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Finally, not only are the FL profession's knowledge bases largely English-driven, they are driven by the presumption of the validity and generalizability, perhaps even necessity, of an Anglo-American educational philosophy and instructional setting. For example, communicative language teaching of a certain kind, namely the basic interactive, situated oral language ability that can be attained in the typical four semesters of language instruction in cognate languages in U.S. colleges, has become not only a programmatic goal and outcome but also a pedagogical medium. At first sight, that linkage is, of course, as it should be. But to uncover its meaning we must go back to the educational context on which it is based. True, many FL programs do reside in the American educational context, share its educational goals, and involve teachers who subscribe to its educational philosophy and goals. But analysis seems called for in order to determine whether all three aspects-- educational goals, educational setting, and cultural predisposition of the instructors - can and should be differently construed in the Asian languages context. I do not wish, in the least, to create either an exclusionary or a privileged construct for the teaching of Asian languages - such a step requires the greatest of caution. But I do suggest a need for determining what can and perhaps even must and what cannot and must not be imported into other instructional environments so that the Asian languages community and other non-English FL professional communities can gain the benefits of others' insights while developing, implementing, and sustaining their own valid interests.
Following these broad brush-strokes regarding my stance I now describe the paper itself in the following fashion: 1) it is a talking paper with less elaborate levels of documentation and attribution than is otherwise customary for a scholarly text, though I provide a bibliography of sources that I have found helpful in arriving at my own thinking regarding curriculum construction and adult FL pedagogy; 2) it is a "problem" paper not a "solution" paper; as such, it simply lays out a number of issues that Asian studies professionals are best prepared to frame and reframe and clarify within their contexts; 3) it is, quite deliberately, a "perspectives" paper, inasmuch as the issues I have selected and those I have not brought to the fore reflect my own viewpoint regarding the current state of affairs in the FL profession, even though the profession's willingness to face them is far from certain. In that sense- and in that sense only- the paper is perhaps also a bit "visionary." In the end the discussion in Chicago will determine the value of what I have here set out to do.
Organizationally, the paper begins with assumptions about the construct "curriculum" as I employ it here. Second, it explores why a curriculum discussion seems to be coming to the fore with ever greater insistence in the FL field at this historical moment, an exploration that looks both to internal and external motivations and determinants with the goal of arriving at broad issues to which future curricula should respond. I will then proceed to the heart of the matter, current options in curriculum development and construction. I conclude with some questions that reflect what I see as peculiarities and particularities that such a discussion might have in the Asian language context, a way of stimulating the session discussion itself.
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I take the notion of curriculum to be one that takes seriously the goal-directedness of any instructional effort and the long-term complex nature of learning. Foundational for any curriculum construction are two broad considerations, principles of selection and principles of sequencing, inherently highly interpretive moves. Although we generally do not think of matters in this fashion, the need for curriculum construction in the FL context really arises only if adult instructed learners are to be able to attain upper levels of performance in their second languages. That is, curriculum construction is an indispensable vehicle rather than an optional afterthought only if we are committed to the goal of assuring that adult instructed learners can acquire a second language effectively and efficiently, that is, to the highest possible level, given the particular educational setting in which they do their learning and given the amount of time they are able and willing to devote to this effort. Or, even closer to the ground, a faculty group contemplating the demanding and labor-intensive steps of curriculum construction must, at the very least, be united by a strong sense that its instructional goals, even in languages that are non-cognate to English and often have completely different literacy practices and writing systems, go beyond basic interpersonal communicative abilities. I say this since, in a very general way, any reasonably competent language teaching, even with a relatively uncoordinated aggregation of courses, should be able to bring students to basic interactive language performance, regardless the language. In that sense, American FL instruction has, by and large, actually been remarkably successful given its generally limited ambitions and absent long-range curricula and few changes would be called for.
However, curricular planning most decidedly is in order if one concludes that this kind of "success" has been unsatisfactory for a long time and will be even more unsatisfactory in the future, for both cognate and non-cognate languages. This is so since, for all its variation, any adult language learning and teaching, but particularly language learning and teaching that targets upper levels of performance, an incipient L2 literacy, is effective and efficient to the extent that it reflects a grounded understanding of adult instructed FL learning. First and foremost that requires a carefully developed understanding of the interplay of the broad features of accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language learning at a time with continued and carefully balanced development of accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language learning over time. Such a careful conceptualization would then result in an effective and efficient pedagogy of choices, as contrasted with the mere application of a teaching methodology or of various teaching tricks of the trade. Its realization, however, critically depends on a curricular framework in order to motivate specific decisions, through a sophisticated awareness of the long-term consequences of certain instructional interventions over a number of years. In reverse, a curricular framework can be queried for its soundness only when it comes to life in a pedagogy of informed choices that considers short- and long-range performance outcomes. In other words, our long-standing preoccupation with the perfect method has been misguided; it does not exist in any case. Instead, appropriate pedagogies are situated choices. Similarly, our long-standing neglect of curricular work has the gravest of consequences for the conduct of our entire field, for programs, pedagogies, materials, and assessment practices.
To give just one example of the intricate relationships at the intersection of curriculum and pedagogy, theory and practice, let me refer to the much discussed issue of seemingly arrested language development in an instructional context, usually and quite problematically referred to as fossilization. All too often that has been interpreted as a flaw in the learner who should change his or her behavior regarding accuracy of performance, and finally get it right; it has even been elevated to a strong version of the critical period hypothesis in an instructed setting, positing a learner age beyond which adult learners are unable to acquire the FL in a manner that would count as successful. Practically never is it suggested that the absence of a curricular context which I take to be the result of considerations regarding the long-term nature of instructed language learning might have contributed to a kind of learning that, by its very nature, makes it difficult for learners to continue to evolve toward more competent language use.
In other words, an emphasis on selection and sequencing as central to curriculum builds on the fact that the long-term efficacy and effect of any pedagogical intervention is enhanced when pedagogical decision-making is informed by a carefully constructed educational context. This kind of context, not merely an aggregation of courses, I refer to as a curriculum. As a result, the continued insistence on a rule-based, grammar-driven pedagogy, the legacy of the post Word War II surge in L2 instruction, is no longer warranted. Also unacceptable is the more recent turn of events, the ubiquitous pedagogical practice of an unmotivated methodological eclecticism, perhaps the most apt descriptor of the communicative turn in FL teaching. No longer defensible as well is a practice of even greater longevity, that of simply stringing courses together, what I have referred to as a curriculum by default (Byrnes 1998). And, finally, we can no longer tolerate a bifurcated aggregation of these courses into language courses where language is learned in isolation from content and content courses occur in isolation from language acquisition. Instead, the profession needs to muster the will to reflect seriously on the possibility of how we might integrate content and language within one overarching curricular framework, a demand that requires us to revisit with great care the inherent connection between foundational assumptions about the nature of language and adult instructed language learning.
Let me summarize, then, what I mean by curriculum (see also Byrnes, 1998): The notion of curriculum refers to "the attempt to devise a sequence of educational opportunities for learners that builds on internal interrelations and continuities among the major units of instruction ... to enhance learning. Critical considerations are the selection of content and its sequencing - the what of the curriculum - and its delivery in both the larger educational environment and the particular instructional setting - the how of the curriculum ... A curriculum is essentially a policy decision about the purpose and nature of education ... A curriculum is also a critical act of defining the role of the learner and, by extension, the act of learning" (Byrnes, 1998, pp. 265-266).
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Before embarking on how such curricula might be constructed an understanding of why curriculum construction has recently become a hot topic in the first place should help direct our efforts in that regard. Here I differentiate between forces arising in the internal forum and forces that reflect and respond to the external forum.
The Internal Forum
Beginning with field-internal matters, to me one of the most remarkable developments in FL education in the last twenty years or so is at least the potential for thinking more deliberately and more openly about the nature of language and about the nature of language learning in ways that differ markedly from current practices, in research and teaching. These ways have for quite some time been available in the quieter recesses of scholarly thinking that the great divide of the Cold War created and sustained on both sides. Until recently and for very different sociopolitical and ideological reasons, however, they were excluded from the center of the public forum of the profession's discourse. I am referring to a re-visioning of the relationship of knowledge, language, and culture. To a significant extent, our current practices rest on the assumption of the validity of a normative and essentialist model of knowledge and language, in line with long-standing Western philosophical constructs that have presumed knowledge to be independent of language, pre-existing, "out there" as it were, in an idealized, even God-given metaphysical realm. Such knowledge is "discovered," is Truth, a way to God's knowledge in the form of the Logos of the Word of God, or God's Second book, the Book of Nature. It is not understood as humanly constructed where it would presumably respond to historical or cultural contingencies and intentionalities as the key site for knowledge creation. Instead, language is reduced to being, protoypically, the act of naming rather than of human meaning-making. It follows that, given the existence of many languages, a particular language system is therefore in its essence arbitrary.
In addition to the consequences arising from this kind of culturally independent understanding of language, 20th century interpretations of the nature of scientific inquiry provided a corroborating heavy overlay of objectivist and value-neutral metaphors for our understanding of language, an approach well suited to the aspirations of the emerging field of American linguistics in its attempt to become an accepted player in the American academy and also a worthy recipient of significant funding resources in the post-war era. The high compatibility between such theorizing about language and the long-dominant model of learning, namely behaviorism, is as obvious intellectually as it is advantageous strategically, thereby establishing the unusual staying-power of the kinds of understandings of language and language learning that still dominate the FL field.
Even so, I believe the contemporary scene also allows for a decidedly different viewpoint, the possibility of considering language as a culturally embedded form of human meaning-making, of semiosis, in short, of language as a social semiotic. By that I mean understanding knowledge to be intricately linked to the language patterns of situated language use, where the use of language is a way of knowing and a way of being that is historical in origin and directly related to social action. In the former communist-held countries such an approach was best explicated by Bakhtin and Vygotsky; in the West, such an investigation of language has been referred to as "functional" and is prominently associated with the British-Australian linguist Halliday and his followers. It emphasizes a symbiotic relationship between human activity and language, with, as Hasan puts it, "the very existence of one as the condition for the existence of the other" (1995). By investigating key constructs of systemic-functional linguistics, namely context of situation, register, text, and text structure, it is possible to create a conceptual framework that can substantiate this claim.
For example, Halliday turns on their head the notions of language and grammar that prevail in language instructional contexts. Instead of considering language to be "a system of forms, to which meanings are then attached," he considers language to be "a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized" (1985, p. xiv). In particular, two central meanings are addressed by language, namely "(i) to understand our environment (ideational), and (ii) to act on the others in it (interpersonal)," where both are held together by a third metafunctional component, the textual component.
Dramatically different from the typical structuralist grammar which is a grammar of syntagmatic linearity - as stated, often with roots in logic and philosophy - this is a grammar not of normative rules but of choices and relations, where "the grammatical system as a whole represents the semantic code of a language"and "the context of culture determines the nature of the code" (1985, p. xxxii). Thought-provoking even for our concern with adult instructed FL learning is Halliday's statement regarding child language learning: "As a language is manifested through its texts, a culture is manifested through its situations; so by attending to text-in-situation a child construes the code, and by using the code to interpret the text he construes the culture" (p. xxxii).
To sum up, the relationship of language and knowledge that a systemic-functionalist approach to language foregrounds is that "...language as social semiotic praxis .... should be seen unequivocally as a construer of reality, not just as its representer ... it does not represent reality; it simply construes a model of reality" (Hasan, 1999, p. 53). Therefore, while the relationship between language as a system may be considered arbitrary with regard to the species-specific potentialities of the human language making capacity, the relation between meaning and that level of the language code which Halliday refers to as its lexicogrammar is far from arbitrary but, instead, constitutive. As Hasan summarizes this issue
The social context within which acts of meaning are embedded is an occasion for carrying out some social action, by co-actants in some social relation, placed in some semiotic contact. (1999, p 62, emphases in original].
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The External Forum
I have purposely elaborated this interpretation of the relationship of language and knowledge, not only because it differs noticeably from common practice in its understanding of language use and, by implication, language learning but because I believe it to be the real issue in the slow but ongoing reconsideration of the nature of language learning in this country. At the same time this interpretation also helps us understand more deeply a number of external influences that affect the FL field, perhaps best exemplified in the Standards project.
To situate that discussion, I take a short historical detour. From the American perspective one can describe the gradual shift in the FL field as having begun at a distance in the seventies, with rumblings from the European efforts toward communicative language teaching and such unfamiliar ideas as a situational or a functional-notional syllabus or curriculum as they arose most especially in England. It became real in the U.S., in a manner of speaking, in the eighties and nineties through the so called proficiency movement, which, not accidentally, received its out-of-the-gate forward thrust through a testing mechanism, the oral proficiency interview, and then, with amazing speed, institutionalized itself through state and district-level curricula, textbooks that were marketed as being proficiency oriented, and a remarkable and well-funded level of activity in the realm of faculty development and professionalization. In a strategic move to finally tie the foreign languages to core curricular concerns in American public education, we have most recently arrived at the Standards project, described in terms of a focus on communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities.
My historical excursus in no way suggests that the gradual shift in American FL instruction - interestingly enough primarily at the K-12 level - is an instance of the kind of thorough reconsideration of the relationship of language and knowledge that I have begun to sketch out and located particularly with systemic-functional linguistics and a socio-cultural Vygotskian approach to knowledge and learning. Quite the contrary. Given the proceduralization of American FL education, particularly through the power of textbooks, various standardized testing practices, and generally insufficient programs for teacher education, that would be expecting too much.
Even so, movement is all around us though, not surprisingly, it has generally been described in metaphors that are familiar to the field, namely in terms of grammar vs. communication, or accuracy vs. fluency. That meant that the old paradigm was largely retained and any shifting was construed in terms of addition - add communication to the foundation of grammar, or add fluency once students have acquired a certain level of accuracy. As the insufficiency of that approach gradually surfaced, a number of high-profile professional skirmishes resorted to oppositional terms; but then more conciliatory voices pleaded that we need both - though they had little to offer in how this was to be, other than reverting to well established practices of skill-getting and skill-using of grammatical features through contextualized, meaningful communicative activities.
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As I hope is eminently clear, both takes on the matter are deeply flawed. The issue is not and cannot be the status of grammar in language use - there is no language use without grammar and therefore without situationally accurate, and that means appropriate, language forms. The issue, instead, is understanding the nature of language as a social semiotic, an understanding that would inherently put meaning-making, ways of understanding the world around us, at the heart of language use and not as an after-thought. If that is so, then the altogether worthy goal of the Standards project, namely to overcome a form- and system-driven analysis of language and language learning, is at once too narrowly and timidly conceived, too meager in its vision of the consequences, and also too flawed in its proposed execution. Both its broad underlying construct, the five categories of communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities, and its division into interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational language use are wholly incommensurate with each other and, furthermore, provide little insight into how we are to arrange a curriculum, much less how we are to teach so that students can reach upper levels of performance in a second language (Byrnes 2000b and c). Not surprisingly, then, at key decision points the Standards project readily falls back on proficiency language and proficiency practices, with their continued reliance on grammar-based notions of language learning. The result may well be that the Standards efforts may actually lose on both counts, lose what "proficiency" did right in its time and not attain what they were intended to accomplish in our time.
That would seem to leave the FL profession with few good solutions for responding appropriately to the external dynamics beyond our narrow professional confines. Yet, we must find them. Once more, I believe we can do so if we look farther afield, differentiating between the "goods" that we are expected to deliver to society, those that any substantive curriculum construction efforts must attend to, and larger socio-political and intellectual forces driving these expectations. Regarding the first, I believe society at large and individuals, in the particularities of their circumstances, expect to be able to use a second language comfortably and competently in their private lives, in family, neighborhood, and community, in leisure and social interaction, and also in their working lives, whether these are more closely tied to a well-defined local community or whether they extend into the professional environment of the globalized economy and supra-national contexts in non-governmental agencies, in think-tanks, in efforts to support human rights, justice, the creation of stable processes and institutions of governance, or environmentally responsible production and equitable forms of distribution of goods.
Regarding the second, the larger intellectual trends, I see them not in terms of the simplistic global vs. local dichotomy, often pitched as the death of local languages and cultures. As scholars like the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman or the sociologist Peter Berger show, things are considerably more complex and dynamic and happily also considerably more resilient and unpredictable. Instead, what seems to evolve is that our customary interpretive template and course of action that gives high valuation to unitariness, and, by implication, to simple hierarchies and either-or solutions is unable to address the enormous socio-cultural changes now taking place: the metaphors of multi-, pluri- and contingent, whether as multilingualism and multiculturalism, as multicompetence, multitasking, or multimodality, or as contingent and adaptive systems, are considerably better suited to the current situation than unitary constructs of one Truth to be discovered once and for all - a far cry from both uninformed invectives about rampant relativism and vapid and fuzzy notions of "culture."
For all the complexity inherent in the task of appropriating these metaphors for our profession I also see enormous potential for FL education, provided we tackle these issues in a forthright manner. In light of my previous comments, possibilities for success would seem to be the greater the more assured we are in our understandings about the relationship of language and knowledge and the more thoughtfully we have considered our contribution to the educational enterprise through our curricula in foreign languages and cultures and our pedagogies. That means breaking out of narrowly conceived, even elitist and self-serving understandings of the humanities, born from an ahistorical approach to the position of the humanities project in American higher education. We tend to forget that the incorporation of the humanities as a supposedly universal, secular religion into higher education was itself a key tool that educational leaders created in support of nation-building in the face of the waning influence of religion as a unifying moral and ethical in public and private lives (see particularly, Pan, 1998; Readings, 1996; Scholes, 1998). In other words, the position of the humanities in higher education is a historically contingent phenomenon that calls for reconsideration in the age of a dramatically reconfigured nationhood. Since the 19th century nation-state critically relied on certain construals of the nature of language and culture, it is obvious that foreign language departments as humanities departments are indispensable contributors to those reflections and key players in their educational realization.
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The Notion of an Integrated Curriculum
Up to this point I have primarily explicated the notion of curriculum itself and the need for curricular thinking and have, to some extent, addressed the need to reconsider the relationship between language form and meaning or content. However, not only were both areas dealt with relatively abstractly, we have yet to address the second component of the session's topic of focus, namely that of "integration." Here we face these questions: what is to be "integrated," what challenges does that present, what bases and forms for integration can we imagine, what limits present themselves, is integration always an unquestioned good or are there limitations to its uses and benefits? This section will explore general answers. The final section will adjust the perspective to focus on the Asian languages.
For our purposes, the notion of integration primarily refers to three distinct instances of linking two components: first, the two sides of language, form and meaning, in order to enhance language learning; second, two foci for learning, content learning and second language acquisition, in order to enhance the learning of both content and the second language simultaneously; and finally, the two structural halves of foreign language programs, namely the language courses and the content courses, in order not only to make programs whole but, given the long-term nature of language acquisition, to make the first two goals at all possible.
Examining these three forms of integration more closely, we find that the first is primarily pedagogical in nature. Occurring at the level of the individual classroom, it would seem to be central to communicative language teaching The second, in practice, is almost completely confined to what is called the language component of programs and rarely enters into the shaping and delivery of content courses. It is therefore inherently burdened by severe limitations. Only the third constitutes a truly integrated curricular approach. From all appearances, it is also the road least traveled in the FL profession. To my knowledge only the Rhode Island program in German and Engineering has a long history of success in creating a comprehensive curricular solution to linking content and language acquisition throughout an undergraduate sequence, though with the delimitation of a highly specified language-for-special-purposes (LSP) context. More recently, my home department also has chosen a curricular solution for linking content and language acquisition; this time, however, the ambition is even more comprehensive, inasmuch as the curricular framework was constructed for an entire undergraduate program, not just an LSP subcomponent.
You may wonder why I have not also referred to two other instructional environments in which language and content are linked, what is referred to as content-based language teaching and the so called language-across-the-curriculum movement (LAC). With regard to the former, its programmatic realizations occur primarily in K-12 instruction and there most often address ESL instruction with its important mandate to assure that students acquire both the language of instruction, English, and the curricular content on whose knowledge they will be tested (for a good overview, see Met 1998, 1999; for examples, see Snow and Brinton, 1997). With regard to LAC (Adams, 1996; Krueger and Ryan, 1993), it does, indeed, attempt to link language and content. However, as I have extensively discussed elsewhere (Byrnes, 2000), the term "curriculum" in LAC does not implicate a language department's curricular framework but, instead, is a short-hand way of referring to the entire array of course offerings in an institution outside the FL department, courses which, at least in theory, are available for being connected to language learning. In other words, this is opportunistic course-based linking of content and language across departmental lines, usually at more advanced levels of language learning, not curricular planning within an FL department as I have described it. And finally, as a closer reading of Adams (1996) indicates, language acquisition is by no means the unequivocal goal of these courses: "content" beyond the metalinguistic content of grammar is, whether that leads to language learning or not.
We have then various attempts to integrate content and language learning that are primarily pedagogical in nature, even as they rapidly encounter various institutional-structural constraints that affect their realization in particular contexts. Deep down, all these cases flounder on the insufficiently elucidated relationship between content and language for the purpose of enhancing language acquisition, a connection that is prototypically expressed in how we envision the relationship of grammar and meaning. Since this is obviously an important concern in second language learning, SLA research has begun to explore the issues, though clearly from the standpoint of its own disciplinary interests, a fact that will require interpretation before its findings should be applied to the collegiate FL situation.
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SLA Research Proposals for Curriculum Construction
Following curricular work in Britain, Long and Crookes (1992) distinguish between synthetic syllabuses (note: British usage for what U.S. terminology commonly refers to as a curriculum) that "segment the target language into discrete linguistic items for presentation one at a time" (28) and analytic syllabuses which "present the target language whole chunks at a time, without linguistic interference or control" (29). While synthetic syllabuses assume that language can be learned in parts and therefore require the learner to synthesize and integrate these parts so as to acquire functional abilities, analytic syllabuses come from the opposite direction and assume that learners are able to perceive regularities in the language they encounter and induce their own rules.
The predominant approach in foreign language instruction over close to fifty years now was built on a synthetic syllabus, a legacy that is, of course, most visible in the continued dominance of grammar, even as we attempt to make it more "communicative" or more "proficiency-oriented." But as Long and Crookes point out, a number of basic flaws disqualify this curricular conceptualization (cf. pp. 30-34). First, it has a static, target language, product orientation and does not consider the learner and the process of learning itself. Second, structural analyses are conducted on an idealized native-speaker version of the language although there is little evidence that these analytical units can serve as meaningful acquisition units for the learner. Finally, the approach assumes a model of language acquisition that is not supported by research findings. These clearly show learners going through lengthy stages of both nontargetlike forms and nontargetlike use of forms, and even showing temporary deterioration and u-turns in the long period of interlanguage development, not the projected steady improvement.
In its place Long and Crookes suggest consideration of an analytic syllabus which takes tasks as the unit of analysis because they provide a vehicle for the presentation of appropriate target language samples to learners - input which they will inevitably reshape via application of general cognitive processing capacities - and for the delivery of comprehension and production opportunities of negotiable difficulty. New form-function relationships are perceived by the learner as a result (p. 43).
The notion of tasks can then be translated into curricular design through three steps: (1) a needs analysis "in terms of the real-world target tasks learners are preparing to undertake - buying a train ticket, renting an apartment, reporting a chemistry experiment, taking lecture notes, and so forth"; (2) classification of the identified tasks into task types (e.g., serving food, serving beverages), and (3) the creation of pedagogic tasks which are "increasingly complex approximations to the target tasks" and are the basis of the work of teachers and students (p. 44).
While this representation of broad aspects of FL targets curricular decision-making, in the end it is on considerably more solid ground with regard to its pedagogical recommendations than with regard to its curricular recommendations. Thus, it strongly suggests that formal instruction, as contrasted with naturalistic learning
(a) has no effect on developmental sequences,
(b) has a positive effect on the use of some learning strategies
(c) clearly improves rate of learning, and
(d) probably improves the ultimate level of SL attainment (p. 42).
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However, the thrust of the argument is really a way of justifying pedagogical interventions in and of themselves, a way of countering Krashen's largely noninterventionist "natural approach" stance. The intention is also to justify pedagogical interventions that are based on learner processing characteristics understood as psycholinguistic phenomena, in order to replace language-as-object and rule-based approaches which are at the heart of grammar teaching that pervades so much of our instructional practices.
By contrast, genuine curricular recommendations as I have characterized them are either rather indirect or very direct but ESL-specific, inasmuch as they presuppose an ability on the curriculum developers' part to establish explicit links between projected societal uses of language for the learner and instructional mandates. Such clear and specific links, however, generally cannot be stated for the instructed context of college FL departments, thereby attenuating, right from the start, the usefulness of this construct for curriculum building. Assuming that we cannot readily identify the kinds of goals and objectives that would lead to the identification of tasks and task bundles that would, in turn, provide the basis for the creation of pedagogic tasks, are there nonetheless important insights to be gotten from these proposals?
As stated, I believe they do exist, first and foremost in their suitability for getting away from a grammar and form-driven understanding of the FL instructional enterprise, and that means, primarily a usefulness on the pedagogical level. Here, because of the insistence on meaning centrality, these recommendations can facilitate learners' awareness of certain classes of linguistic items in the input that they might not notice otherwise, a precondition for making changes in their interlanguage and therefore a precondition for acquisition. Essentially a psycholinguistic solution at the level of the individual learner, this line of thinking, referred to as focus on form (Doughty 1998, and the contributions in Doughty and Williams 1998a, particularly Doughty and Williams 1998b) as contrasted with the previous focus on formS in language teaching, holds promise for an important reorientation from a product- to a process focus. Given at least its implicit recognition of the long-term nature of interlanguage development, it can also contribute to our understanding of how to sequence instructional tasks for maximum effect. Its true benefits, however, would come to light only if other decision-making criteria were available according to which collegiate FL departments can make choices for selecting and sequencing the major instructional events that make up a curriculum.
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A Genre, Text, and Literacy Approach to Curriculum Construction
And that brings me back to my earlier discussion of the possibilities of systemic-functional linguistics, a theoretical and practical approach to language analysis and language use in a societal context that goes right to the heart of the matter that I have emphasized, throughout this paper, as the decision-making point which we can no longer ignore or deftly by-pass, namely the relationship of language and content or knowledge, or meaning, and, by extension, the relationship of language form and meaning and adult language acquisition.
For all our best intentions of creating an integrated curriculum that links content and language learning, content or situations of use, or functions or notions are not inherently amenable to well-motivated decisions for selection and sequencing. For that we require a mediating structure. Systemic-functional linguistics, particularly in its pedagogical applications, has found it in the notion of genre, a key extension of its theorizing that further elucidates the relationship between socially situated knowledge and language. While its insights have thus far been primarily applied to the L1 context, most especially in multilingual and multicultural Australia, it is gradually being considered as well for L2 education, though for the time being primarily in upper level ESL instruction.
A first approximation of the construct genre is that of Martin who states: "Genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them. They range from literary to far from literary forms: poems, narratives, expositions, lectures, seminars, recipes, manuals, appointment making, service encounters, news broadcasts and so on" (1985, p. 250). In other words, textual genre here comprise both oral and written forms of language use. Their connection to cultural contexts of situation has been analytically exemplified extensively, by considering them in terms of the dimensions of field, the social activity that is taking place which often determines what we refer to as its content, tenor, the relationship between the participants, including their roles and statuses, and mode, the part that language is playing in the situation, including the channel.
The larger intent, as Halliday states it, is to create the possibility of "a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English" (1985, p. xv). This is the aim he pursues with his functional grammar, an aim that can be pedagogically operationalized through the notion of genre. Particularly through a rich understanding of genre we can come to understand that "language is not a domain of human knowledge ... [but] the essential condition of knowledge, the process by which experience becomes knowledge" (Halliday, 1993, p. 94, emphasis in original).
Such an approach has extensive instructional implications for the development of literacy at any educational and age level. But its impact is most striking if advanced levels of language ability are the goal, in L1 as well as L2. This is so since language is here understood as situated and purposeful action, a position that leads to interpreting language use and language development as discursively realized semiosis. With its particular emphasis on genre, defined by Christie (1999) as a "staged, purposeful activity" which serves important social goals (p. 760) and characterized by Gee as "ways of being in the world," it provides a "model of text in context - of discourse in relation to grammar and lexis and to those semiotic systems which language itself realizes" (Martin, 1985, p. 249). As already stated, on that basis one can explore the relationship between meaning and form in three major ways: in terms of the "field," which refers to particular content or subject matter areas; in terms of the dimension of "tenor,"which acknowledges the dynamics of particular communicative settings with a range of participants and participant relationships; and, finally, in terms of "mode," the particular construal of processes, participants, circumstances, and relations that a speaker employs, something that affects the nature of the entire text, even as the text itself is affected by the communicative channels being employed (e.g., oral, written, interactive, monologic).
For collegiate FL programs in literary-cultural studies it is noteworthy that Halliday's systemic functional grammar shows a striking similarity to the dialogic approaches chosen by Bakhtin as a way of explicating the phenomenon of language use in society and, particularly, the notion of genre. Therefore, taken together, a Hallidayan functional linguistics and the societal situatedness of stable forms of linguistic actions, the Bakhtinian genre, offer a way of imagining any L2 performance within one conceptual framework. When one highlights, as Kern does, the global and organizational aspects associated with particular genres, a genre approach can serve to enhance both the kinds of interpretive comprehension abilities as well as the situated choices in language production that characterize the advanced learner.
Likewise, we should take seriously Bakhtin's observation that, "to use a genre freely and creatively is not the same as to create a genre from the beginning: genres must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely" (p. 80). Using that insight we can begin to provide learners instructional supports throughout their language learning experience whose dynamic is directed toward the ability to make meaning-driven generic choices. This is the foundation for the long process in which they can begin to find their voices and identities in diverse L2 genres and celebrate their status as multicompetent speakers in the other language, perhaps ultimately even at a high level of performance.
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I have laid out what may strike you as an overly ambitious, if not to say a totally unrealistic framework. While I would be the last person to dispute the magnitude of its consequences, I can also tell you on the basis of our curriculum project that its foundational assumptions can in fact be realized in the collegiate context. More importantly, they open up unexpectedly rich vistas on adult instructed foreign language learning that can lead to framing questions and attempting answers to issues that are central to our work, even as they have long eluded our intellectual and programmatic grasp (for details, see Byrnes, 2000a).
But the ability or inability of one department to have worked with this framework is, of course, not the issue. The real testing ground is whether diverse FL instructional contexts, including quite specifically the Asian languages, might find meritorious aspects in the construct that could be put to good use in their efforts to enhance their programmatic successes.
I conclude these reflections, then, by venturing a few broad questions in the hope that they can stimulate discussion in Chicago. I do so concerned that these questions are themselves the product of my own limited awareness of even more important curricular issues, but also with the expectation that the audience will have no difficulty raising those that have greater merit than do mine.
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