Department of German

I. INTRODUCTION

I begin my talk by thanking Donna Van Handle for having organized this panel on professional issues in German that have an explicit future orientation, that are of particular concern at the postsecondary level, and that have a pedagogy orientation. While the title of my paper announces its focus on the pedagogies of writing development, neither a future perspective nor a higher education viewpoint are immediately obvious. And yet, both influenced the treatment I will give to teaching practice at the college level. At that intersection I make the following general assumptions:

II. ASSUMPTIONS FOR COLLEGE-LEVEL TEACHING OF LANGUAGES

1. Stating goals

I believe that departments must construct an educational environment for collegiate German for the future in such a fashion that the practices within that environment will enable students to develop a competent bilingual and bicultural literacy in German. Granted, in the majority of cases this educational goal will be realized only by a relatively small number of our students. But the reason for that should primarily lie in factors that are beyond our control, namely that a relatively small number of students enroll in German courses continuously throughout their four-year undergraduate career in the first place. They will therefore not have fulfilled a basic requirement of successful language learning to competent levels of use, a multi-year engagement with language learning.

2. Specifying educational goals and curricular and pedagogical means

By extension, the reason for non-attainment of advanced levels of competence should not lie with factors that departments do control. The most important of these are the pedagogies being enacted and the curricula being offered. I emphasize curriculum not for its own merits but because of its fundamental influence on pedagogy: it is only within the trajectory of a multi-year curricular sequence that we can truly advocate particular pedagogical actions because it is only within such a sequence that we can ascertain in a principled fashion the short- and the long-term consequences for learning that such actions do have.

Our first and overarching statement is that pedagogies that are to support the attainment of upper levels of ability are embedded within curricula. From that follow a number of other characteristics.

3. Exploring the relation between meaning and form for curricular and pedagogical decision-making

There are strong indications that curricula and pedagogies should not primarily be motivated by formal features of language. Instead, in their cognitive and attentional thrust they should begin with meaning and content and should guide learners to map these meanings onto forms that are appropriate or expected in the discourse community. Importantly, pedagogies create attentional foci, and attention moves back and forth from the periphery to the center both between meaning and form. Even with a content focus it need not be the case that a an exclusive meaning orientation describes each instructional moment and each learner's engagement in learning; but the overall character of the pedagogical choices made throughout a curricular sequence must be so grounded, thereby guarding against the two extremes that are detrimental to adult language acquisition, an over-emphasis on meaning and an over-emphasis on formal features.

Although we are in the era of communicative language teaching, I am concerned that rethinking of those issues in the profession has yet to occur. Pedagogical preferences may well have shifted away from the centrality of grammar but that is not the same as shifting toward a focus on meaning with varied yet motivated linkages to form. Beyond their much hailed communicativeness or use orientation, communicative, proficiency-oriented or Standards-based instruction relies either on practices that begin with formal requirements, usually sentence-level formal requirements, and proceeds to meaning or privileges meaning but fails to conceptualize and put into curricular or pedagogical practice the long process of language development.

If that is so, then we urgently need to specify more closely the desired content-focus for curricula and pedagogies. We know that content for adult second language learners, contrasted with younger learners, is not inherently sequencable. There is no way of adjudicating independently whether collegiate learners would be better served by first learning about the geography or the history of the German-speaking countries or about contemporary political decision-making processes in light of existing challenges or by first learning how to meet and greet people at a cocktail party in Berlin, make hotel reservations over the telephone in Vienna, or arrange for a sight-seeing tour in the Swiss Alps. One can imagine any of these to be meritorious learning content. How can we resolve this dilemma?

The only answer I know is to assert strongly that college-level foreign language programs are not primarily in the business of teaching content, not even primarily cross-cultural content. They are, however, undeniably in the business of facilitating the acquisition of the German language through content. The challenge for the field, therefore, is to explore linking content with language form in a way that can be sequenced for effective and efficient language learning. This means that texts broadly defined-- oral and written texts -- need to be thought of as both carriers of content and also as vehicles for instruction. Their instructional suitability would then lie in the extent to which they instantiate typified qualities of language use in society and at the same time respond to characteristics of long-term adult second language acquisition by literate learners. This is the linkage that would underlie our curricula and, by extension, the linkage that would provide principles for pedagogical actions.

4. Linking content, text, genre, and task

In the curriculum and pedagogy work in the German Department at Georgetown University that has been ongoing since the fall of 1997 a construct that has turned out to be particularly useful in making that dual linkage between content and text and text and language acquisition has been that of genre. This is not the place to explicate the increasingly rich literature on genre in various contexts. What is important is that a genre focus can offer guidance in two areas: first, with regard to sequencing broad categories of language use (e.g., from the primary discourses of familiarity to the secondary discourses of public life, the language use that broadly describes upper levels of ability); and, second, with regard to pedagogies which offer a way of linking socially situated texts and content with a learning theory.

When we consider the construct of genre in terms of typified rhetorical action it represents a particularly felicitous way of organizing the content and therefore the "texts" that would make up a curricular sequence. In turn, the construct of genre-based tasks is a particularly felicitous way in which college-level pedagogies can be devised so as to present challenges and opportunities for learning that respond well to the requirements of instructed language learning at the intersection of meaning and form. Together genre and genre-based tasks permit a way of attending to the fact that learners must be able to generalize from a single or very few instances of language use -- inherently the limitation of the language classroom -- to others that may subsequently occur both in the instructional sequence itself and, of course, in the use of German in diverse social contexts, in oral as well as in written language - a remarkably tall order.

III. TASK-BASED WRITING IN A CURRICULAR CONTEXT

In providing a lengthy argument in favor of the curricular embeddedness of pedagogical action I may well have failed to meet the expectations with which some of you are attending this session, -- namely to receive particular instructional recommendations for a particular acquisitional problem. I regret that. But I also strongly believe that pedagogical discussions in the expansive venues of professional conferences cannot be about micro level particularities but can, at best, clarify how one might address macro-level developmental aspects. In turn, micro-level discussions can and should take place in departments where recommendations can and must be rigorously examined and negotiated in light of local curricula and educational goals. In the end, pedagogy takes place in classrooms, and there teachers will always make on the spot situated choices. They are the more able to do this, the more they can draw on a rich decision-making context such as that provided through curricula that have a text and genre orientation.

What I will, instead, present for the remaining time are the steps we took as we implemented a pedagogy of task-based writing in such a curricular context with the hope that I can convey some principles and principled considerations that might spur discussion regarding your own instructional practices.

As I now describe some particulars I refer you to your handout, but will not have time to discuss it in detail. Because the intermediate-advanced stage carries particular interest I have provided examples in that environment.

1. Creation and use of writing task sheets

All graded writing events in the sequenced curriculum, and also some ungraded writing events in Level I, are assigned according to so-called writing task sheets.

As you will see from your handout, their primary categories are task appropriateness, content, and language focus. These task sheets serve multiple purposes. (1) They give very precise instructions to the students as to what is expected of them in each of these categories in light of the curriculum and in light of instruction in a particular course. (2) In so doing they are a particularly interesting form of learner centered-ness inasmuch as they help students internalize what can be expected of them at this stage of their language development and, as they move through the curriculum, at each successive stage. 3) They are obviously a highly focused way of providing feedback where that feedback becomes the basis for the revisions that we expect of all student writing. (4) Through the explicit statement of expectations and focused feedback as students progress through a particular course, they also facilitate the assignment of grades, a requirement that is, of course, closely related to assessment of the quality of a particular piece of writing but that is, at the same time different: grading can and should recognize and reward individual development of writing in any of these categories over the length of an instructional level.

2. The embeddedness of writing task sheets in curricular and course-based documents

These writing task sheets do not stand on their own. They are embedded in accompanying documents that further specify their intentions. Let me list them from general to most specific.

a) A general statement about assessment practices in the department.

This document specifies the purposes of assessment in the Developing Multiple Literacies curriculum at both the classroom and program levels. It serves as the umbrella for level-specific statements about the intended uses of assessment.

b) A general statement regarding writing development in the department's curriculum. This document places discourse and narrativity at the heart of the entire curriculum, thereby asserting the department's departure from an additive approach -- from word, to phrase, to sentence, to paragraph, to coherent writing - the model that dominates in second language instruction - toward a genre-based functionalist approach.

c) An idealized statement of the development, from level to level, of this narrative capability on the part of students. It attempts to capture how and to what extent an average student will meet the level-specific expectations regarding writing ability.

d) And, finally, a level-specific statement of the goals of writing that constitute a level's primary focus. In each case, the major categories are task appropriateness, content, and language use.

With regard to language use, allow me to point out two things: language use is in each case described in terms of the discourse level, the sentence level, and the lexicogrammatical level. Furthermore, we arrived at three categories for indicating the differential pedagogical and acquisitional weight diverse formal features receive at different stages of the curriculum, a way of reflecting the long-term nature of language development:

+ focused treatment by way of explicit teaching of a feature that is critical at this level but which will develop a satisfactory level of accuracy only over a longer period of time - e.g., an entire course, or even several courses;

++ focused treatment in order to assure accuracy of something that was previously introduced, has been used for quite some time, and now needs to be expanded functionally and in terms of accuracy (e.g., simple past) before patterned errors have a chance of settling in;

e) As our curricular and pedagogical awareness was enriched in these discussions that have, by now, extended over nearly five semesters, one additional decision is worth mentioning. the creation of a prototypical performance writing tasks. Such a task was created because of our experience, well corroborated in the research literature, of a strong task-effect on language use and performance, including performance in writing. This inherently means that comparing language performance from one instance of writing to the next is not a straightforward matter. And yet, we need to know whether students do in fact progress from one instructional level to the next in the manner anticipated by our curricular guidelines. For this reason, we created a writing assignment close to the end of an instructional level that instantiates, to the extent possible, the kind of writing profile that we deem to be an appropriate learning goal for each curricular level.

3. Assessing and grading writing tasks

With that I have reached where current departmental work takes place. We hope, by the end of this semester, to have developed and tried out in grading sessions broad rubrics for assessing and grading writing. Stated in terms of the three well-known categories for writing development, we are proposing the use of four quality levels, very good, good, fair, and poor. The revision of every writing assignment, undertaken by the student according to the feedback received in each of these categories on the first draft, would then be judged only as very good, good, fair, and poor which would determine whether a grade will be raised by a half step or stays as originally assigned.

IV. INSIGHTS GAINED AND IMPLICATIONS

Some concluding comments: There is reason to believe that effective and efficient pedagogies can be determined within an integrated genre and content-focused curriculum, particularly and perhaps seemingly paradoxically when that curriculum aims toward advanced levels of competence. This is another way of saying that we need articulated programs rather than instructional environments that separate language courses from content courses which inherently further reduce the number of years that are available for continuous and principled language development. College German departments might consider the following: just like the Standards project made its conceptual breakthrough by imagining continuous language instruction K-12 in order to attain usable language abilities, so collegiate language instruction can find its conceptual breakthrough by imagining an integrated programmatic context that will foster continued long-term L2 development toward academic level language performance. I realize that such a proposal is not only bold but even seems to have a certain circularity of argument: we will only get the desired articulation of curricula and language teaching and learning when we posit and begin to demand upper-levels of language ability but these are, of course, possible only through continuous long-term development; and we will achieve language term-development toward competent bilingual literacies only if we imagine an articulated sequence of major stages in language learning. But for now this circularity is not only unavoidable but a significant leap forward because it would set us on the path that has yet to be taken, -- the creation of theoretical, experiential, curricular, pedagogical, and assessment knowledge, not to mention research knowledge that we simply do not possess as a field despite the self-evident need for such knowledge.

In addition, the desired curricular and pedagogical principles and practices in support of developing bilingual and bicultural competence in a second language will require us to assess quite carefully the learning outcomes of our students under well specified curricular and pedagogical circumstances. When we, the test-users and stake-holders, specify what assessment instruments are actually to accomplish for our curricula and our pedagogies then they stop being external and potentially punitive agents. Instead, they will enhance our ability to specify our goals, propose our curricula and courses, recommend pedagogical practices in light of their proven not their assumed efficacy and efficiency, sharpen our eyes and ears with regard to learner language throughout the curriculum -- and, finally, in a feedback loop to make adjustments in any of these components, including our assessment practices. I consider that to be a desirable direction for the future of German in higher education.

HANDOUTS (Excerpts)

Selected References

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Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum..
Bygate, M., Skehan, P., Swain, M. (2001). Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching and testing. London: Longman.
Byrnes, H. (2002). Toward academic-level foreign language abilities: reconsidering foundational assumptions, expanding pedagogical options, pp. 34-58. Developing professional-level language proficiency, Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
2002 Contexts for advanced foreign language learning: A report on an immersion institute, pp. 61-76. Developing professional-level language proficiency, Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
2002 The role of task and task-based assessment in a content-oriented collegiate fl curriculum. Language testing 19.4: 419-437. (Special issue on task-based assessment, John M. Norris, guest editor).
2002 with Crane, C., & Sprang, K. Non-native teachers teaching at the advanced level: challenges and opportunities. ADFL Bulletin 33,3: 25-34.
2001. Reconsidering graduate students' education as teachers: It takes a department! The Modern Language Journal, 85(4):512-130.
2001 with Kord, S. Developing literacy and literary competence: Challenges for foreign language departments. In SLA and the literature classroom: Fostering dialogues, edited by V. Scott, & H. Tucker, 35-73. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Christie, F. (1999). Genre theory and ESL teaching: A systemic functional perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 33(4), 759-763.
Freedman, A. (1999). Beyond the text: Towards understanding the teaching and learning of genres. TESOL Quarterly, 33(4), 764-767.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P.(Eds). (1994). Genre and the new rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P.(Eds). (1994). Learning and teaching genre. Westport, CT: Heinemann.
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Halliday, M. A. K., & Martin, J. R. (1993). Writing science: Literacy and discursive power. London/Washington: Falmer Press.
Hyon, S. (1996). Genre in three traditions: Implications for ESL. TESOL Quarterly, 30(4), 693-722.
Johns, A. M. (2002). Genre in the classroom: Multiple perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martin, J. R. (1999). Mentoring semogenesis: 'genre-based' literacy pedagogy. In Pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness: Linguistic and social processes, edited by F. Christie, 123-155). London: Cassell.
Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.
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Norris, J. M., Brown, J. D., Hudson, T. D. & Yoshioka, J. (1998). Designing second language performance assessments. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Norris, J. M. & Ortega, L. (in press). Defining and measuring L2 acquisition. In Dougthy, C.& Long, M.H., eds. Handbook of second language acquisition. London: Blackwell.
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.
Schleppegrell, M. J., & Colombi, M.C., eds. (2002). Developing advanced literacy in first and second languages. Meaning with power. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Shohamy, E. (1998). Evaluation of learning outcomes in second language acquisition: A multiplism perspective. In Learning foreign and second languages: Perspectives in research and scholarship, edited by H. Byrnes, 238-261. New York: MLA.Zifonun, G., Hoffmann, L., Strecker, B., & et al. (1997). Grammatik der deutschen Sprache (3 vols.). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

Creating Writing Task Sheets

TASK APPROPRIATENESS (what is the macro-genre of this writing task; who is the audience, and what communicative intentions does the writer have?)
understood in terms of the major components that make up a genre, where their presence or absence, the rhetorical ordering of macro-sections, the elaborateness of micro-episodes, and language use in terms of register (e.g. public versus private discourse) all contribute to determining whether and to what extent the expected genre has been created more or less successfully in the students' writing.
Task appropriateness is particularly well captured by the extent to which writers are able to position themselves vis-a-vis an imagined reader-audience and carefully negotiate their relationship to that audience in order to fulfill the intentions of the task in terms of its genre (e.g., telling a story, informing, complaining, persuading, expressing condolences or regrets). The metaphors of breadth of moves required by the genre and interpersonal tenor for author-reader dialogue are particularly important for creating the task and for making assessment decisions.

CONTENT FOCUS (what do we want learners to address in their writing?)
is best understood in terms of the information that writers provide in fulfillment of the major moves that make up the required genre. Task sheets need to be specific in that area in light of the information provided in the various texts of the unit. Within those overall expectations, attention is focused on the degree of elaboration, exemplification, accuracy and richness of information offered in the writing. The metaphor of depth can aid creation of the task sheet and holistic judgment.

LANGUAGE FOCUS (what formal features of the language are in focus because they to have a high probabilistic value for performing the writing task successfully?)
Discourse level
Sentence level
Lexicogrammatical level
Mechanics of writing (e.g., spelling, capitalization, punctuation)
Individual learner focus (as per individual agreement)

Performance Profiles across the Curriculum

Level I
At the end of Level I students should be able to perform short writing tasks that reflect their ability to tailor their use of the German language to audience, intention, and theme/topic. Among the key functions performed in their writing is
- seeking and providing information pertaining to daily life (often on the basis of other written or oral information);
- describing their personal and physical circumstances as well as that of persons known to them;
- referring to different events and places
- referring to texts covered in class and stating their opinions and conclusions about the material addressed.
They are able to use the major patterns of German simple sentences that have such constituents as actor, goal, time, place, and also show an awareness of the larger context of a discourse by using varied word order arrangements and by exploring the possibilities of complex syntax. They can signal different levels of formality and informality in the use of German. In terms of accuracy emphasis is on word order and the order of major syntactic constituents and the verbal paradigm, less so on the internal correctness of all aspects of the nominal paradigm (adjectives, case, gender, plural) although these must obviously be attended to. The greater range of syntactic patterns being attempted successfully at the same time addresses fluency and complexity, since it signals awareness of a larger discourse context.

Level II
Increasing accuracy must be attended to under certain specified conditions of use, primarily though not exclusively at the sentence level.
Students can be expected to be able to plan language beyond the clause and sentence level, into something like a coherent narrative, simple description, expression of opinion or argument. The organization of their writing and their specific language use will begin to show sensitivity to the nature of audience (what it does or does not know, what it might need or want to know) to locating themselves as authors, and to providing clues regarding their intentions (e.g., to tell a story, entertain, describe, inform, express an opinion, make a recommendation, persuade). These are not so much matters of register or style, as they are features of creating a basically coherent and cohesive text, as contrasted with strung together sentences.
At the same time, a focus on accuracy is required at the sentence and below the sentence level, in terms of syntactic constituents and word order, and for the local word-level features of inflectional morphology of gender, case (including prepositions) number, tense, realis/irrealis.
The primary register continues to be the personal, but that can be expanded to more abstract use which usually occurs in the contexts of description, something that favors expansion of the noun phrase.

Level III
Students' writing should now show quite a bit of facility with handling various forms of narration, now made more complex
- in terms of various forms of sequencing and position of the author/narrator and various actors in events
- in terms of more frequent use of complex syntax in those narrations
- beginning use of other ways of organizing information, e.g., more extended description, comparison and contrast, stating opinions, providing an evaluation and opinion.
This will show up particularly by varied markers of cohesion and coherence throughout the system (grammar, lexicon), of author position, intention, stance and some audience awareness. While these characteristics of student writing will not amount to major register shifts or fully elaborated genres, they will be used in order to make the crucial link from private narratives to public narratives and, in general, more public forms of language use.
Sentence-level syntax, while still fragile for some students, is more or less in place at least in terms of major syntactic patterns. At the same time, morphological inaccuracies persist, particularly in terms of noun gender and plural formation and various modifications, particularly in the adjective paradigm. Subject-verb agreement continues to require attention, as does the passive and relative clause environment of syntax/morphology.

Level IV, Text in Context
By the end of the semester students are able to work, in a basic fashion, in two complementary modes of constructing experience and giving meaning to it, the personal, often narrative, and the increasingly abstract academic. This use reflects an awareness of the appropriateness of one or the other in line with the nature of the writing task. As a consequence, writing styles show variation in accordance with task, genre, register, audience, and author intention. At times certain author individuality of expression emerges from this process.
Writing shows readily identifiable forms of organizing a text into a coherent argument that is broken down into major episodes that support the general organizational pattern that is chosen, as well as the subsidiary patterns. This organization as well as appropriate metaphors and images are maintained over an entire text.

While inaccuracies at the sentence level continue to occur, they are restricted to idiosyncratic or low-frequency features and to the consequences of complex lexicogrammatical features that are still being acquired at this level.

The Special Role of Discourse and Narrativity: A Curricular Progression

In Level I, instruction is primarily geared to modeling short functional texts in a range of contexts, thereby acquainting students, right from the beginning, with a whole text perspective and with various ways of reaching toward comprehending such texts and producing their own first coherent texts. Emphasis is on the sentence and its various formal requirements.

In Level II, we make one form of narrativity prototypical, namely the personal story that relies on chronological ordering. This means that various aspects of the creation of coherent and cohesive discourse will be extensively modeled, analyzed, and practiced in a range of contexts. As that basis continues to become firmer, other forms of discourse are gradually being introduced, particularly in terms of their organizational patterns and the most frequent discourse markers that signal these patterns.

In Level III, discursive behavior is extended in the following ways:
1) the personal stance that prevailed in Level II is expanded into the public sphere, that is, individual events are put into larger contexts, mainly through comparison and contrast, cause and effect, the presentation of alternative proposals, and making decisions based on real or imagined choices.
2) the simple narrativity of consecutive chronology is expanded and made more complex (different positions of author and actor(s) with regard to retrospective, prospective, contemporaneous, involved, distanced perspectives and different forms of engagement);
3) discourses beyond the narrative are deliberately taught, to be acquired on a first level of awareness and use (e.g., comparison and contrast; description; supporting opinions, providing information cogently and persuasively; cause and effect)
This expansion involves many of the previous formal characteristics, particularly as far as actor/action sequences are concerned. In those areas, greater emphasis can be placed on accuracy. In the other areas, this treatment amounts to expanding the notion of discourse, inasmuch as other ways of presenting and managing information or interaction between different actors and the author, and other forms of realizing local cohesion and global organization/coherence are beginning to be incorporated.

Text in Context extends discursive behavior from the concrete into the abstract realm, focusing on the secondary discourses of public life, as contrasted with the primary discourses of familiarity and direct interaction that were at the heart of Levels I - III. While many of the issues that were central to Level III require continued attention, particularly as far as accuracy is concerned, Text and Context targets the cognitive and linguistic demands that characterize this shift.