Guest Editorial: Molecule by Molecule: Building Hope for Man

Abstract

face 6f foreign language education over the past several decades, there is a peculiar constancy-a constancy that relates directly to the expectations we communicate to out students and to the role we have tacitly created for them as a consequence. It is a role that troubles me a gteat deal-a role that we need not perpetuate as we seem inclined to do, Periodic visits to randomly selected classrooms over the past twenty-five or thirty years would have left an impression of substantial change. But superficial changes in instruction are analogous to surface changes in other dimensions across time: the clothing worn by both teachers and students would also have changed substantially. Similarly, random reading in our professional journals through this period of time would indicate change-radical change, for our rhetoric is significantly ahead of our behavior. Yet, amid all this change what seems to remain constant is student behavior. Through all these years in most foreign language classrooms a preponderance of time is spent in either the mechanical manipulation of language forms or. in discussing the manipulation of these forins. Sometimes. the manipulative activity is oral, as in various kinds of pattern drills; sometimes it takes the form of written exercises. But in all these classrooms