Hit or Miss, or Missing: The Role of Second Language Acquisition Research in Language Teacher Training

Abstract

Language in American Germanistik has had an often precarious role within its departmental context. While viewed as a staple to the survival of a program, language courses often become the responsibility of the department's least experienced teachers; the central facet of its curriculum as far as most undergraduates are concerned, yet in the minds of many faculty merely peripheral to the department's intellectual life. A relatively recent collection of essays by prominent American Germanists entitled Germanistik in den USA (Trommler 1989) contains only a few scant paragraphs pertaining to language pedagogy in German, suggesting its relative unimportance to those who not only observe but shape the curriculum. This state of affairs has understandably led to numerous observations over the years by language faculty, for whom such perceptions can have far-reaching consequences. As one Germanist noted in the mid-1970s, There are cogent reasons why we should be uneasy about our role as language teachers: graduate work leading to the Ph.D. is largely irrelevant to language ... and professional recognition is not usually achieved through excellence in language teaching (Crossgrove 180). A decade later, Kramsch could still comment: Academia continues to differentiate between professional excellence and discipline-oriented distinction. While the former sometimes is rewarded with salaries commensurate with its usefulness, only the latter results in tenure (1987: 31). In the wry metaphor of an Ivy League language professor: