Dissertation Title: The Introductory Foreign Language Classroom: Evolution of Curriculum, Materials, and the Professionalization of Graduate Student Instructors
Committee: Beatrice Dupuy (Chair), Chantelle Warner, Suzanne Panferov Reese.
Over the past decade, U.S collegiate foreign language (FL) education has been experiencing a climate change. Forced to demonstrate increased relevance in the midst of a “crisis” where enrollments continue to drop, especially in advanced courses (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2015), FL programs have been called on to adopt new ways of thinking, learning, and experiencing FL language education in a globalized world (Kramsch, 2014, p. 297) and move beyond the teaching of vocabulary lists and verb conjugations in isolation and the four skills as separate linguistics and cognitive processes within a functional perspective.
2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the MLA Report “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” that emphasized the need for curricular reform within the field of foreign language. The Report, drafted by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Language, underscored the need to “situate language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames” (MLA, 2007, p. 4) in order to lead foreign language learners towards becoming “educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence” (p. 3). Successful language development is indeed dependent on these two notions: translingual and transcultural competence where students are educated to function as informed and capable interlocutors in the target language, trained to reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture, and learn to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies (p. 4).
Responses to the Report showed a “growing consensus about the importance of language instruction, about the inadequacy of American students' language skills, and a willingness to consider new models.” (Jaschilk, 2007, p. 1).
While the Report seemed to open a long overdue discussion about the 21st century foreign language classroom, it failed to provide practical suggestions for how departments might go about implementing the recommended curricular revisions. It did not suggest any pedagogical approaches or even address how the future FL professoriate should be trained to implement its recommendations (Allen & Paesani, 2010, p. 120).
My research project seeks to examine how the profession has responded to the recommendations made in the MLA Report and subsequent publications in the introductory FL sequence. It does so by 1) analyzing the content of materials currently in use at the collegiate level in the U.S and see how these material could be adapted to a literacy-based curriculum.; 2) examining how language program directors introduced a curricular change in order to be better aligned with the MLA recommendations in well-established foreign language programs; and 3) considering how professional development opportunities could be modified to address the needs of graduate student instructors often socialized in the communicative language teaching tradition.