourth, concern about the language abilities of all students, but particularly those who as undergraduate majors or as graduate students will ultimately themselves have a career in education, whether at the K-12 or at the college and university level. Not surprisingly, non-native graduate students experience great anxiety, during their graduate studies but particularly at the time of hiring (Koike and Liskin-Gasparro, 1999) when the criterion of native or near-native ability becomes both a formidable gatekeeper for the positions they seek and also represents a benchmark for language acquisition that is extraordinarily poorly understood and, in any case, ill conceived by the hiring faculty and department.
  
• Finally, demands for programmatic coherence, usually referred to as articulation, at all instructional levels, from grade school foreign language programs to junior high school and high school, from those secondary schooling environments into undergraduate collegiate programs and, ultimately into graduate programs. On the one hand, we can speak of external coherence that recognizes a very simple fact about language learning: it is a long-term, multi-year project that, for all its complexities, has major discernible stages that command being heeded programmatically and pedagogically. On the other hand, there are issues of internal coherence inasmuch as we focus on independent freestanding courses as the coin in our realm, deeply etched with an imagery and ideology of claims to academic freedom on the part of individual faculty members; we do not focus on the fact that these coins derive their value from the construct of a shared currency, an agreed-upon curriculum in the service of agreed-upon educational goals, from which the individual coins/courses derives their value.
  

Building our professional future on a new language focus

Upon closer inspection all five points are united by one common and critically important bond: all centrally involve the role that language does, can, and should play in collegiate foreign language departments and for any one of us as faculty and students. More specifically, at issue is the role of language or languages in our field of inquiry and therefore in our research interests and how we imagine knowledge to be created. At issue is also its role in our curricular and pedagogical practices, that is, in our teaching interests and how we imagine knowledge to be transmitted and acquired. In other words, I take language to be the pivotal point and the link, for the two areas of expertise and faculty engagement with which I began this talk. Let me already refer to this understanding of language as being literacy-based, a notion that I will subsequently explain further.

As we reflect on what such a new language focus might mean for the preparation of the future professoriat, I offer two cautionary notes. Much of the discussion about the necessary changes revolves around calls for a renewed emphasis on teaching and assumes that future faculty should embody in their professional practices a more equitable weighting of scholarship and teaching than is currently the case. Frequently, the recommendation is to pay more attention to teaching in our reward system. Indeed, you may well have interpreted my focus on teaching in just this fashion. However, to me that is rather a questionable solution, not merely because its instrumentalist approach looks remarkably like rearranging the deck furniture on the sinking ship but because it assumes that our teaching already incorporates in any substantive fashion the consequences of the five areas that I identified a few minutes ago. That, however, is decidedly not the case and it is imperative that we convey this to our graduate students in the strongest of terms.

Therefore, a second and related cautionary note is this: recognition of the pivotal role of the foreignness of our languages and cultures and the pivotal fact that both the language and culture have to be acquired by literate adults does not inherently mean that making changes in the domain of teaching is our most important action as we prepare the future professoriat. On the contrary, we must face head-on an insidious assumption: all too often any emphasis on the linguistic base of our work, on the foreignness of this language within its cultural context and on language acquisition falls under "teaching," and any emphasis on intellectual content constitutes research. As we prepare professionals to work successfully in our changing field we must break open that insidious pairing and gradually build up in them an encompassing intellectual framework that interprets all the work that is performed within the environment of a collegiate foreign language department -- most particularly its teaching and scholarship -- as being language-embedded and language-derived. We would then enable them to recognize and explore the specific language-embeddedness of the creation of new knowledge, which takes place in research, and also the specific language-embeddedness of the creation of shared knowledge, which takes place in the teaching-learning dyad. Either way, they would come to realize that the non-negotiable characteristic of that framework is the foreign or second or heritage language- in another words the language our students are in the process of acquiring to such a level of literacy that it can function as another educational language, that is, a language in which they will create both new and shared knowledge and through and in and with which they will, in due time, gain a certain degree of multiple cultural literacies.

In referring to literacies, and particularly in referring to students' developing multiple cultural literacies as the educational goal, I have presented what, in my experience in foreign language program revitalization, is a particularly felicitous construct and also a basis for institutional and individual praxes that are explicitly language-based in the way the foreign language field as a whole but future faculty in particular will need to learn to understand language. Let me explain this claim a bit more from the two primary perspectives, the literary-cultural and the language acquisitional, just what is at stake in a co-equal treatment of the two capacities that we wish to foster in the future professoriat, namely research and teaching, where, importantly, all four quadrants, will contribute to the realization of this newly conceived language base.

Beginning with the literary cultural side, it is not unimportant that Claire Kramsch, a self-identified applied linguist with a strong commitment to literary-cultural studies, is perhaps the most prolific advocate of language-based literary-cultural research. Specifically, she (2002) recommends a social semiotic perspective on language by pointing to its capacity to facilitate language-based answers to the kinds of broad questions that literary scholars ask, questions about narrativity or point of view and author stance and perspective, questions about imitation and metaphor, about intertextualities and intratextualities, about borrowings, echos and allusions. A social-semiotic approach also allows access to issues of cultural hybridity as cultural studies identifies and seeks to clarify them, through careful analysis of what it means for someone to cross language borders and to create a certain multicompetence at all levels of textuality and imagery, about multiple voices in heteroglossia, about identity gained and shifted, as has been the case for writers who consciously write in a language that is not their native language (such as Canetti or Jacques Derrida).

By comparison, and quoting from a recent article by John Guillory, entitled "The very idea of pedagogy," (2002), the link between literary studies and teaching, including the teaching of literature, is "less productive of scholarship than the fields of rhetoric and language and less conceptually developed" (164) - and the professional literature is powerful silent testimony to that fact.

Turning to the language acquisitional perspective on research and teaching in line with a literacy-orientation, perhaps the earliest and most consistent voice has been that of Janet Swaffar who conceived of "language teaching" not in terms of the formal features of language, otherwise known as the grammar, but in terms of discourse and its various manifestations in oral and written texts. The research for this approach, again not coincidentally, arose from reading or, to use the broader term, from issues of literacy development in a second language by adults, and not initially from the oral mode, the favored environment of communicative language teaching. Specifically, Swaffar directed the foreign language field to think of an evolving literacy as one that would come to recognize specific forms of language use as the manifestations of cultural values (1991). As a result, what was earlier referred to as language teaching would now undergo a reversal of priorities inasmuch as language learning as the learning of a network of forms would be seen as an adjunct to learning subject matter (1993, cf 182) in so-called content-based instruction. We should take care not to misunderstand this phrasing in either direction, inasmuch as such content-based teaching is focused on having students "recognize, reproduce and analyze dominant patterns" (184) within a particular discourse as a way of recognizing "how linguistic rules operate to create messages ... [in terms of their] expressive intent" (183). In other words, once more, we have both a literacy-oriented, language-based research conceptualization and a literacy-oriented, language-based teaching practice, thereby removing the two dichotomous halves of most foreign language programs and also its more recent salve, the so-called bridge course.

As an applied linguist residing in a foreign language department, I have further extended and specified these insights and have concluded that they are both highly beneficial for our field and the issues it faces and, by extension, that they deserve to become part of the knowledge and expertise of future faculty. Let me be more specific. My search was activated by my department's efforts to create an integrated content-based four-year undergraduate curriculum that would, at the same time, assure language acquisition to advanced levels of performance in order to enable students to engage in a range of content themes of literary-cultural studies, broadly conceived: we have called the program "Developing Multiple Literacies." I found a rich theoretical foundation in systemic functional linguistics in the Hallidayan mode, a language theory that explicitly takes a social-semiotic perspective on language and underscores the symbiotic relationship between human activity and language as it reminds us that "the very existence of one is the condition for the existence of the other" (Hasan, 1995, p. 184).

Within a multi-year and ongoing collaboration between faculty and graduate students on issues of curriculum and pedagogy, a group of graduate students further explored the potentialities of genre, understood as typified rhetorical actions that arise in the context of recurring social situations. Genre, understood as "relatively stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types of utterance" (Bakhtin 1986, 64) can, in their totality, not only embody an aspect of cultural rationality, but can provide the all-important basis according to which content can be selected and sequenced in instruction. This is a critical when the organizational underpinnings previously provided by grammar are no longer appropriate. In other words, texts, as carriers of content can, through their generic qualities, provide bases for curriculum development if they are also chosen according to major characteristics of adult second language acquisition by literate learners. They can also support pedagogical decisions if they are selected with simultaneous recognition of the demands of long-term interlanguage development, from the very beginning to academic levels of performance in all modalities. Accordingly, the final step in the conceptualization of our program was a linking of the notion of task to key aspects of genre, particularly to the generic moves which describe a genre, thereby elevating task to an important pedagogical unit which could be open to discursive construction, reflective shaping, and, ultimately, improvement in line with our educational goals of developing multiple literacies.

I have provided these details not only in the hope of making the notion of the language-based character of the work of foreign languages a bit more understandable but also as a way to demonstrate how a programmatic environment that is simultaneously attentive to graduate students' preparation as researchers and as teachers might thereby be realized.

Let me close with brief comments on the larger ideational, institutional, and professional context that affects any rethinking of the preparation of the future professoriat in terms a literacy approach. For that I have chosen the oppositional constructs of competence and performance tas these were initially theorized by Chomsky in transformational-generative grammar in a way that has been so influential in 20^th century linguistics, in order to highlight the ontological and epistemological dichotomies that are increasingly unable to provide a framework for what it means to be a faculty member in a foreign language department.

• In seeking to understand the human capacity for language, the competence-performance split gave primacy to assumed underlying innate abilities. By contrast, conceding the value of that largely biologically driven insight, the educational enterprise in highly literate societies focuses on the fact that humans as social beings use a language to make meaning of and contribute meaning to their physical and social surroundings. Education is about enabling cultural competencies with language, assuring their acquisition through socially situated performance, mostly by encountering them in prototypical oral and written texts.
• The competence-performance split is an instance of the long-standing privileging of generalizable knowing in terms of fixed rules, often with the implicit assumption of fixed truths. Education as a cultural activity is quite cognizant of the kind of knowing that can be profitably pursued in this fashion, especially in the natural sciences. But it is also cognizant that even that form of knowing and that knowledge arises from particular contexts and interests, -- is in situated and interested knowledge as is all our knowledge. To the extent that such local knowing is discursively constructed in communities of practice, education has the obligation to enable access to them through competent language practices. Furthermore, to the extent that such communities of practice are organized around institutions and professions, enabling in our learners a capacity to gain from and contribute to that public discourse becomes a matter of social justice.
• The competence-performance split inherently foregrounds normativity, unitary constructs, and standardized notions of language use and language learning. Education, however, is about keen levels of awareness about differential ways of meaning construction by the different social actors who, nevertheless, follow certain discursive practices in order for communication to be possible at all. Education is then about enabling the enactment of situated choices, about culturally shaped agency in line with desires and interests of the participants in that enactment.
• Finally, the competence-performance split conceptualizes cognition as largely language-independent. In today's world, however, we are increasingly aware that our cognitive capacities are not only worthy of our wondering inquiry about what we all share but are equally worthy of such wondering inquiry about how we differ along historical, cultural, and language-specific trajectories. To the extent that education is about knowing and through cultural knowing about being, it has new and exciting opportunities and obligations in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual world.

I take the furthering of these possibilities to be central aspects of the knowledge base and of the practices of future faculty in foreign language departments, enacted in research, teaching, and in professional service. I take a new uncovering of the language base of our work to be a particularly promising avenue for their realization.

References

Bakhtin, Michael, M. 1986. The problem of speech genre. Speech genres and other later essays (pp. 60-102), edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press
Berman, Russell A. 1998. Minding the shop on Main Street. Contribution to Response to Dorothy James 'Bypassing the traditional leadership: Who's minding the store? Part 1. ADFL Bulletin, 29,2: 39-41.
Byrnes, Heidi. 2002. The cultural turn in foreign language departments: Challenge and opportunity. Profession 2002 : 114-29.
------. 2001. Reconsidering graduate students' education as teachers: It takes a department! The Modern Language Journal 85, no. 4: 512-30.
Guillory, John. 2002. The very idea of pedagogy. Profession 2002: 164-71.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1995. The conception of context in text. Discourse in society: Systemic functional perspectives. Meaning and choice in language: Studies for Michael Halliday (pp. 183-283), edited by Peter H. Fries and Michael Gregoy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Kadish, Doris Y. 1999. Teaching literature in the foreign language classroom: Where have we been and where do we go now? Preparing a nation's teachers: Models for English and foreign language department (pp. 398-411), edited by Phyllis Franklin, David Laurence, and Elizabeth B. Welles. New York: MLA.
Koike, Dale A., and Judith E. Liskin-Gasparro. 1999. What is a near-native speaker? Perspectives of job seekers and search committees in Spanish. ADFL Bulletin 20,3:54-62.
Kramsch, Claire. 2002. Language and culture: A social semiotic perspective. ADFL Bulletin 33, no. 2: 8-15.
Scholes, Robert. 1998. The rise and fall of English. New Haven/London: Yale University Press
Swaffar, Janet K. 1993. Constructing tasks for content classes: The case for generative iteration. Language and content. Discipline- and content-based approaches to language study (pp. 181-99), edited by Merle Krueger, and Frank Ryan. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
------. 1991. Articulating learning in high school and college programs: Holistic theory in the foreign language curriculum. Challenges in the 1990s for college foreign language programs (pp. 27-54), edited by Sally Sieloff Magnan, Boston: Heinle & Heinle.