Keywords

For more than two decades the collegiate foreign language (FL) profession has problematized the traditional division between so-called “language” courses at the lower levels of instruction and so-called “content” courses at the upper levels. James’ (1996) pointed question in the ADFL Bulletin, “Who’s minding the store?,” ushered in one of the first national discussions about programmatic bifurcation, and there has been a steady lament about this departmental structure ever since (e.g., Byrnes 1998; Kern 2002; Maxim 2006; Swaffar and Arens 2005). The 2007 report by the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) ad hoc Committee on Foreign Languages is perhaps the most recent major publication to raise awareness and to engender nationwide debate about this issue. Interestingly, the concerns raised 20 years ago are still very much the same today, namely, that departmental bifurcation (1) is detrimental to long-term, systematic, coherent language development; (2) creates a counter-productive hierarchical structure among the teaching personnel; and (3) hinders effective professionalization of graduate student teachers. Moreover, because of the negative consequences of programmatic division, there was and continues to be strong consensus about the need to address it. In short, for over 20 years the profession has been in agreement about the problems of bifurcation and the need to correct it.

Ironically, little has been done in a concrete or substantive way to change the status quo. Levine et al. (2008) cited surveys published in 2001 by the MLA documenting changes in the way that foreign languages are taught at the post-secondary level. He notes, for example, that the predominant focus on speaking at the initial levels is gradually being moderated through greater emphasis on reading and writing that focuses on literature and culture. While such initiatives indicate a change in course content that includes a stronger literary and cultural component at the lower level, there is still little evidence of emerging systematic approaches to language development across all 4 years of undergraduate instruction. In other words, departmental and curricular bifurcation remains, with language and content divided across the curriculum.

The perpetuation of departments’ divided structure is all the more surprising when, in principle, the action needed is relatively straightforward. To paraphrase Byrnes (2002a), overcoming curricular bifurcation to achieve curricular integration requires attending to content from the beginning and language until the end of the undergraduate program. As the MLA data cited by Levine et al. (2008) indicated, some steps have been taken to address the first part of this equation, namely, attending to content from the beginning of instruction, but attention to language development in a coherent and articulated fashion across the entire curriculum remains a significant obstacle for the profession. Part of the issue is a lack of clarity about what constitutes advancedness in collegiate FL education. While there have been some recent discoveries in the profession’s understanding of advanced language abilities, particularly in the research on the integrated curriculum of the Georgetown University German Department (e.g., Byrnes 2009; Byrnes et al. 2010; Byrnes and Sinicrope 2008; Crane 2006; Ryshina-Pankova 2006, 2010), the profession is still far from a consensus in the field about what types of language use should be featured and targeted in upper-level instruction. Compounding this predicament is the limited experience that instructors at the upper levels have with explicit language-based content instruction. In other words, FL faculty have extensive experience in teaching specific content at the upper levels, but they have not been educated to think about the specific characteristics of the language that convey a particular content or that language learners are asked to use to discuss that content.

In the end, regardless of institutional setting, collegiate FL education is faced with a two-fold problem: first, selecting and sequencing content across a four-year curriculum so that language development is supported in a coherent and articulated fashion; and second, supporting faculty in better understanding what constitutes the language use targeted in upper-level instruction. Each institutional and departmental constellation will have its own content and language foci (e.g. a state institution with a strong STEM focus vs. a small liberal arts college), but the need to select and sequence institution-specific content in an articulated manner that supports long-term language development would seem to apply to all educational settings. Criteria for a FL program to consider when identifying appropriate content include its faculty’s strengths, its students’ interests, and its institution’s mission. As the other chapters in this volume attest, there are many different institutional contexts for studying languages, and each program needs to assess its local situation for the type of content and language that is most appropriate to emphasize.

This chapter addresses that problem by reporting on ongoing efforts in one collegiate FL department, the German Studies Department at Emory University, to determine both the language-based content goals of upper-level instruction and the appropriate pedagogy to facilitate attainment of those goals. Central to this endeavor was the close collaboration between linguists and literary/cultural studies scholars within the department to (a) identify appropriate content-based speaking and writing tasks for the upper levels; (b) specify the linguistic features needed to realize these tasks; and (c) integrate the explicit instruction of these features into upper-level courses in an articulated manner.

1 Educational Setting

The German Studies Department at Emory University is an undergraduate program that offers a major and minor in German Studies and currently graduates each year roughly 15 majors and minors combined. In the past 5 years, total enrollment in German classes has averaged around 200 students each semester. The department typically offers each semester five sections of first-year German, three sections of second-year German, and one section each of Level 3, 4, and 5. The overwhelming majority of German Studies majors combine their major with another field. In the past 4 years alone, German Studies majors have double majored in Sociology, Biology, Mathematics, Business, Music, Economics, Philosophy, Italian Studies, History, Psychology, Political Science, and Physics.

The department has five full-time faculty, four of whom teach German full-time and one of whom teaches Yiddish full-time. Three of the four German-language faculty are tenured, and one is a Senior Lecturer, the second of three tiers among lecture-track faculty at Emory. The Yiddish-language faculty member is tenure-track. In addition, there has been on average two part-time faculty on staff each academic year. Reflecting the interdisciplinary focus of the university and the department, all tenured and tenure-track faculty have an affiliation with at least one other department on campus (e.g., Linguistics, Jewish Studies, Film Studies) and frequently cross-list courses with these programs.

The current German-language curriculum is the result of an ongoing effort begun in the fall of 2007 to integrate the teaching of language and content all curricular levels (see Maxim et al. 2013). Already in the spring semester 2006 discussions had begun in the department about the stark bifurcation within the curriculum and the difficulties students faced when making the transition to upper-division classes. These same issues received attention in the department’s self-study compiled in preparation for an external review of the department in spring 2007. Responding to these concerns, the department requested and received permission to conduct a search for a tenure-track applied linguist with specialization in curriculum construction. By fall 2007, therefore, several essential pieces were in place for substantive curricular reform to commence: the initial departmental discussions about its curriculum; the hiring of an applied linguist who had spent the previous 6 years coordinating the successfully integrated undergraduate German curriculum at Georgetown University; and the final report from the external reviewers that pointed to the existing curricular bifurcation. In addition, 2007 also marked the publication of the report by the Modern Language Association’s ad hoc Committee on Foreign Languages that highlighted the counter-productive effects of curricular bifurcation, thus providing the department with further justification for its attention to curricular matters.

2 Selecting and Sequencing Content in an Integrated Curriculum

While an integrated FL curriculum may not seem particularly complicated in principle, integrating the study of language and content from the very beginning of instruction and sustaining it in a systematic manner until the end of the program requires a substantive theoretical rethinking of how FL curricula are constructed and articulated.

As a foundational first step, the department borrowed from the work by the Georgetown University German Department and turned to the construct of genre to help them conceptualize the integration of form and content. Differing from the notion of genre within literary scholarship (i.e., prose, drama, lyric), genre for the purposes of curriculum construction encompasses a broader array of written and oral texts that includes any staged, goal-oriented, socially situated communicative event (e.g., book review, eulogy, letter of complaint). This approach to genre stems from the larger theoretical framework of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) that provides an approach for analyzing and explaining how language makes meaning. Developed by the linguist M. A. K. Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2006), SFL conceptualizes language not as a system of rules but rather as a resource for meaning-making. As such, language presents a range of options to choose from for making meaning. In the case of genre, the language-based options are constrained by a range of variables, such as the larger cultural context, the specific situation, the communicative purpose, and the intended audience, to the point where genres become conventionalized in terms of their structure and language use. SFL-oriented genre analysts have demonstrated, for example, how the carrying out of a particular genre calls on specific lexico-grammatical items to realize its communicative purpose (e.g., Macken-Horarik 2002; Martin 2009; Rothery and Stenglin 1997). As a result, SFL researchers have explored genres for their pedagogical value in demonstrating to learners how successful textual comprehension and production requires attention to textual purpose, register, structure, and language (e.g., Rothery 1996). The overt textuality of a genre-based approach also coincides nicely with the long tradition of textual engagement and analysis within collegiate foreign language studies.

Genre not only exemplifies the integration of language and content, but it also provides a principled way to select and sequence language and content across the curriculum. Traditionally, grammar has served as the sequencing principle in the first 2 years of collegiate instruction, and then in the latter years the focus has been on specific literary or cultural topics without much systematic attention to language features. Within an integrated curriculum, however, where grammar is not a sequencing principle but rather a resource for communicating meaningfully, grammar needs to be selected that allows learners to communicate about the content effectively, and the content, in turn, needs to be sequenced such that its textual manifestation reflects the language foci of its respective curricular level. Moreover, curricular sequencing needs to reflect a principled approach that supports learners’ long-term language development across the 4 years of the curriculum.

To conceive of such systematic curricular trajectory, the German Studies faculty benefited from recent SFL-based scholarship on genre-based continua for curricular sequencing (Coffin 2006; Christie and Derewianka 2008). During the spring semester 2008, the department’s applied linguist led the German Studies faculty through a series of workshops and departmental meetings that focused heavily on Coffin’s work (2006) for its helpful delineation of three major macro-genres found in secondary school history curricula: recording, explaining, and arguing genres. As a result, the faculty agreed to adopt a similar curricular trajectory for its own curriculum that would begin with a focus on narration at the lower level, shift to explanation by the end of the second year of instruction, and conclude with argumentation at the upper-most level. Table 1 specifies this generic trajectory in terms of targeted macro-genres and discursive foci.

Table 1 Discursive trajectory, Levels 1–5. (The table draws on work by Coffin (2006) as well as the curricular sequencing principles of the Georgetown University German Department see Byrnes et al. 2010)
Full size table

This curricular progression also introduces a systematic trajectory for language development. As Coffin (2006) outlines in her extensive discussion of the three macro-genres, the language focus within the narrative or recording discursive frame begins with first-person recreating and recounting of chronological events involving specific participants, shifts to third-person recounting of events involving more generic participants, and concludes with third-person accounting for the reasons why events happen in a particular sequence. During the next discursive stage of the curricular trajectory, explanation, Coffin (2006) points to the following specific language features: lexis associated with causes or consequences, numeratives and connectives for ordering causes, dense nominal groups often consisting of nominalization, and the decreased reliance on chronology as the main organizational framework. In the final discursive stage, argumentation, within which the focus is on presenting or countering one or more points of view, students are called upon to use non-human and abstract participants, specialized lexis referring to the topic being argued, direct or indirect discourse for quoting or reporting points of view, and fewer modalized propositions.Footnote 1

With a curricular trajectory in place that reflected the discursive progression from narration to explanation to argumentation, the department had to next map appropriate content onto this trajectory that modeled the targeted discursive focus of the curricular level. To do so, the faculty formed over the next couple of years sub-committees that focused on each of the curricular levels. Each committee consisted of faculty members who had taught either at that level, the preceding, or the following level.Footnote 2

In their deliberations, the sub-committees considered content areas for their respective levels according to two main criteria: (a) content that was culturally significant, as defined by the sub-committee, and of interest to both students and instructors; and (b) content whose predominant textual manifestation reflected the discursive emphasis for that level. For example, the sub-committee for Level 1 (i.e., first-year German), consisting of a tenured applied linguist and a Senior Lecturer, elected to structure the course around specific roles or group affiliations that have an impact on one’s self-identity (e.g., student, consumer, traveler, family member) not only for its cultural significance but also because its primary textual manifestation reflected the discursive focus of that level, namely, narration. In comparison, the sub-committee for Level 2, consisting of a tenured applied linguist, a Senior Lecturer, and a tenured literary scholar with a research focus on contemporary German literature and film, chose to focus the second-year course on factors that play a role in one’s coming of age (e.g., family, nature, school) because it allowed for continued attention to narration while also providing opportunities to transition to the next major discursive focus, namely, explanation (e.g., producing a text that not only tells a story about what one does at school but that also explains how and why schooling played a role in on one’s coming of age).Footnote 3

Such a curricular framework has implications for instructional materials as well. For instance, whereas the previous curriculum relied on commercial textbooks for the first 2 years of instruction, the faculty chose for the newly integrated curriculum to drop all commercial textbooks except the reference grammar for Level 2 and to implement an unorthodox approach to the textbook in Level 1 in that the content focus for the level determined the order in which topics in the textbook were addressed in class. As an example, subordinating conjunctions, a grammar topic that does not appear until the eighth chapter of the textbook, is introduced already in the second unit in German 101 because students need that grammatical resource to communicate effectively about why and when they participate in different activities as part of the unit’s discussion of one’s hobbies. This covalent approach in which the textbook serves the language and the content needs of the curriculum continues throughout the program. In fact, beginning with Level 2, the only commercial textbooks used are reference grammars. The content is delivered exclusively in the form of printed and visual texts selected by level-specific sub-committees. In this way the curriculum is readjusted to present the language use needed to help a learner comprehend and discuss a given content area.

Once content areas at each level had been mapped onto a set of discursive focuses, the next step in the implementation phase of the curricular reform was to specify the linguistic realization of each content area to identify the targeted language features for each curricular level. In other words, the language used to convey the meaning of a particular content area had to become the language targeted in instructional units. To guide this process, faculty selected for each content area certain textual genres that not only delivered the content at each level but also exemplified the discursive focus for each. For example, at Level 1 with its focus on narrating one’s own identity, one genre that the faculty selected to deliver the content was the personal recount. At Level 2 the fairy tale was one of the genres chosen for both modeling narrative strategies and examining the theme of coming of age. With each targeted genre, students read more than one example and focus not only on the genre’s relevance for the level’s thematic focus but also on the genre’s organizational framework and linguistic realization. In the case of the fairy tale in Level 2, students read three different examples of fairy tales, and with each text they become increasingly familiar with the genre’s schematic structure and its prominent language features. These textual elements are then summarized for the student in the description of the writing assignment that elicits reproduction of the targeted genre (Appendix A). Students are reminded of the obligatory textual stages as well as important lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features to include.

With particular genres selected for emphasis at each curricular level (see chart, Appendix C), faculty turned their attention to identifying specific linguistic features of each genre to focus on in instruction. In general, the features were divided into two categories: lexico-grammatical phenomena at the word- and sentence-level, and discourse-level structural and rhetorical characteristics. Table 2 provides an overview of the major language features targeted for instruction during the pedagogical treatment of personal recounts in Level 1 and fairy tales in Level 2.

Table 2 Overview of language foci for two genres
Full size table

The personal recount has a linear, chronological structure, and thus expressing temporality, either through prepositions, adverbial phrases, or subordinate clauses, receives particular pedagogical attention in Level 1. Temporality is also a central feature of fairy tales, the next genre chosen. Because fairy tales are narrated in the past tense, learners gain experience in making cohesive connections between different time periods within a story (“after Snow White had bitten into the poisoned apple …”), thus revisiting how the passage of time is conveyed and expanding their repertoire for expressing temporality through temporal subordinating conjunctions and adverbial phrases for temporal concepts like “before” and “after.” Moreover, as Table 2 highlights, the focus on fairy tales allows for introduction of causality as learners begin to practice explaining the factors and consequences of particular actions in the tales.

The specification of genre-based language features to be emphasized in instruction laid the groundwork for the final step of the curriculum implementation process, namely, the development of genre-based writing and speaking tasks for the learners. Following the work outlined by Byrnes (2002b), the level-specific faculty sub-committees selected certain genres taught at each level to target for reproduction and then specified elements of those genres as the assessment criteria for the genre-based tasks.

As the assignment sheet for one genre-based writing task in Appendix A indicates, a typical task description for such an assignment consists of three parts. First, learners are reminded of the genre’s schematic structure, the intended audience, and its mode of delivery (e.g., written or spoken). Second, learners are given suggestions for how to engage the content of the task through a series of question prompts. Third, the specific language features that are necessary for the linguistic realization of the genre’s content are listed. The specificity of each part of the task description provides clear guidance to the learners and the instructors on what is required for successful completion of the task. About fifteen minutes of class is needed to introduce and explain each assignment sheet.

3 Collaborative and Integrative Faculty Development Amidst Curricular Integration

While the process for selecting and sequencing content within an integrated curriculum as presented above was a transparent approach that enjoyed unanimous support among the faculty, the actual implementation of this process was not without challenges. Overwhelmingly, the most serious obstacle to integrating language and content at all levels of the curriculum was the difficulty in identifying the specific language features of a targeted genre. Interestingly, the central issue was that faculty members were not used to approaching content and texts from a language-based perspective and consequently were challenged when asked to specify how a particular text was realized linguistically.

Conceptually, the faculty understood the discursive trajectory of the curriculum from narration to explanation to argumentation. They also were not challenged when asked to select genres that exemplified each of these discursive foci. Furthermore, all colleagues concurred with the latest scholarship that had been presented to them. Convincing for many was a Georgetown study of its new 4-year program that investigated standard measures of syntactic complexity in student written production (e.g., mean length of T-unit, mean length of clause, and clauses per T-unit). That research revealed that as students in the Georgetown curriculum moved along such a genre-based trajectory, their writing performances were marked by a preference for subordination over coordination as a way of organizing information (Byrnes et al. 2010). Coinciding with this rise in subordination was an increase in lexical density (content-carrying words per clause) and a decrease in grammatical intricacy (clauses per sentence). In other words, inter-clausal connections were made increasingly through subordination, but there was also a move toward increased intra-clausal meaning making through lexically denser clauses and fewer clauses per sentence.

Byrnes et al. (2010) suggest that this phenomenon can be explained by an increase in phrasal elaboration rather than subordination (e.g., “After the meal” vs. “After we ate”). Other second language researchers have made similar observations about students’ progress in writing (e.g., Byrnes 2009; Cooper 1976; Flahive and Snow 1980; Ryshina-Pankova 2010). These studies all document the increased use of the linguistic resource grammatical metaphor by advanced writers as a way to condense and restructure information. The following sentence from an advanced learner exemplifies the increased incidence of grammatical metaphor in the form of nominalizations (e.g., “difficulty,” “representation”): Eine große Schwierigkeit jeder Verfassung ist das Problem der gleichen Vertretung der großen und kleinen Staaten (A big difficulty with every constitution is the problem of equal representation of the large and small states). The quality “difficult” is nominalized into the grammatical metaphor “difficulty” and the process “to represent” is nominalized into the grammatical metaphor “representation,” resulting in just one clause with high lexical density. Maxim and Petersen’s (2008) analysis of the transitivity system among writers in the Georgetown curriculum produced analogous findings by documenting, for example, the increased use of abstract, relational, rather than material, processes (i.e., verbs of “being” vs. “doing”), a phenomenon that typically occurs in more public language use and that accompanies the increased use of grammatical metaphor as a more sophisticated meaning-maker (Note the use of the relational process “is” in the learner example above). In sum, this research on genre-based writing development provided the faculty with a clear and sophisticated portrayal of the predominant linguistic resources that learners use as they move up the curriculum.

While this research on characteristics of progress in written performance provided a helpful overview of the general trends in language use among learners in a genre-based curriculum, the faculty was not always able to translate that trajectory into specific pedagogical foci within a particular level of instruction. The problem remained that faculty were challenged to identify the essential meaning-making resources within a particular model text. In many ways, this predicament reflects the current state of the collegiate FL profession and the division between linguistic and literary study. Although language use implicitly underlies much literary analysis, literary scholarship since the days of New Criticism has not focused on fine-grained examinations of the linguistics resources and choices employed in texts (see Arens, this volume). Moreover, discourse analysis has developed as a subfield of linguistics and cultural studies but not of literary interpretation.

To some extent, this separation of textual analysis from linguistic analysis helps to explain why upper-level FL instruction has been deficient in exemplifying stipulations for the type of language that advanced learners need to learn and use. The traditional advanced grammar course in many FL departments is an attempt to address this situation, but in most cases the instructional focus has been on sentence-level grammar rather than on a discourse- or text-level grammar and the grammar use appropriate to discuss different contexts, genres, and media. Moreover, after such a transitional grammar course, students in their subsequent advanced FL classes rarely find writing assignments that provide detail about the specific language features to use. Students are left to infer how to express what they have read about (appropriate referential or summative language) or what they view the broader implications to be of a reading or viewing.

Such was the case in the early stages of the curricular revision of Level 3 at Emory. Level 3 is the last of the three levels with prescribed content (Levels 4 and 5 consist of electives with content foci that change each semester). With the gradual decline over the past several years in the number of students entering Emory with prior exposure to German, most of the students at Level 3 come up through the Emory German Studies curriculum and have already completed the one-year language requirement at Emory. As a result, most of the students enrolled in Level 3 (roughly 20 per semester) do not take the course to fulfill a graduation requirement and many will complete a minor or major in German Studies. In addition, in contrast with its instantiation before the curricular reform, Level 3 is no longer considered a “bridge” course that serves to introduce students to German Studies; rather, it continues the integrated approach to language learning begun in the first semester albeit with a different content and discursive focus.

As Table 2 indicated above, the discursive focus on explanation had been established for Level 3 and the corresponding content focus chosen to elicit such a discourse was a reverse chronological examination of the tensions and dichotomies inherent in the portrayal of love at different points in German-language cultural production. Students were thus expected to examine a particular text’s depiction of love and then explain the factors and/or consequences of particular scenes, events, or characters. The expectation for students entering Level 3 was that they had developed their narrative abilities in the previous two levels and were now ready to shift their discursive attention to explanation. It should be added, however, it is not as if students had not had to explain factors or consequences prior to enrolling in Level 3. Particularly in the second half of Level 2, students frequently were asked to explain the reasons for a particular character’s coming of age and thus were called upon to express causality to a greater degree. Nevertheless, the first writing assignment in Level 3, a plot summary, was selected because it served as a hybrid genre situated between narration and explanation that required the writer to both narrate the major events of the plot as well as explain the connections between the events. However, the first iteration of the writing assignment did little to guide the learner in how to construct an effective summary. Consisting of four short sentences, learners were instructed as follows:

Write a summary of X in your own words. Keep your summary clear and focus on the main events with concrete examples from the text. Don’t copy words or passages from the text unless you are using a quotation to explain a scene or event. Be sure to proofread your work to catch careless errors.

Not unexpectedly, the results varied greatly and were deemed largely unsatisfactory by the instructor. In response, the instructor, a literary scholar working together with an applied linguist in the department, developed a writing assignment designed to specify what learners were expected to produce. The first step was to identify the summaries that were considered successful and effective. For this initial assessment, no criteria were established to delineate what determined success or effectiveness; rather, the instructor read each student summary and selected 4–5 that reflected her notion of a successful summary.

Next, the linguist and the instructor worked together to identify specific language-based examples in the performance that contributed to the effective plot summary, particularly choices made at the lexico-grammatical and the textual level. After codifying and categorizing successful learners’ language-based choices, a second iteration of the task description (Appendix B) then included (a) a brief description of the genre’s purpose; (b) an overview of the general structure of the genre; and (c) a list of rhetorical devices for conveying the content of the summary. In other words, the new task description began to include what genre-based pedagogues (e.g., Rothery 1996; Martin 2009) emphasize in their approach to genre-based writing, namely, the context of culture (i.e., the social purpose of the genre), the context of situation (i.e., the register), the schematic structure (i.e., the plot sequence), and the language features characteristic of the first three factors.

Upon closer inspection, however, the two colleagues realized that the task description needed additional refinement. In particular, the specification of language features remained relatively general and did not necessarily correspond to the different stages of the summary. As genre theorists have pointed out, each genre stage carries with it a specific communicative purpose and linguistic realization (Martin 2009)—the different language representative of each different stage. Thus the two colleagues expanded the task description to include a third category that focused exclusively on language:

Language

  • Present tense

  • Indirect discourse when quoting a character

  • Passive voice (in the introduction)

  • Action and sensing verbs in the main section

  • Sentences in the main section that begin with …

    • Temporal phrases to establish the chronology

    • Summative nouns and nominalizations to capture/summarize elements (e.g., these conditions …/because of her decision …)

    • Adverbs that portray the physical or mental state of characters or scenes (e.g., Despairingly, s/he goes home/Hunted by the villagers, s/he …)

  • Rhetorical and discursive devices for a summary (see Appendix B)

Not only did this addition to the task description bring it in line with the already established tri-partite structure of task descriptions for Levels 1 and 2, it also gave the learner more guidance on how to make meaning at each stage of the summary. The first two bullet points refer to language that is prevalent in all three stages of the summary, but then the subsequent bullet points refer to the specific linguistic realization of each stage. The final bullet point refers to the expanded categorization of different rhetorical and discursive devices used in summary writing, e.g., to introduce a work; to introduce a character; to arrange/organize events; to comment on the work’s effect on the reader. Where the second iteration of the task description distinguished solely between “introduction” and “content,” the third iteration categorized the rhetorical devices according to the stages (Appendix B). For example, learners were instructed that in their conclusion they should discuss the effect of the work on the reader, and one of the categories listing appropriate rhetorical devices addressed precisely that communicative purpose.

A clear by-product of this iterative process of developing comprehensive and guided task descriptions is that the assessment of student performances becomes more precise. As the so-called “feedback form” in Appendix D indicates, the different features of the task outlined on the assignment sheet (Appendix B) become the criteria for assessing the degree to which the student completed the task effectively. The next step will be to move from the feedback form to a rubric.Footnote 4

The consequences of this collaborative effort for the learners, the department, and the curriculum were noteworthy. To begin with, the positive interaction between colleagues contributed to an openness and collaborative spirit that had begun with the advent of the curricular reform, especially in creating a symmetrical relationship between the two colleagues. In other words, both the linguist and the literary scholar made important contributions to the effort without one feeling subordinate to the other. The literary scholar brought expertise on summaries of literary works while the linguist provided knowledge on genre and discourse analysis. Together, they pooled their findings and produced a task description that would not have been possible if just one of them had worked on it.

Second, the focus on identifying language features in exemplary summaries instilled a renewed appreciation among the faculty for the centrality of language in our discipline. One of the often-cited casualties of departmental bifurcation is the absence of any systematic attention to language development in upper-level instruction and to advanced language use. In many ways, the type of unsystematic approach to language can be said to be a product of interdisciplinarity in the profession (see Maxim 2009; Pfeiffer 2008). While this shift has expanded course offerings and established closer ties with other disciplines, it has also resulted in a greater role for English in FL departments (e.g., Donahue and Kagel 2012). Language-based interactions with content and tasks, such as outlined above, however, can return the discipline to what would seem to be its core mission, which Swaffar (1999) so eloquently expressed as an examination of “how individuals and groups use words and other signs in context to intend, negotiate, and create meanings” (7).

Third, equipped now with a clearer idea of what students need to succeed linguistically, instructors can be much more focused and systematic in their course and lesson preparation. As a case in point, prior to the specification of the language demands for Level 3’s summary writing, the “language” component of the course consisted of a standard review of German grammar as presented in a reference grammar textbook, rather than the task-based, contextually anchored grammar problem the new assignments presented.

Fourth, awareness among instructors and learners about discourse-level and genre-based textual features increased with this task-based grammar. As the curriculum reform moves forward, the tri-partite structure outlined will be used in each speaking and writing assignment to include both the targeted genre of the task and its schematic structure. Although it is still too early to gather substantive data on how such structures influence learners’ awareness and thinking, its objective is to prompt learners to think more about the type of text they are producing, the audience they are addressing, and the organization of their text.

Last, this collaborative approach to task development has become a model within the department at all levels. Faculty work together to specify the structure, content, and language of each task and are willing to revise and enhance the descriptions based on student feedback and task completion. Even more interestingly, because all genres have not been described linguistically and structurally as we do here, the faculty has had to conduct its own genre analysis, exposing uncharted territory that has proven to be challenging but ultimately rewarding for faculty.

In many ways, this genre-based analysis exemplifies the integrative approach to foreign language education that many, including the authors of the MLA Report (2007), have proposed for the past three decades, linking language to content and form at more advanced levels. In addition, since genre analyses have taken place collaboratively, faculty has begun to be better informed about the tasks, texts, and curriculum as a whole. Similar to what Byrnes (2001) described as the publicly shared knowledge and commonly held practices that resulted from the curricular reform in the German Department at Georgetown University, the curricular project in the German Studies Department at Emory University has integrated the expertise of the faculty to produce a common foundation from which to build their language program.

4 Conclusion

The different calls for curricular reform in the profession share refrains about needing to integrate the study of language and content at all curricular levels. This chapter has illustrated two specific challenges that arise when such integration is attempted.

First, FL professionals need a principled way to select and organize content that adheres to their preferred articulated, coherent, and systematic approach to language development. In this case, the genre-based continuum from narration to explanation to argumentation has provided a helpful map for appropriate content along a language-learning pathway.

Second, all faculty involved in a curricular reform need to become familiar with language-based approaches to content, if they are to target them for explicit instruction. Whether a language department’s colleagues are linguistic, literary, or cultural scholars, they are all used to working with texts, but often do not make the kinds of explicit links suggested here, even if, invariably, most colleagues are more than willing to discuss textual engagement and analysis. Indeed, in many ways, those types of text-based discussions are what have motivated and excited all our scholarship since we entered the profession.

On another level, however, we have not always approached our textually oriented analyses from a language-based pedagogical perspective. In other words, we have not thought about how the texts we engage could be models for our students’ language development or how language functions to make content meaningful—we have been socialized to divide these language acquisition imperatives, not to teach them holistically. Thus, for example, FL graduate student teacher education typically perpetuates the bifurcation found in undergraduate FL programs by separating graduate students’ pedagogical development from their coursework in literary and cultural areas (see Reeser 2013 and Ryshina-Pankova 2013, for counter examples).

The key to collaboration in a curricular reform therefore must be based on a shared understanding about the role of texts in language development. That is, the choices behind text, content, and course selection all have to take into account the language-learning trajectory of the projected learners. Without such linguistically oriented textual thinking, curricular integration will remain elusive in collegiate FL education.