Foreign Language Across the Curriculum: A Critical Appraisal

Abstract

promotes the idea of foreign language across the curriculum (FLAC) (20). FLAC as presented here calls for modifying non-FL liberal arts courses to include FL reading component; this change is based on the premise that FL study becomes meaningful chiefly in its application. Indebted to content-based language instruction, FLAC follows in the footsteps of writing across the curriculum. As early as 1981 the National Assembly on Foreign Language and International Studies recommended just such strategy for projecting FL into general education. It proposed, for example, that a section of course in which lectures were in English could include discussion, reading, and writing in the foreign language.' The NEH has also lent support to the concept, underwriting FLAC program at Earlham College (1980-84) and second at St. Olaf College (1989-93). Although other institutions practice FLAC in some form, published accounts describe only these two. They therefore form the basis of this critique.2 Our criticism aims less at the two programs examined, or at the idea of FLAC itself, than at two orders of associated problems endemic to college-level FL instruction: first, elementary and intermediate FL study does not adequately prepare students for programs like FLAC; second, the program descriptions reflect certain misconceptions about the relation between FL and liberal arts that echo broadly across general education. The FLAC models reviewed here