Priorities in Language Education

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Diekhoff
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
General Public ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Liaison Committee ◽  
Language Study

When the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association was five years old, in 1957, its Advisory and Liaison Committee drew up a plan for its second five years and prepared a request for a foundation grant to implement the plan. The proposal outlined five areas of major effort. There were activities designed to increase the quantity of language study, but these activities were to be more than an extension of prior promotional activities of the MLA Foreign Language Program. The intention was still to persuade educators, parents, and the general public of the value of language education and of the necessity for sequences of language study that could result in proficiency in the spoken and written language. But in addition to an “information and advisory campaign,” the MLA also proposed “effective demonstration programs.”

MLA Foreign Language Proficiency Tests for Teachers and Advanced Students

PMLA ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 77 (4-Part2) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Wilmarth H. Starr
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
American Association ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
South Central

I. Brief History of the Project: Since 1952, the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association of America, responding to the national urgency with regard to foreign languages, has been engaged in a vigorous campaign aimed in large part at improving foreign-language teaching in our country.In 1955, as one of its activities, the Steering Committee of the Foreign Language Program formulated the “Qualifications for Secondary School Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages,” a statement which was subsequently endorsed for publication by the MLA Executive Council, by the Modern Language Committee of the Secondary Education Board, by the Committee on the Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, and by the executive boards or councils of the following national and regional organizations: National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, American Association of Teachers of French, American Association of Teachers of German, American Association of Teachers of Italian, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, Central States Modern Language Teachers Association, Middle States Association of Modern Language Teachers, New England Modern Language Association, Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Northwest Conference on Foreign Language Teaching, Philological Association of the Pacific Coast, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and South-Central Modern Language Association.

The MLA and the Study of Foreign Languages

PMLA ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Mead
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Easy Task ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Foreign Language Study ◽  
Language Study

In surveying the contributions of the Modern Language Association of America to the teaching and study of foreign languages in our country, especially during the last three decades, I hope to recapture the mood and spirit of past events and to pay tribute to those colleagues who took leading parts in them. This is not an easy task, but it is a welcome and a challenging one. Many of these colleagues are deceased, others are retired, and few if any of us during those intensely active years, I suspect, gave much thought to the task of gathering materials and memories for a chronicle of the MLA's role in the development of foreign language study. But it was an inspired and inspiring time—one happier than the present for education in our country—and I am grateful for the opportunity to set down a brief, personal, and inevitably incomplete memoir.

The Foreign Language Program in 1964

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-32
Author(s):  
Donald D. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
National Defense Education Act ◽  
Title Vi ◽  
Education Act

Our major activities this year, as in each of the past five years, have been undertaken either with foundation support or through contracts with the United States Office of Education under the National Defense Education Act. In February John Harmon became Director of the Materials Center, changing places with Glen Willbern, who became Director of Research. Under Mr. Willbern's direction and through a government contract we have just completed a survey of modern-foreign-language enrollments in junior and senior colleges as of the fall of 1963. We are currently negotiating several contracts through Title VI of the National Defense Education Act. The first is to gather statistics on offerings and enrollments in all foreign languages in public and non-public secondary schools. The second is to make a survey of current college enrollments in all foreign languages. Since gathering statistics on the classical languages is not a justifiable expenditure of national defense funds, the Modern Language Association will pay out of its own funds the proportion of the total cost needed to gather the facts on Latin and Greek in schools and colleges.

scholarly journals JALT2014 Plenary Speaker article: Foreign language teaching and the multilingual subject

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Peter Hourdequin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
International Association ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Foreign Language Education ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Doctoral Dissertations ◽  
The University

Claire Kramsch is Professor of German and Affiliate Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Applied Linguistics and directs doctoral dissertations in the German Department and in the Graduate School of Education. She has written extensively on language, discourse, and culture in foreign language education. Two of her books, Context and Culture in Language Teaching (OUP, 1993) and The Multilingual Subject (OUP, 2009) won the Mildenberger Award from the American Modern Language Association. She is the past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the current president of the International Association of Applied Linguistics.

The College Teacher of English and Foreign Language Study

PMLA ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 69 (4-Part2) ◽  
pp. 22-25
Author(s):  
J.H.F.
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
English Language ◽  
College Graduates ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Standing Committee ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
College Teacher ◽  
Foreign Language Study

Since its organization fifteen years ago, the Commission on Trends in Education, a standing committee of the Modern Language Association of America, has been concerned about the increasingly unfortunate consequences of the monolingualism of most American college graduates. Mastery of the English language and of English or American literary studies must remain forever provincial to those lacking a knowledge of foreign languages, and it is surely important, in peace as in war, to be able to communicate directly with other peoples. The Commission on Trends in Education is therefore enthusiastically supporting the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association in its study of our linguistic inadequacies and its attempt to remedy them.

The Foreign Language Program in Title III of the National Defense Education Act

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
John R. Ludington
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
National Defense Education Act ◽  
Title Iii ◽  
Education Act ◽  
Support Research

Only fifteen months ago the President signed the National Defense Education Act into Law. Many of you here know what went into getting that legislation in the form necessary for acceptance by Congress. It is no exaggeration to say that without the Modern Language Association there may never have been an NDEA. Certainly, languages would not have received the attention they deserved without the strong support, research, and testimonial efforts of the MLA and its members.

The Report of the Executive Secretary

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-36
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
National Scale ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Executive Secretary ◽  
Second Year ◽  
To Come

Auspicious is the term by which I would describe the eighty-second year of the Modern Language Association. Our development has been satisfactory and our activities useful. But I have a sense of more important events impending for which the last year and the year or two yet to come are, essentially, preparation. I recall having had this feeling once before, between 1953 and 1955, during the first years of the Foreign Language Program. We had at that time the same stream of new faces through the office, the same effort to establish new lines of communication within the profession, the same struggle to achieve consensus and establish policy. That period saw the transformation of the MLA from a comfortable learned society into a professional association engaged in pedagogical and political activity relating to the modern foreign languages on a national scale. For the last ten years, we have been pursuing the leads and developing the policies laid down at that time. We have grown in the meanwhile from seven thousand to twenty-two thousand members; the headquarters staff has grown from four to forty-four; we have begun to add concern for the curriculum and teaching of English to our concern for the curriculum and teaching of the foreign languages.

The Future of the “FL Program”

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
William R. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Policy Statement ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Mixed Emotions ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Special Meeting

This is my third annual report as Director of the FL Program. It gives me great pleasure to begin by quoting a resolution passed by the M LA Council at a special meeting held last month: “The Executive Council declares the essential elements of the current Foreign Language Program to be a permanent concern of the Modern Language Association, eventually to be included in the annual budget.” This policy statement looks forward to October 1958, when present foundation support for the Program expires. As most of you know, the Rockefeller Foundation has recently made us a supplementary grant of $115,000, to be spent in the period 1955–58. Expressions of confidence totalling nearly a quarter of a million dollars inspire (to put it mildly) mixed emotions. Not for another quarter of a million would I admit that we are undeserving; but I freely concede that this profession has scarcely begun to spend its own human resources for giving language study a vital role in American education and life.

Of frameworks and the goals of collegiate foreign language education: critical reflections

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Byrnes,
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Learning Goals ◽  
Educational Goals ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Multiple Literacies ◽  
Performance Development ◽  
Viable Approach

AbstractThe paper suggests that among reasons for the difficulties collegiate foreign language (FL) programs in the United States (and most likely elsewhere) encounter in assuring that their students attain the kind of upper-level multiple literacies necessary for engaging in sophisticated work with FL oral and written texts may be the fact that prevailing frameworks for capturing FL performance, development, and assessment are insufficient for envisioning such textually oriented learning goals. The result of this mismatch between dominant frameworks, typically associated with communicative language teaching, and the goals of literary cultural studies programs as humanities programs is that collegiate FL departments and their faculty members face serious obstacles in their efforts to create the kind of coherent, comprehensive, and principled curricula that would be necessary for overcoming what are already extraordinary challenges in an educational environment that provides little support for long-term, sustained efforts at language development toward advanced multiple literacies. The paper traces these links by examining three such frameworks in the United States: the Proficiency framework of the 1980s, based on the ACTFL oral proficiency interview, the Standards framework of the 1990s, part of a more general standards movement in U.S. education, and the most recent document, by the Modern Language Association (MLA), which focuses on the need for new curricular structures in collegiate FL education. Specifically, it provides an overview of the U.S. educational landscape with an eye toward the considerable influence such frameworks can have in the absence of a comprehensive language education policy; lays out key characteristics that would be necessary for a viable approach to collegiate FL education; probes the complex effects the three frameworks have had in collegiate FL programs; and explores how one department sought to counter-act their detrimental influence in order to affirm and realize a humanistically oriented approach to FL education. The paper concludes with overall observations about the increasing power of frameworks to set educational goals and ways to counteract their potentially unwelcome consequences.

scholarly journals Transdisciplinarity across two-tiers

AILA Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Chantelle Warner
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Status Differences

Abstract In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” (2007) dissatisfaction with the “two-tiered configuration” of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the curriculum, it has often been noted that programmatic bifurcations mirror institutional hierarchies, e.g. status differences between specialists in literary and cultural studies and experts in applied linguistics and language pedagogy (e.g. Maxim et al., 2013; Allen & Maxim, 2012). This chapter looks at the two-tiered structure of collegiate modern language departments from the perspectives of the transdisciplinary shape-shifters who maneuver within them – scholars working between applied linguistics and literary studies. These individuals must negotiate the methodologies and the institutional positions available to them – in many instances, the latter is what has prompted them to work between fields in the first place. The particular context of US foreign language and literature departments serves as a case study of the lived experiences of doing transdisciplinary work in contexts that are characterized by disciplinary hierarchies and the chapter ends with a call for applied linguistics to consider not only the epistemic, but also the institutional and affective labor needed to sustain transdisciplinary work.

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