Abstract
This chapter outlines a core problem for foreign language (FL) departments at the graduate level: how the training of graduate students needs to answer not only to new curricular and institutional demands, but also to the demands imposed by both traditional and current ideas about disciplinarity and scholarship, as well. It offers a heuristic for understanding how research, teaching, and professional communication need to be integrated systematically into graduate curricula, and how the graduate curriculum in any institution needs to be rethought as based on professional integration, not content.
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- 1.
See the hallmark document calling for greater accountability from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2002): Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. An interesting contemporary parallel is found in Europe: Terrón-López and García-García (2013), “Assessing transferable generic skills in language degrees.”
- 2.
An example of this “dilettantism” with a political focus would be the now-past tendency of some feminist scholars to critique representations of women’s roles from the distant past because they do not correspond with today’s norms for behavior –a blatant historical inaccuracy that renders such judgments essayistic rather than scholarly.
- 3.
To say nothing of their further demand for interdisciplinarity: “The professor of literature must be conversant with the relations between literary theory, philosophy, psychology. He must be able to give some reasoned account, to representatives of other disciplines, of the nature and value of literature” (Wellek and Warren 1948, p. 290).
- 4.
To make that differentiation in any detail is beyond the scope of the present chapter, but I allude here to the differences between I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929) as a systematic approach to reading) and Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), with its final chapter “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” which stresses the poem as a unity of experience that cannot be paraphrased without destroying it (a clear nod to Romantic notions of the artwork as a particular kind of revelation).
- 5.
It can be argued that contemporary scholars like Halliday do indeed deal with language use beyond formal structure (e.g. Martin and Rose [2003]), genres, and pragmatic contexts. Yet I would point to a significant difference between Halliday’s understanding of language as a cognitive phenomenon and a user- and context-centered pragmatic approach, no matter how much the two are mutually informing. Halliday and Matthiessen (2006) subtitle their exploration of experience A language-based approach to cognition. This work thus falls in the tradition of cognitivist approaches to language and psychology popular at least since the Second World War. These approaches look for the logics and patterns in mental processing as the determining factor in meaning-making, and, as such, provide excellent scientific models for how mind functions in processing language—much in the tradition of Heidegger’s philosophy, which took up Husserl’s (1999) notion of intentionality (how concepts are virtually a priori linked in the acts of consciousness that produced meaning—if you say “front,” you intend the existence of the concept “back,” for example). This strain of scholarly investigation ends up by modeling the formal structures of language, cognition, and experience as sets of laws or as patterns whose parts interact in ways that are the subject of much of their publications (for a literary version of this kind of scholarship, see Ingarden 1973).
Yet Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books (1958) show that the cognitive frame need not be considered as existing prior to a use context—that a single mental concept can correspond with multiple frames of mental action (“Brick!!!!” can mean “Hand me a brick, I need one,” or “Duck!!! Incoming missile!”), what (again in a literary framework) Hans-Robert Jauss (1982) would explore as a “horizon of expectation” heavily conditioned by habit, tradition, and history, as well as by the limits of individual minds and the materials worlds they live in. Thus local and community patterns of meaning-making, analyzed from the user’s point of view and correlated with affect and identity, are much more important than the intentional structures of philosophical-phenomenological objects. Thus when Jauss discusses genres, he sees them as historical-conventional objects that condition individuals’ knowing because they are habituated into understanding through the filters of these patterns. In contrast, when Halliday discusses genres, he works more like Ingarden, speaking of the a priori ground for what make the genres meaningful and offering an inventory of the ways in which the genre structures may convey meaning in use. Jauss’ version is based in a vision of cognition as shared habits in a particular historical and social context, as well as the patterns of mind—a historical epistemology of experience; Halliday’s is based in the need to investigate possible patterns of cognition implicated in genres as longer-formal acts of language and information—potential experience.
- 6.
- 7.
These are of particular interest in the history of rhetoric and social histories—another hidden interdiscinpliarity within literary studies).
- 8.
Thanks to Per Urlaub for this distinction. What passes for “content-based instruction” these days is usually language for special purposes, focused on primary language acquisition at fundamental levels, backed up with a limited address to content knowledge (usually aimed at other majors who are presumed ot know the content, leaving this instruction to teach differences between the language, institutional, and interactional patterns in the L1 and L2 cultures). It is critical to differentiate this “content-based language instruction” from a true language-based content instruction: a learning context based first on the structures of the content addressed, within institutional/group/professional norms, then on how these content norms are transacted orally and in textual forms in any media (in either the L1 and L2—see National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project [2006] for the comparisons and communities standards), and then finally into specific forms of language performance that can be sequenced in any variety of language hierarchies in the L1 and L2. For examples of how that curricular development may be planned and implemented, see Swaffar and Arens (2000) and Arens (2005, 2007, 2008, 2010).
- 9.
See the National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project (2006) for the publication on the project and the general information online at <http://www.actfl.org/publications/all/nationalstandards- foreign-language-education> for project information. For an example of how it is intended to be used to plan and assess curricula, see Allen and Dupuy (2012).
- 10.
See “The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education” (2010), online at <http:// classifications.carnegiefoundation.org/descriptions/>, which should be part of the professional education of every PhD, not as an inflexible norm, but rather as the fundamental grid determining all careers as researchers and teachers in post-secondary contexts
- 11.
An older generation will remember when the answer to the question of whether Kafka is an expressionist or a modernist was an issue of professional survival in graduate school. More important for today’s scholars is why and how such distinctions arose and can be used (or not), and what cultural assumptions (and hence power relations) they represent
- 12.
Not to be overlooked, but not to be discussed here, is the alignment with such judgments of “rightness” with professional success, visibility and rewards rather than with scholarly debates and mutual assessment, as well as the tendency of trends and popular approaches to dominate in choices of dissertations, rather than treating the dissertation as an apprentice price, not just producing new scholarship, but also learning what those practices imply for the structure of work and professional communication. That “trends”—or trendiness—dominate the professional landscapes today is undeniable, if one looks at programs for the large annual meetings of national professional associations in any of the disciplines.
- 13.
See Information on Systemic Functional Linguistics (n. d.), online at <http://www.isfla.org/ Systemics/definition.html>for an introduction of this discipline’s self-presentation, and Eggins (1994) for a concise introduction to its processes. One might also point to the projects undertaken in Europe under the Bologna Process as another framework in which theory informs textbooks and assessment. See European Ministers of Education (1999), The Bologna declaration, and the Council of Europe (2001), the Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. For research on that framework, see particularly Cañado (2013a, b).
- 14.
Such charges are often leveled at today’s interdisciplinary work, where a FL scholar borrows a methodological perspective from another field and then applies it to a problem in her own. All too often, that borrowed methodology has been critiqued or improved in its own context, and so an interdisciplinarily credible use of that method would have to either adopt the improvements (and thus function in ways intelligible to the other discipline) or account for the use of the older version (and thus question the “discrediting” or “improvements” by the other discipline, on specific and overt grounds, as a challenge to method). When this is not done, the work is open to charges of naïveté.
- 15.
Old-style “objective tests” involving basic explanatory essays, definitions, and sometime multiple choice or true/false items test content mastery. Passing them requires good memories and often a lot of reading, but they do not necessary document other kinds of learning, like the ability to critique, to analyze, or to persuade, or the ability to work with original text materials to create categories of knowledge. Testing for an interlocking or articulated curriculum is likely to assess knowledge by setting as test items a series of tasks of ever-increasing difficulty, as is outlined in Bloom’s Taxonomy, starting with recognition, labeling and grouping (“which item does not belong with the others”), to definitions and explanations, standard analytic patterns used to apply to the chosen materials (“Discuss how depressions and stock market crashes like 1929 tend to affect the middle classes more than any other”), and up to crafting original models.
- 16.
Note that the history Standards have two parts: Historical Thinking Standards and Content Standards for US and World History; see <http://www.nchs.ucla.edu/Standards/> (accessed 5 July 2013).
- 17.
The term is borrowed from Roger Chartier (1994), who uses it to model how books are involved in various networks: as container for knowledge, as an object of value, as an object to be controlled, etc.
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Arens, K. (2014). Discipline, Institution, and Assessment: The Graduate Curriculum, Credibility, and Accountability. In: Swaffar, J., Urlaub, P. (eds) Transforming Postsecondary Foreign Language Teaching in the United States. Educational Linguistics, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9159-5_10
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