Foreign Language Departments Research Articles

Challenging Monolingualism: Institutional Implications of Postsecondary German Language Instruction

We often pose the question How much German in German Studies? in more specific form, as, for example, does William Donahue when he wonders whether we shouldn't give our conference papers in German (German Quarterly 78.4 [Fall 2005]). Donahue's sensitive observations concerning our use of German as professionals in formal scholarly contexts may provide for many of us non-native speakers of German an uncomfortable occasion for recognizing our inadequacies and discomfort with being foreigners in foreign-language departments, of facing, as one older colleague once described it, our discomfort with a lifetime of impersonating a German. Yet whatever pangs of conscience I personally may suffer when I rely on my native tongue instead of my hard-won foreign one in a scholarly context, specialists of German should be sharply aware of the distortions that occur when we pursue the life of the mind as a matter of guilt and redemption meted out depending on whether we practice our spoken German at scholarly meetings. We write for publication in the language in which we are best able to formulate our ideas at a particular moment in our life history and we write in the language required by the venue in which we plan to publish and by the audiences we wish to address. When we speak to our colleagues and collaborators, moreover, we speak in the language in which we are both emotionally and intellectually most comfortable with one another-indeed, sometimes that medium of exchange will involve frequent code switching from one language to the other, maybe even with a smattering of Italian, French, Dutch, Danish, Polish, Czech, Turkish, or Yiddish. Neither the GSA nor the AATG can serve as language enforcers, and one would hope that neither organization would ever do anything but strive to create the most open, inclusive, and productive forum possible for the exchange of ideas. For me the question How much German in German Studies? has other implications. I urge that we consider first and foremost what this question means institutionally; in the end, it surely pertains to the resources, both human and monetary, that colleges and universities are going to devote in the future to the teaching of the German language. German departments or German sections within foreign-language departments have long been entrusted with teaching German to undergraduates. This is an important mission, for the study of a language not one's own can offer students one of the more radical confrontations with human difference provided in postsecondary education. Especially at this moment in the history of the United States, it is critical that our students participate in such encounters and undertake such engagement as a central feature of their undergraduate education. Therefore, any respectable future we envision for ourselves in American academia as Germanists, German cultural historians, or professors of German studies, or whatever we prefer to call ourselves, must in my view include the continued teaching of the German language at multiple levels at postsecondary institutions. As a non-native speaker of German, I remind all of us that learning German well, if one is not actually living in a German-speaking country, is a long and arduous path. Non-native speakers of German cannot develop adequate language facility in this American context unless they are taught systematically. Without the language there is little justification for making appointments in an administrative unit called German or, for that matter, appointing our German Ph.D.s at all. German history can be taught in a history department-and indeed is taught at some institutions by the colleague who teaches European history and actually specializes in, for example, France; the teaching of German literature-if it is done in English only-can be subsumed by a comparative literature program or perhaps a department of literature or English; contemporary culture can be taught in the context of a department of geography, anthropology, or ethnology, and so on. …

Kaleidoscope of Language Learning

we have students. Often we have disagreements among professionals concerning most effective methodologies or materials or technologies for in struction. However, some significant issues appear to stay with us unresolved decade after decade. In May of 2007 the Executive Council of the MLA released the document Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World, based on the work of an ad hoc committee on foreign languages, which had been appointed by the council in 2004 to study the mat ter. This document points at agenda items that continue to present themselves in the areas of pol icy, research, institutional organization, curricu lum, and pedagogy. In this document before the Modern Language Journal readership, Transform ing Collegiate Foreign Language Departments, the committee made specific recommendations in the areas of research, coalition building, advo cacy, and configuration of foreign language de partments in American colleges and universities. The numerous institutions of higher education present many models of language departments in terms of organizational structure, curriculum, size, faculty, institutional requirements, finances, administrative support, technological sophistica tion, pedagogical emphases, and student out comes. The kaleidoscope of settings thus provides an infinite number of variations and possibilities for language learning. Having spent the last 4 decades primarily in the community college en vironment, my view is necessarily formed by the colors and patterns of the 2-year college setting. Change does not have to be large and dramatic in order to effect a difference in the environ ment. One click of the wheel of a kaleidoscope can produce a fantastic new image with a great modification in impact for the viewer. Likewise, a single change in a department can make a dra matic difference to the faculty and students in that institution.

Developing a prototype information system framework to handle pedagogical knowledge in a secondary school modern foreign languages department

This paper reports a small-scale project to develop a prototype web-based information system to support teaching and learning within the modern languages department of a comprehensive secondary school. The system was developed in close consultation with the teaching staff and the work is presented within the broader context of knowledge management systems and their potential use in an educational environment.

Effective Curricular Management

In the field of education, there are excellent administrators who are truly motivated, accommodating the needs of the faculty and the district. In the past five years of teaching, I have had very unique experiences with administrators, dealing with curricular matters within the English and Foreign Language Departments. Unfortunately, their objectives ranged from not understanding the curriculum to being too active leading to micro-management. Three congruent trends emerged that I witnessed regardless by which district I was employed.

English content-based approaches to teaching accounting

This article illustrates the application of strategies on the part of the lecturer to teach a course of accounting in English to non-native English speakers. The following approaches proved to be the most useful: students realizing the importance of acquiring technical vocabulary in English; applying theory during the class as a language strategy; using different bibliographic sources such as journals, books and websites; writing papers which demonstrate student’s comprehension; communicating theory utilizing visual tools such as graphs, tables, beamer presentations; progressively reapplying the same financial procedures to more sophisticated settings with increasingly more text; consolidating a strong relationship of cooperation between the lecturer and the Foreign Language Department. This is a process of continuous improvement, hence the need to share results with other instructors and to observe similar experiences from different universities.

Best Practices in Study Abroad: A Primer for Chairs of Departments of Foreign Languages

Best Practices in Study Abroad: A Primer for Chairs of Departments of Foreign Languages

Strategies for teaching Geography electives in English to native Spanish speakers at a Colombian University

Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia has been increasing course work in English, and the need for adequate learning and teaching strategies has become salient as both students and instructors expressed concern of a foreign language impeding content acquisition. Through a seminar on English Content-Based Instruction, the Foreign Languages Department identified underlying problems related to language, such as the need for language strategies in mainstream courses in areas such as academic writing and reading. The English Content-Based Instruction approach seeks to simultaneously teach content and language. The need for instruction to be focused on fostering autonomous learning became apparent given the heterogeneity of learning styles. Two geography courses taught in English are discussed here in light of an overall survey on learning strategies.

A More Capacious View of Scholarship

As a member of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, I am happy to share here a few reflections on our report and, especially, on the urgency of our policy proposals. In doing so, I want to focus on and around the report's third recommendation, which reads, The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios (11). Indeed, if there was one aspect of the data that the task force collected that disturbed me the most, even if it confirmed my suspicions, it was the statistics showing just how fixated we are in English and foreign lan guage departments on monograph production as the gold standard in tenure and promotion cases. Almost ninety percent of Carnegie Doctorate-granting institutions rank monographs or very important in promotion and tenure processes, and almost half of all Carnegie Master's and BA insti tutions do the same. Even more alarming, a third of all departments and half of all PhD-granting institutions now demand progress toward a second book for tenure. And while articles are also valued by almost all institutions, other forms of scholarship?broadly defined?are not: textbooks, bibliographic scholarship, scholarly editions, and journal editing are all being devalued. In my opinion, this is an untenable and unjust state of affairs. I describe this state as untenable and unjust not only for practical rea sons, given contextual factors that the report details and that I reiterate

Spanish: The Foreign National Language

An issue that currently dominates discussions in and about foreign language departments in higher education in the United States concerns the explo sive growth of enrollments in Spanish courses, a situation that has become synthesized in a catchy acronym used widely now to encompass the other foreign languages: LOTS (languages other than Spanish). Whether Span ish on your campus is a separate department or ensconced within a larger unit such as Romance languages or modern languages and literatures, its disproportionate size with respect to the other foreign languages is a real ity with which we all have to contend. The urgency surrounding the topic is exacerbated by the larger circumstance of the increasingly tenuous place that foreign languages have come to occupy in the humanities curriculum. According to the latest figures compiled by the MLA, almost fifty four percent of all foreign language enrollments in 2002 were in Spanish (Welles), which means, of course, that there are more students matricu lated in that language than in all the other foreign languages combined. This situation is difficult for all parties involved: on the one hand, Span ish departments or sections feel that they are not being allotted the re sources that should be theirs by dint of their extraordinary size. In fact, most departments of Spanish are attempting to come to terms with their new situation in a number of creative ways: inquiring into what their mis sion is and how they can best accomplish it, finding ways to share their

Action Research on the Development of a Caring Curriculum in Taiwan: Part II

This article presents the development, design, implementation, and evaluation of the third-year course of a caring curriculum being developed for a 5-year associate degree nursing program in Taiwan. The course, titled Application of Caring Concepts, was taught to more than 800 students by 16 instructors recruited from various departments. The instructors attended workshops and seminars on caring and then developed the course materials and teaching strategies. Instructional strategies included role modeling, dialogue, discussions, journaling, simulations, readings, and projects that involved students' applying caring skills outside of the classroom. Students were evaluated by patients in clinical practice using the Caring Behavior Measurement, developed in a previous study, and the course was evaluated by qualitative analysis of student feedback. Student responses to course content and instructional strategies were positive. Patients generally indicated that students always or normally performed caring behaviors. The study showed that with an appropriate curriculum and learning strategies, students can learn caring skills.

The Poet and Daughter of the Sea: Animated Ships in Andalusian Arabic Poetry★

The Mediterranean Sea has stirred the imagination of Andalusian poets of the tenth and eleventh centuries. They wrote many poetic maritime scenes with lively details about sea and ships. Describing ships as camels ranging over the land is the central core-image of these scenes. The poets’ perspective of ships reveals their unique character and aspires to an aesthetic truth. This article will concern itself with some of the ships’ depictions in Andalusian Arabic poetry, and will illustrate, in particular, the ways by which poets refer to the ships’ external characteristics in order to represent them as animated beings in the sea vista. These epithets coincide with the medieval perception of animals that generally particularize their appearance by some qualitative characteristics. By means of some of animal epithets like physiological features, anatomical references, behavioural traits and feminine characters, poets succeeded in referring to ships as the most animated objects on the maritime scene. ☆ I wish to express my gratitude here to my teacher Professor George J. Kanazi, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, University of Haifa, for his valuable remarks that improved the early drafts of the article. To Dr. Marsha Benshushan, Department of Foreign Languages and Professor William Freedman, Department of English, both of the University of Haifa, my thanks for their freely offered help with the English translation of the poetry.

A New Washback Model of Students’ Learning

Abstract: This study investigated the washback of the General English Proficiency Test on English learning in Taiwan. The research sites were the applied foreign language departments of a university of technology and an institute of technology. The latter required day-division students to pass the first stage of the test's intermediate level or the school-administered make-up examination, whereas the former did not prescribe any General English Proficiency Test requirement. Department documents and records were reviewed, and the department chair, teachers, students, and parents or spouses of participating students were interviewed. One of the courses taught by each interviewed teacher, as well as activities in the self-study centre, were observed. Findings indicated that existing theories did not fully explain the washback of this test on educational context, so a new, tentative washback model is proposed.

Postmodern Composition Pedagogies: Understanding Revision as a Process of Delay

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsKristen GarrisonKristen Garrison is a Ph.D. student in the English, Speech, and Foreign Languages Department at Texas Woman's University, Wichita Falls, TX and Adjunct faculty member, English Department, Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX

K–12 Language Learning and Foreign Language Educational Policy: A School‐Based Perspective

by researching and documenting the successes and challenges of microlevel school-based acquisition planning, important issues can be brought to light concerning macrolevel national foreign language educational policy. Since 1995, we have been involved closely with the Chartiers Valley School District as it has developed, implemented, and monitored a comprehensive, innovative foreign language program that has been recognized domestically and worldwide. Nestled in a southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, this district of approximately 3,600 students has met the challenges of developing a Spanish program in Grades K-7 for all students. In 1995, the superintendent formed a Foreign Language Program Committee consisting of the district's director of curriculum who chairs the group; the superintendent; principals from the primary, intermediate, and middle schools; selected teachers; the chair of the secondary school foreign languages department; and university collaborators. The committee began its work by conducting a community survey that led to the selection of the foreign language to be taught, Spanish. The committee also carefully planned for implementing the program year by year beginning with kindergarten in 1996-1997 and adding one grade level per year (see Tucker & Donato, 2003). At the primary (K-2) and intermediate (3-5) grade levels, Spanish classes are offered to all children for 20 minutes per day, 5 days per week. The Spanish teachers are all certified in foreign language teaching, and some hold dual certification in foreign language and elementary education. The K-5 curriculum is linked to the elementary school's major interdisciplinary themes and was written by the Spanish teachers in collaboration with the elementary school teachers. When the program expanded to the middle school (Grade 6 in the fall of 2002), a different curricular model was adopted. Best described as content-related instruction, the Grade 6-8 Spanish curriculum uses academic subject matter as both the content of da ly lessons and the vehicle by which Spanish is learned. The content-related curriculum was developed based on selected topics introduced in four academic subject areas of the middle school program-English/language arts, reading, science, and social studies (for a general discussion of approaches such as these, see Crandall, 1993, 1998). In collaboration with the academic subject teachers, the middle school Spanish teachers developed the Spanish curriculum by selecting major concepts (e.g., natural resources, civilization, figures of speech) from each academic subject. Each subject area is taught in the Spanish classes for 40 minutes a day, 5 days a week in four 9-week units of study. By the 2003-2004 school year, the Spanish program was fully in place from kindergarten to the seventh grade. In the fall of 2004, the program's initial kindergarten class reached the eighth grade. From kindergarten to Grade 7, every child was scheduled in Spanish, either in a 20-minute class (K-5) or in a 40-minute core class (Grades 6 and 7). As eighth graders, students received the option to choose two of three course offerings as an elective: (a) year-long Spanish, (b) year-long reading, and (c) a series of three 12week exploratory courses (German, French, literature enrichment). Of the 254 students who entered Grade 8 in

Thinking and Feeling Asian America in Taiwan

by the publication of Marlon Horns essay on Chinese American literature in Taiwan in 1982, Asian American studies has gradually established itself in Taiwan's academies since the 1980s.1 Taiwan has since witnessed both the growing consumption of Asian American culture in popular media and the emergence of Chinese American literature as an academic field. Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club and David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly were both well received in Taiwan, not just for their own literary merits, but also for their notable adaptation to films.2 The success of Wayne Wang's film version of The Joy Luck Club (1993) made Tan arguably the bestknown Asian American author in Taiwan, and her later books, including her latest essay collection, The Opposition of Fate (2006), were all translated and published there. In addition to Tan's publications, the works of Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and a younger generation of Chinese American writers such as Fae Myenne Ng, Gish Jen, and Eric Liu have also grabbed the attention of students and scholars in Taiwan's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.3 The presence of immigrant novels in Chinese by such writers as Yan Geling and Hong Ying along with the success of Asian/ American films from Ang Lee's Wedding Banquet ( 1 993) to Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2004) at the box office have also enhanced the visibility of Asian Americans in Taiwan through the lens of diaspora and transnationalism. Whereas scholars are engaged with organizing conferences on Asian American literary studies and publishing their research in international journals, graduate students in Taiwan also find interest in the critical study of Chinese American literature.4 Shan Te-hsing, a research fellow at Academia Sinica, has pointed out that more than forty master theses on Chinese American literature have been produced in Taiwan in recent years, and the scholarship continues to grow.5 Shan also collaborated with Sau-ling Wong at the University of California, Berkeley, on a translation project to publish canonical Asian American texts in Chinese-language markets, hoping to introduce Asian American literature to a wider audience beyond U.S. borders. Since the 1980s, scholars in Taiwan

The evolution of an effective pedagogy for teachers using the interactive whiteboard in mathematics and modern languages: an empirical analysis from the secondary sector

There has been considerable investment in the use of interactive whiteboard technology in schools in the UK. There is evidence that whilst teachers understand such technology, many do not understand the nature and implications of interactive learning. Observation and analysis of 50 video‐recorded lessons taught by ‘successful’ teachers drawn from mathematics and modern foreign language departments in secondary schools led to the classification of three types of practice representing a spectrum of increasing interactivity. The nature of this good practice was analysed together with criteria for assessing the changes being wrought by technology in approaches to learning and teaching. The investigation concluded that the use of new technology alone cannot lead to enhanced learning. Teachers also need training to develop awareness of the relationship between approaches to interactive learning and conceptual and cognitive development in subject areas.

Nakagami and the Denial of Lineage: On Maternity, Abjection, and the Japanese Outcast Class

margherita long is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of California, Riverside. Her published conversation on Nakagami with participants at the Shingû Seminar appeared in Waseda Bungaku 29.5 (November 2004): 22-53. She is currently completing a manuscript called This Perversion Called Love: Tanizaki, Freud, and Feminist Theory.

Developing a Course to Teach Spanish for Health Care Professionals

To make the baccalaureate nursing curriculum more responsive to changing U.S. demographics, the School of Nursing at The University of Texas at Austin instituted a required course, titled Spanish for Health Care Professionals. This course, developed in collaboration with the University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, focuses on conversational Spanish using the communicative language teaching approach, rather than grammar and medical terminology instruction. Class activities, along with course materials, are linked to nursing practice. Course assignments are designed to develop authentic communication in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and understanding culture, and students demonstrated oral and written linguistic gains in relation to their Spanish fluency and accuracy. Because the Hispanic population is now the largest minority group in the United States, this course will help nurses communicate with Spanish-speaking patients.

Beyond Disciplines: India Studies in the United States

Beyond Disciplines: India Studies in the United States

Action Research and the Professional Development of Graduate Teaching Assistants

The dominant approach to second language (L2) teacher education emphasizes reflection as a tool for helping teachers develop context-specific, personal theories of L2 teaching. Educators can facilitate reflection by involving teachers in action research. This small-scale study investigated whether carrying out action research as part of a graduate seminar affected the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (TAs) who were teaching in foreign and second language departments. Insights into the TAs' professional development were gained through a qualitative analysis of their professional journals, reflective essays, action research reports, and oral and written feedback. The findings indicated that the TAs gained a broader understanding of research, developed an appreciation for peer collaboration, and adopted new L2 teaching practices. Suggestions for L2 teacher educators with an interest in incorporating action research into their graduate degree programs are offered.