At a time when more and more people are exploring the natural cultural diversity of the world, it seems antithetical for a foreign language department in an independent school to remain unresponsive; rather, such a department ought to encourage and facilitate cultural exploration. However, a cursory search of independent school language programs – most of them Eurocentric – will highlight what is considered the language curriculum sine qua non: year 1, year 2, year 3, AP Language, and perhaps AP Literature. It is admittedly rigid and static in its sequence and content, yet it is difficult to argue against the notion that it has served independent school students well for years. But is that still the case?
Until recently, our extant curricula at the upper levels (eleventh and twelfth grades) were oriented toward the AP exams in May, but we were experiencing a certain malaise with the AP curricula in French and Spanish, our two modern languages. On the one hand, we felt that the grammatical and written preparation required for these exams was very strong; on the other hand, we felt that the spoken aspect of the language was given less emphasis in the AP courses. Of course, our perception was also informed by our school calendar, which provided us with minimal academic time to cover what we as teachers felt ought to be covered. We had found the oral proficiency guidelines from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) to be of tremendous value, and we desired to move toward this model in our classroom approaches. Unfortunately, we understood that we would have to move away from the traditional AP model if we wanted to be successful with the ACTFL guidelines, as we needed more flexibility in our classrooms. Although we were teaching our AP courses exclusively in the target languages and our students were receiving good scores on the exams, class time was organized around reviewing homework and trudging through workbook exercises that did not exactly instill a burning desire in the students to speak the language. After all, we felt that our goal as a department was to encourage the continuation of a student’s second language in college and beyond. We saw it as a life tool, not as an exam to help a student get into college. Where was the natural interaction that comes from engaging in another culture? Where was the fluid spoken component?
We then initiated a series of internal discussions which revolved around our curriculum, leading us to ask ourselves whether our course offerings held the kind of intrinsic value that we as language teachers wished to promote in our classrooms. We focused on several areas: methodology, desired objectives of our program, teacher satisfaction, student satisfaction, and student retention. Our discussions led us to rethink – very seriously – the way in which we offered language. The end result was the proposal of a new modern language curriculum in grades eleven and twelve. The question was no longer about AP per se, but rather about the nature of second language acquisition in independent schools.
Our department philosophy, we determined, was a blend of communicative approach and immersion. Over the years we had become gradually more aware that the nature of our methodology encouraged accelerated growth in our students, but it also brought about positive and exciting experimentation with grammatical structures and idiomatic expressions. This kind of student performance meant that, for our language sequence, the third level of the language (French 3, Spanish 3) represented the natural cut-off point for the intermediate level and a springboard into advanced uses of the language. The results of this thinking were twofold. First, we decided to change the language requirement for graduation from “three years of language, including language in the junior year” to “the completion of level three of language.” Such a change allowed students whose strength was not in language to consider their requirement complete, thereby avoiding the unnecessary step of immersing themselves in an even higher level of language in which they would not find success. If Mel Levine’s A Mind at a Time, which we had read as a faculty two years prior, had shown us anything, it was that forcing students with brains that weren’t fully wired for second language acquisition to continue with higher levels of language simply to fulfill a school requirement showed little concern for adolescent neurodevelopment. We had been placing the student in an untenable situation: you must take French 4 (Spanish 4, Latin 4) because we require it, even though we know that it is the bane of your existence and that you will struggle emotionally, mentally, and perhaps physically in order to keep up with the demands of the course. Second, the change allowed strong students the option of taking very different, yet very challenging classes in grades eleven and twelve: the language elective series. The strength of this position, from a pedagogical and methodological point of view, was that juniors and seniors would be taking these courses together, which is to say that we would have language learners helping each other. Seniors would have followed the language program for six years (grades 7-12), while juniors would have followed it for five years. The seniors’ extra year of experience in the target language would serve the juniors well, helping them to grow at an accelerated pace, thereby assisting the teacher in the role of providing idiomatic expressions or elaborating advanced grammatical constructions.
All of the above served to underscore what we felt was important as a language department: pedagogical initiatives in the form of new, one-semester courses; re-invigorating the faculty teaching through such initiatives and the research that necessarily accompanies such thinking; student satisfaction in taking courses that would be a departure from the static structures to which they had been accustomed, with student retention in the upper levels a logical outcome of that satisfaction; and a renewed focus on the outcome of the program in modern languages – a high degree of fluency in the target language, outpacing that of the traditional AP track by means of the ACTFL oral proficiency approach mentioned earlier. We decided as a department to eliminate the AP designations for our courses altogether (i.e. the course title AP Spanish Language would no longer appear in curriculum guides or on student transcripts). This move also allowed us to avoid the AP audit while injecting more freedom into the curriculum. We followed up our discussions by putting forth a proposal containing the aforementioned structures, with the happy result of its acceptance and introduction for the 2006-07 school year.
Now at the start of the second year, the elective courses have acquired the reputation of offering interesting choices to students and are rigorous and demanding in their content and expectations. Instead of taking AP Spanish (or French) Language, our students have the option to take semester offerings such as Advanced Conversation, Contemporary Issues, World Literature in French Translation, Cuba: Yesterday and Today, and still others. We offer them on a two-year rotating cycle, with new courses (if desired) introduced every two years. To be sure, we opted to keep the stronger elements of the traditional AP curriculum, such as a one-semester elective in Advanced French or Advanced Spanish that focused on grammar exclusively, and students could still sit for the AP exams in May, if they desired.
A real bonus for the department is that modern language faculty members are now consistently engaged in ongoing discussions of how to offer more electives that are meaningful and relevant to today’s learners. These learners are different from their predecessors. It is all too easy to say that they are “not as strong,” a classic designation. We do not agree. The fact is that they are simply different. These learners come to us with new ways of learning. Technology has influenced their lives far more than it has ours – even if we are marginally adept at emergent technologies; they are digital natives and we are not. These learners represent generational change – they are more choice-driven in their personal tastes, but their personal tastes also reflect their own learning styles. Innovation, therefore, is necessary to refocus and re-energize the department, meeting the students on their terms – no longer on ours. Student-centered learning is as relevant in second language acquisition as elsewhere, and their kind of learning is much more strongly right-brained, we would argue. Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind has convinced us of that.
To complete our departmental facelift, we asked to rename ourselves the Classical and Modern Languages Department, casting off the moniker of “foreign languages” on account of the oft-cited pejorative sense of the word “foreign.” The new department title reflects exactly what we teach, from Latin to French and Spanish. One could submit, however, that our department would be better titled the Department of European Languages, which is a fair assessment, given our current offerings. Happily, though, the department is engaged in an effort to add Mandarin. We would like to increase language choice, but to Daniel Pink's thesis, we would like to acknowledge the forceful role that Asia plays in our everyday lives. Moreover, the addition of Mandarin would push us toward more interdisciplinary studies with the History department, as the tenth-grade World History course has a component that focuses on China.
Yet there is a balancing act to be maintained in all this discussion. Just as schools are not perfect places, neither are curricula. Our philosophy holds that all students ought to be exposed to other languages and methods of second language acquisition, yet it is clear that some students (as has always been the case in education) are not strong in this area. How can we encourage these students to continue with their second language when we know that they will not find success in the most rigorous of our electives? The logical response appears to be that we should always maintain a minimum of one elective per semester that is focused on a review of the building blocks of second language acquisition along with forays into the cultures where the target language is spoken. Such an elective provides a nice counterpoint to the more “intellectual” electives that many teachers dream of offering; it would allow us to meet different kinds of learners on their terms (more student-centered) than on our own. Instead of Renaissance poetry, why not a class on rai (a musical genre primarily influenced by traditional and modern Arabic rhythms, particularly from North Africa)? That is the kind of music our students hear on web radio or in the streets of multi-cultural urban centers in France. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention.
Looking back on the process, rethinking the language department has instilled the notion of an independent education in the language faculty. It has served as the catalyst for countless discussions on methodology, pedagogy, and pure content as it relates to preparing Tower Hill graduates for the real world. Our students can communicate better than ever, especially orally, and their skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking are challenged in a comprehensive and holistic manner rather than by means of categorized sections so commonplace in curricula driven by standardized testing.