Keywords

In spring 2007, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) issued a report that addressed the crisis in US collegiate foreign language education (Modern Language Association 2007). The principal professional organization for scholars of language and literature in the United States urged language departments to transform their undergraduate programs fundamentally, by developing and implementing curricular structures that integrate language study and content at all levels of the undergraduate program. The MLA report called for a “more coherent curriculum in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuous whole” (3). This call articulated a programmatic principle opposing the two-tiered curriculum that separated language instruction from content, the template for course offerings that had been the dominant curricular paradigm in collegiate modern languages departments throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In conjunction with changing institutional needs and external political and economic pressures, some FL departments had been downsized or even eliminated, and so the MLA report lent credence to pre-existing professional voices that had urged the need to rethink the role and objectives of FL departments in the United States (see Byrnes 1990; James 1997; Swaffar 1999).

Innovative curricula that integrated language and content in ways that alleviated that upper/lower division split had already been piloted and implemented in the late 1990s at the post-secondary FL departments at Georgetown (German) and Stanford (German; Spanish and Portuguese). However, due to the heterogeneous nature of the higher education landscape in the United States, these models could not simply be adopted nationwide, but rather needed to be modified, reconfigured, and extended to fit local environments. As a result, a great diversity of curricular initiatives emerged that shared a common principle: integrating form and content at all levels of undergraduate program.

Five years after the publication of the MLA Report, the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin held a symposium for faculty, curriculum developers, and administrators from a variety of institutions in order to discuss and theorize concepts, conditions, configurations, and consequences of curricular transformations in collegiate foreign language education—to take stock of the situation 5 years later and assess what these practical innovations might have meant for the language-teaching professions. The conference led to this book in addressing past, current, and possible future configurations of foreign language departments in postsecondary education in the United States.

This volume presents expanded versions of the talks given in March 2007 by nine participants in that symposium, representing a range of institutional contexts, all of which are in the process of building and reforming foreign language curricula during a major transition period in postsecondary education as a whole. The focus of this volume is thus on the transformation of foreign language curricula and learning objectives in undergraduate and graduate programs in North American universities and colleges. Individual chapters address this issue in various ways, by looking at both curricula and the relationships of foreign language (FL) departments to interdisciplinary and international programs, because changes in undergraduate programs will require revising both curricula as well as engaging more extensively in faculty development, cross-disciplinary courses, institutional structures and missions, and international education. What this volume’s readers should pay particular attention to is the various frameworks in which the context of curricular transformation can be conducted. The contributions are organized in groups so as to amplify the significance of those frameworks for future transformational work.

1 The Role of Contexts in Curricular Development

Topically, this volume is anchored in the work of important predecessors from Europe and the United States, notably in publications that have long been used to guide curriculum developers. Monographs by Brown (1995), Graves (2000), Richards (2001), and Nation and Macalister (2010) all present sequential models for curriculum development by describing stages in that process as it needs to be undertaken in institutional settings, including an initial needs analysis, the implementation of proposed ways to meet those needs, and the final assessment of the new curriculum. Edited volumes by Graves (1996) and Macalister and Nation (2011) offer case studies that illustrate such processes in a wide variety of institutional settings. Highly practical in approach, these books are noteworthy in also using curricula for English for Specific Purposes programs as examples. These programs, most familiar from outside the US, model ways of integrating new and different learning perspectives, as well as specific contexts, into programs that are often under the aegis of administrative guidelines and objectives (often governmental or corporations), and not determined by individual institutions, as would be the case in the United States. Consequently, these publications are often used as authoritative textbooks to prepare graduate students in TESL/TEFL, applied linguistics, and teacher training programs to encompass and model future instructional and administrative roles.

The editors of the present volume chose their focus on the United States in no small part due to their own familiarity with this particular setting and its contexts for curricular development outlined above. In Europe, for example, the context is significantly different, and is becoming even more so. Policy efforts aimed at integrating entire educational systems of individual nations into a European framework have impacted language learning experts in many ways: the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS),Footnote 1 the harmonization of national educational system through the Bologna Process and the establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA),Footnote 2 as well as the recalibrations of programs as a result of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)Footnote 3 all have stimulated ongoing processes of curricular transformation in higher education at institutions between the Strait of Gibraltar and the North Cape. In general, the commitment to regulatory frameworks and efforts to create compatibility across Europe are stronger than in the United States, where there is little legislative initiative from the federal government to influence curriculum and instruction at universities, which are either private entities or regulated at the state-level.

By focusing on the North American context, the contributions to this volume address the special situation of collegiate foreign language departments in the United States that have traditionally claimed considerable autonomy with regard to what is taught and how compared to institutions in countries such as France, Germany and the UK, whose higher education sectors remain heavily regulated by national and European policy.Footnote 4 Yet despite variables that differ from institution to institution, it is increasingly evident that shared concerns, especially about accountability to students and costs, have animated widespread interest in changing the FL curriculum in college and university language departments.

First among these shared concerns is that FL departments in North America must offer language training and undergraduate degree programs that meet the formal requirements and the educational vision defined by their home institution. Therefore, successful transformations of existing foreign language programs in a broader humanities context must take into account changes in their historic institutional configurations, emerging interdisciplinary relations, local institutional priorities, faculty roles, internationalization efforts, graduate student training, research and funding priorities in the professions, and even the public discourse on foreign language education. In this context, the essays in the present volume all address curricular transformation in terms of the how specific foreign language programs in large and smaller language departments have addressed or seek to address the challenge of transforming their FL curricula in response to such demands arising from outside the FL curricula themselves.

In addressing curricular transformation in context, however, these essays also respond specifically to the MLA’s call. The premise underlying all of the following chapters is that learning objectives and curricula at collegiate language programs cannot be formulated solely in terms of linguistic proficiency. Instead, they must be developed as multidimensional frameworks that integrate factors in both disciplinary content knowledge and foreign language proficiency. The sensitivity to the MLA’s objective elicited different scholarly responses across the United States. Those differences suggested a need for reflection and planning relevant not only for language specialists, coordinators, and curriculum developers, but for all faculty represented in collegiate foreign language departments. Such a project also speaks to decision-making at the executive-level of university administrators in the humanities, business, of vocational programs with international purviews, and international education as a whole. This collection explores representative examples of best practices suggested for or implemented by FL departments in different institutions.

In addition, the essays pay consistent attention to the significant differences in the student body enrolled in university language courses and to solutions that can be applied in various contexts. Some European countries offer stronger language programs at elementary and secondary schools compared to their American counterparts. As a result, these students enter their universities with intermediate or advanced foreign language proficiency, often in more than one language. Students starting a new language at the university level are most likely to be motivated to supplement already existing FL competencies. That motivation is lessened when, as is commonly the case in the United States, students begin to study a language at the university level with the goal of earning a BA-degree in the FL department. Consequently, the integration of language study with the disciplinary content of the foreign language or an international program has a different and larger role in postsecondary language studies in the United States than it has for some of their European counterparts.

European models often answer to different problems than do U. S. -based ones. For example, Perez Canado’s (2012) informative volume on competency-based language teaching in European higher education illustrates the innovative curricular thinking and implementations that were generated in recent years largely in response to European educational policy. Although context and impetus for change are very different from the situation in North America, these approaches to curriculum development address a country’s potential to participate in globalization. From that perspective, curriculum developers all over the world share a rapidly increasing access to learners on a global level. Thus, it is the hope of the editors that, despite different political and administrative constraints and opportunities, language program directors and curriculum builders beyond the North American context will benefit from familiarizing themselves with developments in the United States, and that references to European curricular initiatives may assist U.S.-based specialists in fostering longer learning sequences and instructional goals that incorporate a global purview.

2 Before and After the MLA Report: Moving from Content-Based Language Instruction to Language-Based Content Instruction

The essays in this volume take up their projects in light of the longer-term evolution of FL instruction in the US, not just current issues. Content-based Language Instruction was a concept developed in the 1970s (see, for example, King et al. 1975), but when it emerged as a more broadly implemented curricular paradigm in foreign language education in the 1990s, this approach had developed towards a narrow focus on FL language proficiency, similar to many programs in vocational Languages for Specific Purposes contexts (see Snow and Brinton 1997; Basturkmen 2006).

In the research and theoretical literature on the integration of language and content in collegiate humanities-oriented contexts three major concepts have emerged to supplement that traditional focus: literacy, genre, and discourse. Although the theoretical foundations of these concepts differ significantly from each other and in the work of many of their adherents, they share an important common feature: all three terms ground significant visions of a new curriculum whose basic structure is premised on the integration of language and content at all levels of a program.

For example, Kern (2000) outlines a model for a literacy-based curriculum that is “neither purely structural nor purely communicative in approach, but attempts to relate communicate to structural dimensions of language use” (304). The result is an integrated curriculum, where “the study of language and the study of literature are treated as mutually dependent, not mutually exclusive, activities” (305). Consequently, Kern (2002) suggest that the two-tiered curriculum can be overcome through an emphasis on literacy, a concept that conveys “a broader and more unified scope than the terms reading and writing” and thus “facilitates discussion of all the reciprocal relations of readers, writers, texts, culture, and language learning” (21). In his use, then, the term “literacy” not only served as a conceptual device to integrate the various components of the collegiate foreign language department, but also as a rhetorical strategy since colleagues with a specialization in literature, culture, and linguistics are able to intellectually identify with a literacy-centered framework (Kern 2002).

The basic mechanics of such a literacy-based model, namely the bridging of language’s structural features and communicative content, resonates with the genre-based approach to collegiate foreign language curriculum that was developed based on Halliday’ss Systemic Functional Linguistics. Georgetown University’s German department became the epicenter of this widely recognized approach to curriculum development. Crane (2006), Byrnes and Sprang (2004), as well as Byrnes et al. (2010) exemplify applications of genre-theory to the curriculum development process by demonstrating the opportunities that a theory of language as a meaning-making system can offer to the development of collegiate FL curricula that integrate language and content.

Even more knowledge-driven than the literacy- and genre-based approaches just characterized, Bernhardt and Berman’s (1999) integrated curriculum is theoretically grounded in second language reading research. It reflects the insight that second language reading comprehension is not merely a linguistic challenge, but depends to a large degree on the reader’s cultural background knowledge. Thus, an integrated curriculum promotes not only language development, but also the development of such knowledge structures from the beginning stages, including through readings and discussions in the student’s first language. Bernhardt’s (2011) assessment of students learning in the German program at Stanford shows the effectiveness of this curricular approach. Background knowledge not only provides beginning learners with the opportunity to generate “intra-German perspectives” on cultural materials, it also provides effective scaffolding for reading and discussing culturally and linguistically increasingly complex materials in the target language in intermediate and advanced stages of the curriculum.

Swaffar and Arens (2005) strike the balance between literacy- and content-based models by suggesting a curriculum that helps language learners to develop multiple literacies in the second language, with a goal pointing beyond language and content enabling them to understand the implications of texts and other media, not just their forms and contexts. Developed with the learner’s need for critical literary competencies in a variety of genre in mind, this learner-centered curriculum emphasizes “a sequence of learning rather than a sequence of material” (187). At the heart of this endeavor rests the methodology of the précis that helps learners to discover multiple layers of communicative implications through an investigation of textual elements, discourse structures, and genre.

The concepts of discourse and acculturation are central mechanisms of the learning process in Kramsch’s (2009) social semiotic view of language learning. Symbolic competence blends language and content and permits learners to participate in the “traffic of meaning through reflection, translation, and awareness for the power of language in discourse” (Kramsch 2012, p. 19). The concept of symbolic competence had a significant impact on collegiate language programs, since it informed to a large degree the MLA report that was co-authored by Kramsch (Modern Language Association 2007).

It is worth underscoring, however, that the vast majority of work done in implementing these post-proficiency models has remained in the hands of FL specialists, with only limited outreach to TESL/TEFL or European/governmental frameworks. Over the last ten years, however, the annual volumes of the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators have served as important venues for the articulation of innovative curricular thinking in collegiate foreign language education. With each year’s volume dedicated to a special topic, these volumes have addressed issues such as the role of literature in collegiate FL instruction (Scott and Tucker 2002), advanced FL instruction (Byrnes and Maxim 2004), program articulation (Barrette and Paesani 2005), the impact of the ACTFL National Standards (Scott 2010), the role of or critical and intercultural theory (Levine and Phipps 2012), and emerging forms of online and hybrid language learning (Rubio and Thoms 2014). For the present context, it is important that all contain contributions outlining instructional and curricular innovations that are not only sensitive to the particular contexts of collegiate FL departments, but also theoretically aligned with the above sketched research clusters on and models of concepts like literacy, genre, and discourse. Consequently, these volumes have contributed significantly to the profession’s efforts to integrate language and content at levels or the undergraduate program and to overcome the tradition two-tiered curriculum, and they need to be addressed by more than FL professionals.

3 Setting Our Stage: Working Outside of the FL Box to Grow FLs

A collection of nine essays like the present project cannot represent the entire spectrum of language program transformation in higher education. For example, the fact that none of the authors featured in this volume works predominantly with non-Western languages may suggest that the perspectives presented and principles discussed in the volume would only apply to curricular transformation efforts in the so-called commonly taught languages. This is, however, not the case. Although it is widely acknowledged that the acquisition of decoding competencies in languages with logographic and syllabic scripts is a major challenge that must be articulated in language-specific pedagogies especially at the beginning stages (see Walker 1989; Allen 2008), the basic principle of the integration of language and content has been championed by researcher and practitioners in Middle Eastern and Asian foreign languages (Brustad 2006; Christensen 2009).

Similarly, this volume does not have chapters devoted to technology and assessment, although they are transformative aspects of change in contemporary foreign language education. While recent curricular innovations inform many of its chapters, they reference a number of excellent volumes that present both theoretical and practical facets of technology (see Warschauer and Kern 2000; Blake 2013) and assessment (see Norris et al. 2009). Ultimately, however, a FL department’s choice of the many technological and assessment options described in these books, will be determined by the objectives and outcomes the department wishes to achieve within available constraints. In contrast, the purpose of our volume is to illustrate how faculty members in a spectrum of FL departments in institutions across the United States might go about realizing and implementing their preferred learning objectives and outcomes for curricular change. In short, this collection addresses departmental faculty in particular by presenting suggestions about how to implement transformational changes in their curricula before turning to the previously discussed volumes to select their preferred options for technological and assessment procedures.

Our enterprise is instead to advance a faculty-wide discussion that relates to recent curricular transformation processes and documents important steps towards the development of a multiliteracy curriculum in the FLs—a curriculum that focuses on language and content rather than language alone. In this effort the volume explores questions such as:

*How do historic and current disciplinary, institutional and political conditions enable and hinder curricular transformations in collegiate foreign language education programs?

*How can current theoretical frameworks guide such reform process?

*How can interdisciplinary approaches to curriculum development expand the footprint of collegiate foreign language education?

*Which kind of professional development initiatives for graduate instructors and faculty support a transcultural and multiliteracy curriculum?

*How does the transformation of the undergraduate curriculum affect graduate education?

The nine chapters are structured into three parts: Contexts: Drivers for Curricular Change, Insights: Making Curricular Transformation Work,and Outlook: Strategies Facilitating a Curricular Transformation for Multiliteracies.

4 Contexts: Drivers for Curricular Change

The first section of the volume, Contexts: Drivers for Curricular Change, consists of two essays that document and theorizes wider contexts and conditions that shaped foreign language programs up to the current critical transition period.

Janet Swaffar’s historical analysis traces the discourses and events within the field of applied linguistics and second language education from the end of WWII to the presence and shows how these developments that have influenced the curriculum. She presents a trajectory of external influences and professional responses that have evolved over that period by distinguishing between the innovations, policy changes, and impact of those changes on the constitution of FL departments and their curricula. Her objective is to demonstrate the ways that central features of that development have left an imprint, a palimpsest, that strongly influences the character and pedagogical practices of FL departments to the present day. Armed with these illustrations as explanations of often-pervading perspectives within and outside a department, Swaffar’s chapter informs readers about the basis for some of the predispositions to resist change that may exist among fellow faculty members and administrators in their institutions. She suggests that changing existing perspectives will generally be a gradual progress, but a necessary one to engage in as a precondition for developing new perspectives that lead to making fundamental changes in an existing FL curriculum anchored in its respective historical legacy.

Glenn Levine’s discourse analysis reminds us that foreign language education does not exist in a vacuum, and it would be naïve to assume that only theory and research in second language studies affect how language learning is perceived or taught in American classrooms. His chapter looks at the many external factors that influence foreign language education in the United States, as those factors are revealed in diverse discourses expressing divergent public perceptions of what should be taught and the objectives of language programs (primarily those at the K-12 level). Levine makes the case that, while such discourses have the power to channel support and consideration towards both popular and populist initiatives, they can also result in draining funding and attention from other programs that are not perceived favorably by special interest groups or the general public.

Drawing on a variety of media sources, this analysis of current trends in dominant discourses about the teaching and learning of foreign languages in the United States illustrates how many positions articulated in the public debate are contradictory and self-defeating. Levine argues that the most significant of these controversies revolve around reliance on English as a sufficient basis for global communication. Neither position in these controversies acknowledges today’s rapidly changing technologies and recent insights from research about discourse processing and the way comprehension is altered when a medial text’s context is resituated by reader location or predisposition. One need only consider the difference between reader reactions to a series of cartoons published in 2005 by the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten intended for a presumptively Christian audience when viewed by Muslim citizens and Muslims abroad (Powers 2008). Levine concludes by challenging the language profession to undertake the daunting task of challenging a largely monolingual US population to confront the dangerous political and social consequences inherent in maintaining an “English-only” sensibility.

5 Insights: Making Curricular Transformation Work

After the volume’s consideration of historical and current influences on the foreign language discipline, the four contributions in the second section of the volume explore how colleagues have changed or propose to change different components in their curricula, in full awareness of internal and external constraints on any transformative impulses.

Hiram Maxim’s account of one institution’s FL curricular reform describes how efforts at the departmental level were negotiated through the adoption of a conceptual framework compatible with the academic background and interests of fellow faculty members. He describes the facets of a curriculum designed to reflect both the strengths of a department’s faculty and learning objectives compatible with the broader goals of Emory University. Maxim provides the reader with strategies used to engage the commitment of all his colleagues in the German Department, in this case by focusing on the academic expertise of his entire faculty and delegating different levels of task development that integrated language with interpretation and critical thinking appropriate to students’ language proficiency. Maxim describes how the decisions made about what to change in the curriculum reflected particular literary and linguistic theories, in this case, Systemic Functional Linguistics. The author illustrates how teachers’ desire to help students discover how particular language use creates meaning lead to identification of a sequence of curricular stages that defined levels of elementary, intermediate, and advanced courses.

The three chapters that follow explore different ways faculty members in FL languages can more actively and influentially participate in class syllabi design in a neighboring academic field (Melin), study abroad programs (Watzinger-Tharp), and contribute to business programs that seek to produce students who can operate in managerial positions internationally (Tsethlikai).

Charlotte Melin’s chapter illustrates the cross-disciplinary commitment involved in designing an interdisciplinary course in sustainability studies. In doing so, she traces the stages and strategic advantages accruing to FL departments when they commit their energy and expertise to realign a foreign language curriculum with new academic programs, in this instance by developing a strong language component for an ecology course. Her account provides insight into how a single faculty members’ collaboration can expand her FL department’s purview beyond departmental boundaries. At the same time Melin found it could also provide a significant impetus for change within one’s FL department. By applying its problem-focused approaches implemented in the interdisciplinary course development, the collaboration Melin describes here helped lead to new practices in the foreign language department’s curriculum and course objectives.

Using her administrative point of view as director of the University of Utah’s popular International Studies major as well as a faculty member in a languages and literature department, Johanna Watzinger-Tharp assesses and critiques interdisciplinary efforts afforded by global studies degrees. She describes why “a bifurcated ‘first language, then content’” curriculum characteristic of many FL departments actually leads to significant deficits in the preparation of students to engage in broader curricular and extramural endeavors. Assessing the implications of such separate emphases in language departments’ programs, she challenges the reader to do the same—to look at whether the foreign language component and particularly the curriculum in their programs contribute to what needs to be learned to prepare students for study in a foreign country. Her analysis illustrates how problematic it is to have language departments accept only their traditional, “language only” role the internationalization efforts of U.S.-based universities and failing to help construct the components of global education: new ways of identifying, structuring, and assessing language use as part of learning about a foreign culture, its attitudes, practices, and values. She cautions that, while global education has become a priority for a large number of institutions, individual courses in language learning construed narrowly will not suffice to introduce students to the cultural and social implications of that language and hence will not prepare them to profit from their experience. Instead, Watzinger-Tharp urges that departments develop four-year programs that speak consistently about globalization as a literacy to constituents outside as well as within their FL departments, and that they construct programs with courses for non-majors as well as majors that stress both pragmatic language use and fundamental literacy about socioeconomic and political factors that influence life and attitudes in the language use and culture of the FL taught. Her illustrations of consortia developed between different departments and colleges to conduct this work identify cross-curricular options for readers interested in instituting such interdisciplinary work in their own colleges or universities.

Kenric Tsethlikai’s description of the business language program at one of America’s leading business schools provides the reader with an example of a different interdisciplinary partnership than those Melin and Watzinger-Tharp describe in the preceding chapters—an international studies program that is independent from, but nonetheless consulting and working with, the FL departments at the University of Pennsylvania. His short history and analysis of language/culture studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and its role in the program for executive education looks at a complex of elements that have rendered that program successful. First, the program integrates content and language studies in courses across the program to achieve one of its primary goals: the preparation of professional students who will become leaders with global perspectives. Tsethlikai then describes the three prongs of this effort to achieve this goal. The first is The Wharton School’s global modular courses of language and culture studies. The second major component involves a feedback loop with former students who have been in the program providing current enrollees with extensive engagement with Wharton alumni. The third uses internships combined with study abroad to provide first-hand orientations about the operation of practices and their articulation in the targeted foreign business locale. In his conclusion, Tsethlikai distinguishes between those components he sees as unique to the Wharton context and those that could be modified and applied to other institutions in order to suggest which features might serve other postsecondary settings and how.

6 Outlook: Strategies Facilitating a Curricular Transformation for Multiliteracies

The final segment presents three vistas into the future, outlining measures that will need to be implemented in many curricular transformations, if they are to be more than cosmetic or transitory.

In her chapter, Chantelle Warner makes the case for foreign language reading instruction that encourages students to recognize and articulate their reactions to a text’s format, subject matter or rhetorical features as the initial steps in reading. She establishes the ways that such reactions influence all subsequent text comprehension and are, therefore, the appropriate introduction to reading texts originating in an unfamiliar language and culture. She makes a compelling case for acknowledging affective responses as the framework and direction for subsequent reader perceptions, especially as a new student type begins to enter our classrooms. To demonstrate the possibility of so doing, Warner incisively exemplifies how foreign language readers’ negative personal attitudes toward textual content or their ability to comprehend textual messages becomes a significant source of interference with comprehension—an impediment to learning that should be addressed at the onset of instruction. The pedagogical model outlined here illustrates how the integration of foreign language readers’ affect fosters the acquisition of new knowledge and adds an important dimension to the teaching of reading by arguing why cognitive processes should not be privileged over affect in foreign pedagogy.

Heather Willis Allen offers concrete proposals for the curricular change necessary to prepare graduate students in foreign language studies comprehensively to integrate content and language in their teaching. She emphasizes that, even if they are in departments working to integrate language and cultural content in their curricula at the undergraduate level, graduate student instructors, especially at PhD-granting foreign language departments, rarely engage in developing the content and pedagogy of these courses. Consequently, they are insufficiently prepared for the spectrum of pedagogical demands in course preparation at all levels, innovative use of technology, and fulfilling their professional obligations as teachers and faculty members responding to the challenges of change in their departments and institutions.

As recognized in all the chapters in this volume, Allen observes that no single overarching model can replace current practices. Depending on the objectives of the language program, readers of this chapter can choose from a number of teaching approaches and mentoring techniques suggested for integrating graduate content with literature, language, and culture studies. Yet central to Allen’s case is her critique of the widespread reliance on pre-service training as sufficient graduate preparation for their future roles as teachers, making instead the case for in-service sessions throughout a graduate career as far more likely to insure sound professional training. Her contribution exemplifies how such training can be augmented through in-house video or visitation feedback loops that connect graduate student and coordinator, allowing them ongoing discussions about student responses to classroom activities, the relationship of language learning to content, and indicators of knowledge acquisition.

In a more theoretical proposal, Katherine Arens’ reflective essay lays out a framework for thinking about the graduate curriculum as a whole that reframes it to include not only a focus on scholarly content, but also the pedagogies exploring those contents with students. Like Allen, in rethinking the graduate language curriculum, Arens proposes that any review or structuring of a graduate curriculum in FL programs needs to not only consider scholarship and language teaching, but also a major role for pedagogies of textual, historical-cultural, and sociolinguistic content, professional literacies, and recent adaptations of Bloom’s taxonomy. Commencing with early observations in Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s (1949) Theory of Literature, Arens traces the MLA’s evolving call for “intellectual communication” across the curriculum—the evolution of disciplinary fields within FL graduate and research contexts—in three major editions of its handbook Introduction to Scholarship (Gibaldi 1981, 1992; Nicholls 2007), all of which suggest how scholars in language studies can speak and write in ways that are intelligible to colleagues in other humanist studies and the sciences. She illustrates for the reader her thesis that language study must expand its purview beyond the profession’s current education of specialists in relatively narrow theoretical or subject matter domains. Only such a project, she argues, can train scholars who are aware of their professional responsibilities in both their scholarly and pragmatic implications and who thus are adequately prepared to engage in the kinds of curricular transformation required by new scholarship and institutional demands. The graduate program she envisions would familiarize and empower students in the use of multiple research designs and resources, not as experts, but as strategists in planning their own scholarly research, curricula, and professional profiles. Included here is the category of FL pedagogy itself, a FL literacy underserved in today’s graduate education and limited by hereditary definitions of second language acquisition that have effectively separated it from other components of the curriculum.

These three clusters emerged as central to the University of Texas meeting; they constitute approaches to the core problems facing curriculum designers in the wake of the MLA Report and new economic realities that have brought many institutions to rethink what they are doing. We hope that they will challenge our readers as they challenged us.