From German 1 to German Studies 001: A Chronicle of Curricular Reform

Abstract

In 1995, the Department of German Studies at Stanford University embarked upon a review of its objectives, curriculum, and staff deployment. At one level, such a review was mandated. The Stanford Language Center had been created to monitor the newly enhanced language requirement and had ordered that each language program articulate the language and cultural expectations that all graduates of a first-year program were to meet. At the same time, given the national enrollment crunch in German, declining local enrollment meant administrative pressures to carry a more appropriate student/teacher ratio. Adding to general enrollment declines were department-internal declines-30% across first year; 60% from first to second year. Accompanying the tensions caused by weak enrollment figures under the university microscope came additional university-level pressure in the form of encouragement to increase tenureline faculty participation in the beginning undergraduate curriculum. Compounding these pressures were university constituency issues: laments from students studying abroad that they were not prepared with idiomatic oral language for the overseas experience, complaints from instructors at overseas centers that students lacked adequate cultural-historical background, and criticisms from faculty colleagues that language departments in general could not be relied upon to prepare students for the real world. These were overt conditions pushing toward curricular revisions. While these external pressures were indeed extant and influential, a set of intellectual dissonances in the department added to our sense of urgency for curricular reform. What the department offered then to learners was the traditional mix of grammar-based sequences through the first year, to be repaired at the beginning of the second year, a second-year program that introduced some cultural/literary material but nevertheless focused on language development, and a set of underenrolled literature courses. Little had changed in language instruction since 1962.1 However, much had changed about the beliefs and the theoretical perspectives held by the faculty and being taught to the graduate students. In fact, the perspectives were tied up in cultural studies, in German intellectual thought, in popular and contemporary culture, and in second language acquisition research. The intellectual dilemma became one of bringing theory and practice into balance and harmony. There was a clear need to change a number of things in the basic German program at Stanford. First, the same language program (documented by the use of consecutive editions of the same textbook) had been in place for at least thirty years. The language program was relatively non-reflective of developments in second language learning pedagogical practices (documented by the growing size of the Xeroxed course reader with authentic materials). Second, graduate students were asked to teach the German language according to a structured model illustrated by materials that were grammatically sequenced at the sentence level. Ironically, though, the students were in a graduate program-a German studies program-that pointed them toward intellectual models that were not