special issue: a century of language teaching and research: looking back and looking ahead, part 1...

Shaping the Discourse of a Practice: The Role of Linguistics and Psychology in LanguageTeaching and LearningAuthor(s): Heidi ByrnesSource: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 84, No. 4, Special Issue: A Century of LanguageTeaching and Research: Looking Back and Looking Ahead, Part 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 472-494Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers AssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/330302 .

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Shaping the Discourse of a Practice:

The e Role of Linguistics and

Psychology in Language Teaching

and Learning HEIDI BYRNES German Department Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057 Email: [email protected]

This article treats the Modern Language Journal (MLJ) as a site for observing how a particular community, foreign language teachers, over an 85-year period shaped its practices discursively, gradually developing a particular kind of professional identity. Instead of treating the current situation as the result of a straight-line sequence of rational choices, this article points to various dynamics external and internal to the field whose influence was by no means preor- dained nor even necessarily beneficial. Focusing on the relationship between language teaching and disciplinary inquiry in linguistics and psychology, it identifies (a) a period in which the Journal and its readership circumscribed their interest in teaching modern, as opposed to classical languages; (b) a period in which both linguistics and psychology offered important insights, with linguistics, ultimately, dominating practice; (c) the rise of psycholinguistic models that, alongside existing understandings, led to enormously varied beliefs and approaches; and (d) a time for renegotiating our professional identity in light of a multiplicity of voices, interests, and models of research and practice. It concludes that the advantages of professionalization through disciplinary inquiry and the power it conveys to certain voices need to be balanced against the gains made possible with a kind of professional multilingualism.

INTRODUCTION

The goal of this article is to provide an over- view of the way in which the two acknowledged lead disciplines for the teaching of foreign lan-

guages (FLs) in the United States in the 20th

century, linguistics and psychology, have affected those individuals who are engaged in FL teaching in this country and have thereby not only shaped their identities as members of a profession, but

profoundly influenced that profession's very formation, self-understanding, and conduct.1 A

chronological approach to attaining this goal seems justified in this particular case: We are cele-

brating a new millennium, which naturally invites

The Modern LanguageJournal, 84, iv, (2000) 0026-7902/00/472-494 $1.50/0 ?2000 The Modern LanguageJournal

retrospective and also prospective viewpoints; we are commemorating the 85-year history of The Modern Language Journal (MLJ); and we are at-

tempting to trace the historical development of our professional field, at least in terms of the

major developments that characterize the ever-

changing relationship between teaching and dis-

ciplinary inquiry in linguistics and psychology. On this seemingly straightforward, though ex-

tensive, task I impose two constraints: First, I ex-

plicitly narrow it by making almost no reference to publications beyond the Journal itself; second, I give the resulting narrowed viewing lens a specific interpretive filter, one that not only moti- vates my selection from among the many developments and events referred to in the thousands of

pages of the MLJ, but also colors their interpretation. Specifically, echoing Anderson (1991), who has investigated nations and nationhood, I con-



Heidi Byrnes

sider the writers and readers of the MLJ to be a textual community. Like citizens of nations, they form an imagined community; that is, for the most part, they do not know each other person- ally. Also as with nations, who is actively engaged in that community-here by reading the Journal or contributing to it as an author-fluctuates, not

only because of passing times, but because of

changing opportunities and occasions for and interests in participating in that conversation. Fi-

nally, besides the fact that there will always be more or less visible presences and more or less audible voices, the overt discourse on the Jour- nal's pages is embedded in, responsive to, and reflective of many other, less accessible discourse communities whose interest and belief systems nevertheless profoundly shaped writers' thoughts as they incorporated them into the articles, news notes, editorials, and announcements of the Jour- nal. I recognize the existence and importance of that multilayered presence, although its particulars are beyond the scope of this article.

As a way of exemplifying this complex interaction, let us look at the cover pages of two issues of the MLJ, which happen to be at the beginning and the end of the row on my bookshelf, Volumes 68 and 83. Along with certain outer design changes, they respectively announce a publication that is "devoted primarily to methods, pedagogical research, and topics of professional interest to all language teachers" and one that is "devoted to research and discussion about the learning and teaching of foreign and second lan-

guages." Assuming that the Journal continues to focus on learning and teaching of other languages, queries that suggest themselves are whether it matters that "pedagogical research" and "all teachers" are no longer separately stated or that "topics of professional interest" are not explicitly mentioned, though surely implied in the "discussion" that now comes into focus. Is there a difference between "pedagogical research" and an unadorned category "research" when "learning" prominently precedes "teaching"? Perhaps that question is significant, particularly in light of the simultaneous disappearance of the concept of "methods," by tradition one of the central notions for describing the act of teaching or, more broadly, the field of pedagogy. What shifts, aside from the obvious one of greater inclusiveness, are intended by the elaborated term foreign and second languages?

In order to begin to answer such questions, we would first take note of choices in wording, taking them, on the most obvious level, to be shifts in the topics that occupy the field. But at a deeper level

473

we would also attempt to ascertain what motivated those shifts, what is behind these phrasings, and what goals were intended by them. In this instance, as with many others that the present article will refer to, we can usually make only more or less informed and largely incomplete judgments. That tentativeness is heightened because we are drawing on evidence from only one

documentary source, namely the MLJ, to the near-exclusion of others.

However, one can also view this limitation in less negative ways: By adhering to the prescribed focus of the Journals pages, we have a well-defined framework for ascertaining the influence of

linguistics and psychology on language teaching and learning, namely by following the evolving conversation of an intact virtual discourse com-

munity. Through the mediation of the Journal, we can observe how one particular group of people who were engaged in such matters, namely the Journal's authors and readers, influenced each other's ways of thinking about themselves with

regard to their interest in language. In so doing they inevitably created the very discourse that not

only gave them and, in time, us our sense of

membership in this imagined community that we now call our profession, but also began to specify the nature of that profession itself. Finally, though their primary concerns pertain to matters of language, those concerns reside in the midst of a host of other influences that, indeed, affect the

contributing writers as well as the readers. In fact, as I hope to show, it was the external sociopoliti- cal environment that deeply affected the quality and direction of internal scholarly considerations, thereby not only altering the nature of that

scholarship but contributing to our profession's historical evolution.

I propose, then, to determine the impact of linguistics and psychology on language teaching and learning not by presenting developments in these two disciplines in terms of a straight-line forward movement of rational choices, but rather by linking the content and goals of our inquiry to its methodology. In so doing, I invite readers to ascertain and evaluate through the medium of the printed pages the significance of diverse actions in and for the field. This article, therefore, does not establish the influence of linguistics and psychology on our practice as though both fields were preexisting givens, but treats the Journal in its entirety as a site for observing how that kind of knowledge was gradually constructed and built up over time within our field, thereby contributing, in important ways, to the creation of an identity for its readership as FL professionals or, more



474

generally, language professionals, as contrasted with less well circumscribed notions of themselves as individual language teachers. The goal of this article is not merely to see the current state of our profession as the result of an accumulated se-

quence of events and facts, but to gain important insights into how those events and facts were themselves the result of multiple dynamics whose influence on the field were by no means preor- dained or even necessarily in its best interests. As a consequence of such an understanding, we might be able, with a sharper eye, to consider the nature of the interpretations which we currently give to major influences, both inside and outside the field, and the range of options that are available to our profession, in terms of its professional practice, its scholarship, and its societal actions, now as well as into the future.

This article has the following sections:

1. Establishing a Discourse Community. A close-up of the early life of the Journal, its first 25 years until the early 1940s, a period during which the Journal, its contributing writers, and its readers broadly circumscribe the nature of their interest in FLs, develop practices for how best to discuss it, and explore its potential repercussions for

teaching and learning modern languages. 2. Learning the Languages of the Disciplines. An

in-depth analysis of the challenges arising for the teaching profession as a result of the war effort. This section begins with the Intensive Language Programs in 1942 and concludes after another generation, in 1965, with two seemingly opposing influences: seminal contributions by some of the best known psychologists and the beginning im-

pact of transformational-generative grammar. That time span can rightly be taken to be the period during which language teaching comes under the influence of both linguistics and psychology, with linguistics getting an earlier and more pervasive hold and gaining primary influence.

3. Contesting the Conversational Floor: Themes and Variations. In contrast, the subsequent years, until about 1990, see a dramatic rise in prominence of psycholinguistic models, which results in continu- ous renegotiation in the pages of the Journal about which discipline should offer the preferred topics and also the preferred modes of discussing them, researching them, and practicing them. The result is an array of enormously varied beliefs and practices.

4. Reflecting on Our Dialogues: Projecting Future Conversations. On the assumption that psycholinguistic models now provide the discursively

The Modern Language Journal 84 (2000)

prominent metaphors of our field, I conclude with a condensed retrospective of our past and briefly offer some considerations for our professional future.

ESTABLISHING A DISCOURSE COMMUNITY

Perusing the Journals first 25 years of publication history, one is surprised by the minor role that topics pertaining to linguistic and psychological phenomena play. This minimal presence is curious, given that the path-breaking intellectual achievements of European historical linguistics that immediately preceded this time period constitute the foundation for much of our received knowledge about language, at least in terms of its structure. That fact alone is a good reminder that the MLJ, from its inception, was neither a linguistics nor a psychologyjournal but

ajournal for and by practitioners who, as a group, evolved their own ways of receiving and absorbing linguistic or psychological insights in light of their particular interests. Thus, for the first generation of its existence, the Journal's pages reveal three clusters of topics that color any linguistic or

psychological influence that might have entered: (a) Writers and readers of the MLJseem primarily occupied, one might even say preoccupied, with finding and forming themselves, and the Journal provides a venue to that end; (b) when linguistic and psychological insights do appear, they are filtered through so many layers of larger so-

ciopolitical, educational, and intellectual concerns that one is hard-pressed to distinguish their treatment from the common-sense approach of an educated nonspecialist; and (c) the form in which discussion takes place is highly diffuse and, from that standpoint as well, a contemporary ob- server has difficulty assigning contributions to the categories of linguistics or psychology.

A closer look at this extended period of formation permits the following insights. A broad range of items was put on the table which, taken to-

gether, fostered the gradual building up of shared notions about what should be the community's topics of conversation and also about the forms of discourse through which its members would address them. The use of a variety of meta-

phors is particularly revealing given that these reflect a remarkable openness to diverse content areas. From the perspective of contemporary professionalization, with its inherent narrowing of interests, that openness might well be interpreted negatively, as pointing to a host of uncoordinated actions and largely unresolved internal contradic- tions. Be that as it may, the loosely configured



Heidi Byrnes

readership of the MLJ, one that had created in the pages of the Journal a relatively unstructured discourse space about matters pertaining to language teaching, soon faced extraordinary external challenges. Under the impact of World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Sputnik episode, we find, in a very few years, dramatically changed textual behaviors, a development that I see as the beginning of a field-specific professional discourse that is at once more restrictive toward its inside members and more powerful vis-a-vis the outside world than it had been earlier on.

Choosing Topics of Conversation

So, what is being talked out in the early pages of the Journal? Most persistent are assertions about the group's need to be recognized as an honored member of the academy, as that implies a validation of the community's goals and interests. That this should be a major issue derives from two facts. On the one hand, the ability to speak modern languages was the common-in both senses of the word-characteristic of the masses of immigrants, therefore hardly worthy of academic considerations. On the other hand, it was the proper purview of the intellectual elites who, in addition to being solidly grounded in Latin, and less so Greek, acquired it during their diverse European travels as a way of extending and rounding out their formal studies and their personal formation. In other words, intellectual respectability and prestige for centuries had in- hered in the study of the classical languages, and an educational system that had been built on that foundation was both unable and unwilling to re- linquish that notion, even as it faced the demands of mass education and the practical concerns of an increasingly industrialized nation, particularly in educating the populations of its urban centers.

Partly as a way of professing their own background and identity as philologists, and partly as a way of strategically positioning themselves in the academy, the Journal's contributors insisted on claiming connections between modern FLs and the classical educational languages of Latin and Greek. The strain that inheres in that line of argument can be seen in the repeated use of key metaphors, though their emphases shift all the way to being contradictory of each other. Most important among these metaphors are the nature of knowledge and learning, the importance of laws or rules, and the meaning of the term science.

In retrospect, these efforts may at times appear bewildering. However, rather than noting the ar-

475

ticles' seemingly far-fetched lines of argumentation in support of modern spoken languages, we should acknowledge that their authors could hardly have made better strategic choices if their goal was to present a coherent and powerful jus- tification of the field to their contemporaries, both in the academy and in that part of the outside world that set policies. In any case, what inconsistencies surfaced in the bargain would be negotiated inside the field, the precursor of the modern language profession. Therefore, in the large scheme of things, the inconsistencies in their efforts would surely matter less, a bargain worth entering into, all the more so as the rhetorical actions taken in the Journal were pre- sumed to facilitate the all-important access to key intellectual and social benefits that had histori- cally been associated with the nonspoken languages. A few quotes exemplify this continued complex reconfiguration of the conversation, one in which the Journal's authors move to in- clude highly valued intellectual and educational goods by making them available, in the form of language and therefore as models of a voice, to the now well-spoken conversational partner, the scientifically prepared modern language teacher:

In his 1922 article, Aron made the following argument for increased professional competence on the part of FL teachers:

I take it for granted that the modern language teacher has as good a practical command of the language he is teaching, as he has been able to secure, that he is at home in its literature, and that he knows the life and institutions from which this literature has sprung. In addition to this, I believe he should have a general linguistic background, by which I mean a fundamental understanding of the principles of language in general and their application to the particular language which is being taught. In this paper I shall use the term linguistics in that sense . . . The essential branches of linguistics with which the teacher is ordinarily not on terms of easy familiarity are phonetics, principles and history of language, and psychology. (p. 75)

Given that language up to this point was treated as written text and not as spoken language or speech, it is perfectly justified that teachers should now be asked to understand and consider in their teaching the articulatory and phonetic qualities of their languages. Such phonetics training, however, is accorded extraordinary value, not so much because a teacher who did not receive such training might not be perfectly capable of teaching students how to pro- nounce and speak the language well, but because other critical educational goods were deemed



476

thereby to be within reach. By emphasizing the

spoken language through phonetics, one could at the same time associate with one of the proud- est intellectual accomplishments in 19th century historical linguistics, namely the discovery of the various sound "laws," such as Grimm's Law, or Verner's Law. In reverse, a linkage to phonetics also offered an important opportunity for the field to distance itself from the troubled mael- strom of irregularities in any language, but most

particularly in a living, modern language that is to be learned for the rough-and-tumble world of

speaking. One could even go one step farther. Presum-

ably it is no accident that in the exhortations

typical for the Journals publications of the early 1920s the laws of grammar were not accorded

explicit primacy, but were implicitly included

through the history of the language. Grammar, per se, as the component to which we sub-

sequently gave the lead role, a role that is scarcely diminished even to this day, could really only occupy that position once two developments had taken place: (a) when the "spoken language" quality of the modern languages was no longer an issue that needed to be treated defensively and (b) when, with American structuralism, linguistics acquired a unique foundation from which to exert efficient and effective influence on lan-

guage teaching. Both of these developments had occurred by the early 1940s, the period which we will examine more closely in the next section.

Also, it is worth recalling that inconsistencies do not become problematic for practitioners because theories about languages are potentially at odds with their practices of teaching languages in their own classrooms. Inconsistencies become dis-

quieting and even disruptive for teachers only when they result in clearly enunciated external mandates that contradict their own established

practices but to which they, nevertheless, are ex-

pected to respond even when they challenge their own perceived expertise. However, external societal pressures that took populist views of education

notwithstanding, the educational establishment at all levels of instruction simply had not yet had the time to work these matters out such that they might influence individual FL classrooms and, in fact, make a difference in pedagogies. That circumstance, therefore, left practitioners free both to continue to claim for themselves the benefits of the established patterns of classroom practice in the classical languages and to attribute any negative consequences to the language learners themselves, something that happened with remarkable frequency.


The following quotes show how these issues conflate and also compete with each other. The

high value of being deemed scientific resides

alongside the desire to be part of an extended humanistic tradition and the related claim that one is dealing with rules and regularities. The

importance of being accorded a certain professional presence is being reiterated over and over, bolstered by the assumption that what is good for the profession at large and for the individual teacher would surely also benefit the learner and

learning-arguments that should strike us as more than familiar in our own beleaguered states. A few selected quotes from Aron (1922) exemplify this belief:

1. It goes without saying that real scientific study of language is impossible without a knowledge of phonetics. (p. 76)

2. What teacher has not been asked the reason for the grammatical gender of German, French, and Spanish? A brief exposition of Brugmann's well- known theory of the rise of grammatical gender in- variably satisfies the questioner. (p. 79)

3. As long as the teacher depends on a pedagogical bag of tricks and not on skill in teaching based on thorough knowledge of and about the material he is teaching, . . .just so long language teaching cannot claim classification as a profession ... it causes the student to think where before only distasteful memory work seemed to count... The result is the feeling that the resentment against the foreign language is justified... [given that] language is the one [subject] where purely arbitrary rules reign supreme. (pp. 77-78)

Over and over again modern language professionals found themselves having to address the fact that spokenness of their subject was being associated with lawlessness. Indeed, Marchand (1929a) arrived at the damning verdict that the

empiricism of the direct method had "introduced into the classroom a veritable intellectual chaos"

(p. 4). By contrast, grammar offered mental train-

ing, one of the abiding legacies of Latin study, which was given an extra boost because of the

highly beneficial association with the powerfully rising natural sciences.

The teacher of languages, then, can be the equal of these teachers [e.g., the teacher of physics] only when he opens up a new world, when his chief concern is The Origin of Language, Usage as a Law of Language, Grammar and the Grammarians, Deriva- tion of Words, Principles of Linguistic Growth, etc. While occupied with these great ideas, a boy can at the same time learn German. But this little bit of German, mere memory work ... is nothing com-

pared with the emancipation of the mind from the childish notions about language which are enter-



Heidi Byrnes

tained even among the educated. (Greiner, 1922, p. 357)

This generalized "he"-for few women's voices are heard until very late in the Journal's pages when they suddenly join the conversation with great gusto-gradually emerges as a professional- ized teacher by following a number of particularly curious twists and turns, primarily in order to gain the value of being associated with "science." For example, both Senn (1937) and Bolin- ger (1943) went to great lengths to make the distinction between the humanistic or human sciences, including language study, and the natural sciences. Indeed, Senn pointed to the unfortu- nate translation of the German words Geistes- or

Kulturwissenschaften (the interpretative, culturally shaped form of knowledge creation that characterizes inquiry into the languages and which is

usually captured in the English term humanities) into English "linguistic science," a practice that presumably arose because of the use of the Ger- man Wissenschaften in both contexts, inquiry in the natural sciences, the Naturwissenschaflen, and the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften. Therefore, in order to dissociate these notions he concluded that it might be better to call the en-

terprise "the art of linguistics." Bolinger (1943), by contrast, took the opposite stance, presumably in order to lay claim to the intellectual prestige associated with the natural sciences. Although he acknowledged that the "science" of the physical sciences differs from that of linguistics, he asserted, nonetheless, that "grammar is, in fact, fun- damentally a scientific study" (p. 170) and proposed a more liberal interpretation of science: one that would "make room for investigations whose chief purpose is to understand nature, without necessarily the immediate design of controlling it" (p. 171). Obviously, this latter aspect-the extent to which control (and the power of controlling) does or does not inhere in a theoretical or empirical approach, here deliberated in the designation of a form of inquiry as a "science" or not-came to have enormous repercussions for the discursive constitution and the discursively instantiated and perpetuated practices of our field and continues to influence the field to this very day.

So pervasive is the notion that knowledge of grammar, understood as formal rules, is the indis- pensable guarantor of success in language learning that students who are not able or willing to engage in "orderly thinking" can be pronounced as not "language-minded." "If they fail in one language [they] should not be encouraged to

477

attempt another language in the hope that it will be easier" (Patterson, 1937, p. 473).

Whether intended or not, extraordinarily powerful gate-keeping mechanisms were thereby put in place. As Lindquist (1930), Supervisor of For- eign Language of the Detroit Public Schools, stated, "the enrollment in the high schools of the country is nearly 1000 per cent greater today than it was 25 years ago" (p. 285). Consequently, she instituted a General Language Course which, among other things, "is a prognosis of language ability" by emphasizing "essential principles of language structure, necessitating a thorough review of the fundamentals of grammar" (p. 286). In this fashion she hoped to be able to provide an answer to the question "as to who should and who should not study a foreign language and how this may be determined" (p. 286), a pressing question in light of overcrowded classrooms and too few well-trained teachers and "pupils [who] want to take a foreign language (you will notice that I don't say want to learn or want to study)

" (p. 285),

not to mention that FLs were under the gun because of a public perception that "the benefits of the study of foreign languages are not com- mensurate with the time and effort demanded" (p. 285).

Let me conclude this particular strand of discussing the first 25 years of the Journal with two examples that show the multiple layering of stances. Both of the articles that I have selected take a rare, explicitly psychological perspective that is of interest to us because it has striking parallels in present-day thinking. In the first article, Johnson (1939), like many of her contemporaries, made strategic use of the metaphor of law even in the title of her contribution, "Some fundamental laws of language learning." However, she stated that teachers of the various modern languages "are primarily teachers of language, not of a language, of language in its technical aspects as a tool for expressing thoughts and ultimately of language in its artistic and aesthetic aspects, as an art form, as literature" (p. 15). That assertion means that emphasis should be placed on linguistic phenomena, which she pointedly distinguished from scientific or mathematical or historical phenomena. Thus, the central issue that the notion of "law" addressed in her approach is that it can "develop a method of teaching based on an intelligent understanding of the fundamental laws of receiving and assimilating linguistic impressions ... a psychologically sound approach to language teaching" (p. 15).

Drawing her authority from Sweet, the eminent British language teaching practitioner and pho-



478

netician, Johnson (1939) quoted him with the

phrase "All minds work by the same fundamental

psychological laws. No one can learn a language without exerting the faculties of association and

memory" (p. 21). Notably, the laws that she referred to as linguistic would, in contemporary lan-

guage, be designated as psychological or psycholinguistic, a reminder that the scope of linguistics, too, was far from uniform even in the heyday of American structuralism. Thus, she offered 10

principles from which I have chosen 4 that are

particularly relevant to my argument:

Language is primarily a means of communication, a medium of intercourse. It grew up in response to a need, a desire to express thoughts and ideas, hence it involves a social situation, a give and take, with a speaker and a listener, or a writer and a reader ... Language cannot be thought of as a conglomeration of conjugations, paradigms, and rules, intricate, un- related and meaningless as cross-word puzzles. (p. 15)

Language is not only a means of expressing thought-it is also a means of thinking ... It is not enough to think as a foreigner thinks, we must learn to feel as he feels. (p. 18)

What is the unit of speech? . . . In speaking one's native tongue one thinks in complete sentences. It is not a question of putting words together like ajig-saw puzzle, which is a slow and laborious process. "It is more correct to say that the sentence gets itself unrav- elled into words than that words are combined together to form sentences." (p. 19)

The preceding discussion leads to the realization that we learn to understand our native tongue through a process of intuition, association, and assimilation as a result of repeated experience and contact; it is an inferential process which continues throughout life. (p. 20)

Referring to the French phonetician Breal, whose work placed particular emphasis on meaning, she continued by asserting that language learning is

not an acquisition of knowledge, but a growth in power, not a process of accumulating a certain number of essential facts about the language, but a process of developing skills in using the language as a tool to understand the thoughts of others, and, to a lesser degree, to increase one's power of self-expres- sion. (p. 21)

In other words, the lawfulness of language that

Johnson emphasized is not the imputed lawfulness of language as a system, but the suspected lawfulness of human language processing on the

part of the learner. The gradual reconsideration of language and

of learning, away from universal logic and or-


dered rules as indicators of the human mind and intellect, received a particularly interesting twist in the second paper that I use to demonstrate how changes gradually occurred, Angiolillo's (1942) report on teaching "French for the feeble- minded." He interpreted his study to show how the particular instance of language learning by those individuals institutionalized as "moron, im- becile and idiot" (p. 266) "belies the conception of any proportional relationship between mem-

ory and intelligence" (p. 270). On that basis, he concluded that "the beginning of foreign lan-

guage learning need not be an intellectual activ-

ity of a high order, of truly challenging, if not

forbidding, material" (p. 271)-a most tell-tale

critique of a practice that obviously left many learners stranded and at the same time questioned the very foundations regarding the intellectual merit and, by extension, the purely rationalist interpretation of the enterprise that had been studiously cultivated for so long.

How to Do Things with Words: Genre and

Being Scientific

Just how much being a member of a professional group and the existence of the group itself in the early part of the century differed from present-day customs is particularly well illustrated by the very form that published contributions took, typically five or fewer pages in length, and the

genre they represent. For example, the repeatedly acknowledged need for professional development and for help with the daily demands of the classroom was addressed in largely anecdotal fashion that openly referred to the authors' own classrooms in a more personal manner than we find in even highly practically oriented teacher hand- books that might accompany today's textbooks.

Examples are Marchand (1929a, 1929b) for the

teaching of vocabulary and, as much as 20 years later, Moulton (1952), who, on the basis of his

experience at Cornell University, made available to teachers and students some down-to-earth recommendations for how to approach the learning of a FL. Similarly, we observe how shared knowl-

edge is being created in the community through retracing the last 100 years of proud achievements in the field, all compactly presented on less than seven pages (Funke, 1943).

Professional goals are further explicated through Sturtevant's (1944) answer to the question "What is a linguist?"-a status or identity to which the readership is invited to aspire in order to be deemed competent language teachers. The Journal also kept its audience informed of ongo-



Heidi Byres

ing professional activities, such as those by "The Committee on Direction and Control of the Mod- ern Foreign Language Study," which at the time had just worked out recommendations for the

improvement of "study of the modern foreign languages in the secondary schools and the cor-

responding grade of collegiate instruction" (Fife, 1925, 1936). The French-teaching readership was

apprised about the results of an extensive test for

ascertaining the relative advantages of a func- tional or a theoretical approach to teaching grammar on learners' language proficiency (Cheydleur, 1932) and considered the implications for contemporary teaching materials of a set of recommendations drawn up by a committee of experts appointed by the French Ministry of Pub- lic Instruction 50 years earlier, in 1900 (Bement, 1952, p. 325; 1953a, 1953b). We also witness an- gry outbursts of the damage done "by a small but determined group of linguists [that] has moved over to the wrong side of the railroad tracks" when, in their democratic zeal, they disregarded the existence of social strata, thereby endanger- ing all of us of selling "our linguistic heritage for a mess of phonemes" (Fay, 1942, p. 595). There were warnings from the field that "in the last two decades English as a second language has charac- teristically been dominated in the United States by a new segment within the academic community, the Bloomfieldian New Linguists," who are "frankly interested in reshaping all language teaching," a fact that "teachers of other languages might well take note of" (Long, 1961, p. 149). We encounter frustrated teachers who felt put upon by the educational and professional leadership, identified as people who seemed far removed from the classroom and who made unforgiving methodological demands, thereby leaving classroom teachers entrapped and ready to strike back with irony, satire, and blunt language, as in the articles "Despised dictation: A radio skit" (Faye, 1948) or "Dialog memorization: A nemesis" (Ben- well, 1961). We also run across the familiar exas- peration with the wrong-headedness of teachers, educational specialists, and society itself regarding language, all of whom make questionable pol- icy decisions about the importance of "correct speech" in English classes (Bolinger, 1943).

In sum, a veritable smorgasbord of written gen- res, ideas, issues, and activities was being placed in front of the readers, a way for the academic modern language teacher of the time, particularly at the college and the secondary education level, to become engaged and to stay engaged with other practitioners. Without a unified professional voice and, therefore, also a unified pro-

479

fession, one can conclude that, compared with modern-day teachers, these colleagues enjoyed an enormous amount of freedom of decision-

making. The question whether the kind of professional passion, depth of conviction, willingness to state opinions, and also sense of empowerment that so many authors were able to exhibit in their writing is in any way related to this kind of "pre- professional" and "prediscipline" state of affairs is at least worthy of being considered in light of subsequent developments.

How to Do Things with Words: Authorship and Believability

Knowledge creation in a field of inquiry is, of course, intimately connected with authorship, which, first and foremost, is an issue of trust and believability translated into authorial voice, authority, and power. In the earlier decades of the Journal author names and, less frequently, institutional affiliations appeared at the end of articles rather than in the prominent place they now occupy and with the symbolic value they now carry. As a way of foreshadowing developments that strongly appear in the 1950s and 1960s, when we encounter something like the scholarly apparatus for a paper as we expect it today, namely a bibli- ography and a review of the literature, that practice often marked psychologically oriented contributions referencing a range of experimental studies that necessitated identification of a specific source. The articles' authors introduced such behavior as a sign of their scholarly creden- tials and credibility, though the primarily pedagogical concerns of the Journals readership at that time might have suggested other solutions. Indeed, we will subsequently observe those exact ways of establishing authorial voice in the pedagogical literature even when no specific research experiment is being reported-a practice that blends forms of argumentation which are deriva- tive of linguistic insights with those that are motivated by the experimental nature of contempora- neous behaviorist psychology.

Returning to the nature of most articles during the Journal's early period, it seems that for several decades the geographically dispersed community of the Journal's readership (which was surely much less mobile than today's professional) relied on forms of discourse that ring of personal familiarity and small-scale social interaction, em- bellished with a certain gentility, literary ca- dence, and rhetorical flourish. For example, in his article dealing with an important matter in language teaching and learning, "Presenting



480

grammar inductively," Hagboldt (1928) concluded his discussion of the value of inductive reasoning and its recommended steps of observa- tion, comparison, abstraction, and generalization, in the following fashion:

Here the process of inductive reasoning is ended; the

linguistic law is found, and the deductive phase of the lesson, the application of the law through a series of different exercises follows.... What we need is intensive mental activity. Like the hero in a drama by Kleist we must struggle through confusion to light, for it is in this struggle for clarity that we receive our deepest and most permanent impressions. (p. 445)

Not a single citation is given. Attempting to ex-

plain this practice, one is reminded of the work of

contemporary intellectual historians, like Shapin (1994), who, referring to work by the British soci-

ologist Anthony Giddens, takes as one of moder-

nity's central characteristics "the shift from repos- ing trust in individuals in contexts of face-to-face interaction to trust in systems and abstract capaci- ties" (p. 15). Once more, then, we observe how a

community of practice takes on increasingly more

rigorously defined ways of conducting its internal

dialogue in order to meet certain perceived chal-

lenges and, in so doing, lays the discursive foundation for future forms of institutionalization of which the formation of professions is only one

component, though an important one. Since those early beginnings as they are re-

flected in the first decades of the MLJ, our field has indeed developed many such systems for

regulating its discursive practices, most notably a blind-review process for submitted manuscripts that explicitly queries whether certain well-established categories, among them up-to-date bibliog- raphies, have been appropriately addressed by writers. Following Gee's (1998) practice of distin-

guishing within the totality of language use in modern societies the primary discourses of fa-

miliarity and the secondary discourses of public life, we could even say that the entire FL field traversed a similar development and thereby became literate in its own culture: from surprisingly personal and interactively constructed ways of ex-

pressing opinions and making recommendations to the increasingly specified public secondary discourse of a professional field with all its explicit markers of literacy.

LEARNING THE LANGUAGES OF THE DISCIPLINES

The Journal's pages from the early-1940s to the mid-1960s, the time period under closer consid-


eration in this section, unmistakably show the extraordinary impact of the events of World War II on the development of language teaching and

learning. Among the tell-tale symptoms are: (a) the number of articles falling under what we would now call applied linguistics, with a particular interest in classroom-related issues (Politzer, 1958, in fact uses that term); (b) the articles' substantial similarity to contemporary practice, in terms of content and format, length, topic focus, increasingly specialized vocabulary, rhetorical or-

ganization, and ways of establishing believability; and (c) the direct testimony by the writers themselves regarding what they, too, experienced as the dramatic changes affecting the field. If re-

peated explications about what "really" happened and why it happened indicate that even those individuals living at the time could not al-

ways readily understand it, then this period was indeed one of momentous change (Blayney, 1947; Haugen, 1955; Hill, 1956; Politzer, 1964).

Based on the printed evidence, one can conclude that the readership of the MLJ after the 1940s, which, only a few years earlier, had no more than a diffuse sense of itself, increasingly represented a defined textual community with its own discursive forms and its own way of signaling membership through adherence to its practices of a professional literacy. Aside from comparing these developments with the acquisition of a sec-

ondary literacy, one could also describe them in terms of the likely causes of the dramatic shift. Here the term going public seems apt, given that the phenomena which accompany the decision

by a privately held company to be publicly traded on the stock market are remarkably similar to those the FL field encountered. For commercial

enterprises, this step, the initial public offering or IPO, involves a kind of expanded scrutiny that binds emerging companies to adhere to certain forms of conduct in the public marketplace, thereby necessitating as well a rearrangement of their internal conduct, most particularly how key personnel perform their tasks and speak about them. In exchange, the company hopes to gain the benefit of a potentially substantial influx of

money that will help it grow and become a

greater presence in the market.

Similarly, the language field from the 1940s to the 1960s entered an era during which major financial resources were devoted to language learning by the government, initially through government language programs, such as the

Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) for

military personnel, the Army's Civil Affairs Train-

ing Schools (CATS) for various occupation offi-



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cers, the postwar Committee on the Language Program (CLP), and thereafter in conjunction with the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and the Defense Language Institute (DLI) language teaching mandates. However, as Moulton (1963) documented, these early efforts rapidly ex-

panded into an intricate network of various fund-

ing sources and an astounding array of activities that were conducted by a host of well-established, as well as new, organizations (e.g., the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Lan-

guage Association (MLA), the Center for Applied Linguistics). As evidence of the culmination of this build-up, we can point to passage of the Na- tional Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which, for years to come, funded pivotal projects for furthering the study of language in the United States, thereby essentially defining an entire era and an entire field.

For our purposes, however, the real issue is not so much that funds became available, but that the publicness of these resources and activities re-

quired certain behaviors by the parties involved. Thus, a particularly intriguing question is whether what we observe in the pages of the MLJ constitutes a dramatic transformation of the established readership and its traditional authors, those who previously preferred a gentlemanly conversation about issues they had deemed to be significant, or whether we are actually witnessing their replacement by a new and aggressively influential group, one characterized by its ability to meet the stringent demands of accountability that American society associates with publicly funded and publicly performed tasks. We can, however, draw strong inferences from the stances and discursive behaviors taken by the authors, both by those who espoused the changes and those who viewed them with undisguised criti- cism. Taken together, the articles of this period have all the markings of bearing witness to the development of a dramatically new, rather than an internally transformed, group of readers. By gaining their own voices, they give a new voice to the entire membership of the MLJ community, thereby bringing an end to a professional identity that was captured by the term philology. If not entirely in its actual practice, that designation had, at least in its idealized self-understanding, comprised the whole modern language field, inquiry into the language itself, diachronically and synchronically, engagement with its literature, and inquiry into issues of language pedagogy and language learning.

Specifically, three aspects of the shift deserve closer scrutiny, given that all arose from the need

481

to go public, which itself was motivated by the desire to achieve publicly held goals through publicly committed funds: (a) opening up to other

disciplines, (b) responding to the demands of the public educational system, and (c) attending to what was explicitly designated as professionalization (see Eddy's comments in Dostert, 1960, pp. 220-222). I will comment primarily on the first point, the consequences of the opening to the disciplines and its effects on our field, beginning with linguistics.

Prologue in Heaven-Or a Faustian Bargain: Observations on the Impact of Linguistics

Among the intriguing impressions to be gained from a close look at the MLJ articles during the formative period in which language teaching and learning came to be associated with linguistics is that the evidence is neither one-di- mensional nor uncritical. That scientific linguistic approaches, however defined, and audiolin-

gual methodology should ultimately come to dominate seems to be tied to two pivotal features: first, the enormous time pressures under which much of this work had to be accomplished and, second, the far-reaching consequences of institutionalization, particularly in the public school system but, in general, through multiple forms of signaling how "to do linguistics" in language teaching programs. Particularly powerful among these influences are how to prepare materials and write methods manuals and, increasingly, how to create teacher development opportunities. Accompanied by extensive program creation or reshaping that was made possible through funding, that combination of rapidly created facts in the classroom and in the teachers' daily lives and a language to talk about them, which, in turn, resulted in preferential status in the form of higher visibility and authority for those who were able to command it. The continued flow of resources assured that this would become a self-sustaining dynamic.

It is curious that the Journal's articles published at the beginning of this period provide little direct evidence for just what linguistics, as a formal discipline whose interests had not traditionally been associated with language acquisition, might contribute to language teaching. The explicit linkage to language learning and teaching and the designation as being a linguistic rather than, for example, an educational effort, must have taken place in other venues. We only find that development and its attendant intellectual and, at times, personal turf wars reflected in the Jour-



482

nal subsequently through a number of tell-tale indirect references, which often take the form of "corrections" of misperceptions.

For instance, with regard to the newness of the

approach and its theoretical base, where newness serves to legitimize claims for those who put forward the potential, indeed the indispensability, of

linguistics as a way of assuring that the country had the necessary language abilities, Haugen (1955) stated emphatically:

The leading ideas of the ILP [Intensive Language Program] were not new, and that they were also familiar to other linguists and to numerous language teachers in this country. If their ideas had not been

widely applied in regular language teaching, this was not the teachers' fault. It was due to the attitude of the American public, which did not really want lan-

guages taught effectively, and therefore did not provide the time and the money needed. No real prestige was attached to speaking foreign languages (any im-

migrant could do that!), so the learning of languages was regarded either as an intellectual exercise or as a

merely social accomplishment. (p. 244)

Similarly, Politzer (1964) noted:

The ultimate reason for the fact that the audio-lin-

gual approach has become steadily more popular since 1945 is neither linguistic theory, nor the For-

eign Language Program of the Modern Language Association, but the change toward "international- ism" which has occurred on the American scene. (p. 149)

It is hard to imagine that the public did not want these languages taught effectively, to use

Haugen's words, or that a change toward interna- tionalism itself would accomplish this sea change. What seems more likely is that, up until then, no one from within the field was able to make a

persuasive case-and that means having the req- uisite persuasive language tools-that the field could accomplish that goal of language proficiency for instructed learners, no matter what their age and circumstance, a capability that would simultaneously bolster the more expanded view of the world that the United States acquired as a result of the war effort. Presumably, this was the benefit that some people correctly associated with the discipline of linguistics, thereby creating a language that made them appropriate spokes- persons for the field and mentors in the proper discourse behaviors for as yet to be professional- ized practitioners in the emerging field. At the same time, these leaders could serve as persuasive advocates in the eye of a public which needed such assurances of efficacy and effectiveness in


order to fund the massive enterprise in language education that defined this time.

Perhaps the best summary of what passed as the contributions of linguistics to language teach-

ing is given by Sacks (1964), who referred to the MLA's involvement in setting standards for secon-

dary school teachers of modern languages and also its involvement in the creation of the text- book Modern Spanish, a project that was to serve as a model for other languages as well. To him,

supporting materials intended for the teacher should reflect the following principles, "which the linguistically minded teacher would subscribe to":

1. Language is patterned oral behavior. 2. An audio-lingual approach is the proper begin-

ning, and the four-fold progression of hearing-speaking-reading-writing follows logically from the basic

assumption. 3. Oral fluency and listening comprehension re-

quire accurate description and thorough drill of all

aspects, including intonation and juncture. 4. Speech standards are relative, not absolute. 5. Two kinds of statements about grammar might

be needed, for language as speech and language as written.

6. Pronunciation and spelling problems are different and must be handled separately.

7. Separate phonemic from subphonemic problems in pronunciation.

8. Beyond patterned contrasts of sound there are also patterned contrasts of form and meaning. So the notion of "patterned contrast" must also pervade morphology and syntax.

9. Language should be studied in terms of its own structure.

10. Particularly for adolescents, grammar should be comparative.

11. Language is an integral element of culture, and culture is conceived of in the broad anthropological sense. (pp. 7-8)

Among the most thoughtful voices about how

linguistics impacted FL teaching-both appropriately and inappropriately-is that of Politzer

(1964), who provided numerous examples for how understandings about language, which were themselves based on highly contextualized in-

sights, came to be applied in other situations or

generalized in ways that made them problematic. For instance, the refined methods that lin-

guists used in the 1920s and 1930s for describing languages could, in some sense, be understood as ways of going about learning these languages. In support of that notion, Politzer quoted Fries's book Language Learning II, in which he stated that "the fundamental feature of this new approach consists in a scientific descriptive analysis



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as the basis upon which to build the teaching material. ... It is the practical use of the lin-

guistic scientist's technique that is at the heart of the so-called 'new approach to language

learning'" (p. 149). He went on to note that be- haviorism and formal analysis of language were the chief features of the linguistic impact on lan-

guage instruction in the 1940s. However, neither one of these features amounted to a psycholin- guistically compelling system of language learn-

ing or teaching. Similarly, Politzer (1964) alerted readers to the

fact that two instructional sites provided the

methodological laboratory for what was to become the audiolingual approach: the ASTP and the University of Michigan Center for the Teach-

ing of English as a Foreign Language. However, despite the fact that these two very different instructional approaches were often conflated into what became known as the audiolingual method, they differed centrally in their assumptions about the nature of language learning and about their instructional goals. The former emphasized audi-

olingual knowledge in practical situations, to be

acquired through "mim-mem" (mimicry and memorization), whereas the latter attempted to

impart

an audio-lingual knowledge of English to native speakers of Spanish most of whom had already received some previous training in English. The materials evolved [sic] were highly structured from the grammatical point of view ... The intensive course ... is carefully divided into pronunciation, structure, vocabulary and pattern practice. The latter, above all, was a primary feature of the Michigan program and an outgrowth of the belief that the very methods (comparison of likes and unlikes, substitution) which the linguist uses in linguistic analysis could also be employed as teaching methods in the classroom. (p. 149)

In any case, as was already mentioned, Haugen (1955) had clearly pointed out that the method-

ologies employed in situationally based wartime

programs like the Intensive Language Program stemmed almost in their entirety from the Euro-

pean reform movement of language teaching in the 1880s and 1890s and, therefore, could not be the result of a new linguistics. Haugen characterized these early versions in terms of their em-

phasis on "(1) oral mastery as the primary objective of language learning; (2) expansion of the time devoted to learning; (3) emphasis on con- stant drill, mimicry, and memorization; (4) the

postponement of grammatical analysis until after memorization; (5) team instruction, also known as the informant method; (6) the preparation of

483

linguistically analyzed materials in a phonemic transcription" (p. 243). He also observed that these attributes have only a scantily motivated

linguistic or psychological base. As a result, Haugen concluded:

The significance of the intensive language program was therefore not that a new method was developed, but that scientific linguists were given their first chance to apply principles of language learning that had been accepted by all competent scholars in the field for half a century or more. (p. 245)

In contrast, the Michigan program under Fries's direction and those who followed its tenets called the direct method problematic from the stand-

point of learning, not only because it treats the adult learner like the native child but, more fun-

damentally, because "language is pattern-patterns of sound, of words, of phrases and sentences" (Hill, 1956, p. 344). Hill added, "There is no way in which an adult can acquire a new set of such habits except by initial intellectual under-

standing, backed by drill which transforms the

understanding into automatic response" (p. 344). In fact, in an astounding reversal of what

contemporary positions might look like in this matter, he stated:

since books for more mature students find it useful to present systematic grammatical description as a sup- plement to drill, the assumption given necessarily affects this systematic reference material also. A bad book presents its account of grammatical classes primarily in terms of meaning. A good book presents them first in terms of theirformal characteristics, with descrip- tions of meaning only after the formal characteristics have been used to isolate and identify the entities described. (p. 339)

For their own reasons, other scholars, too, questioned the appropriateness of such an approach for adult learners (e.g., Blayney, 1947), with Bernard (1951) raising the objection that the benefits of the ASTP in general seem to have been overstated. Its limited aims are "too nar-

rowly utilitarian to be directly applicable to educational institutions. Likewise, the situational and motivational factors, as well as the factors of time allotment, generally do not exist in the peace- time pursuit of foreign language study" (p. 87). In particular, for educational institutions, in which reading ability must remain an important instructional goal, it is a concern that "the results of our testing give little evidence that this dual

objective was impressively or consistently attained" (p. 87).

To conclude, though there are some enthusiastic endorsements of the "new approach" (e.g.,



484

Diller, 1962; Haden, 1954), these tend to be in a "take it or leave it" tone that gives new meaning to Hill's (1956) admonition that linguists should work with humility if they wish to have their work

accepted in the classroom. By comparison, most voices seem to sympathize with Politzer's (1958) assessment that "linguistic analysis is not a method of instruction ... [but] merely has some-

thing to say about what is to be taught. Neverthe- less the most profound influence of linguistics on

language teaching has been precisely in the area of methodology of teaching" (p. 67). Politzer (1964) concluded:

One cannot but feel that theoretical considerations coming from the disciplines of educational psychology and linguistics had had to [sic] immediate and too direct influence. Linguistics and educational psychology are not and should not be the forces which actively shape language teaching methodology, but rather the tools which the language teacher uses to create and validate his methods.... Perhaps the most important role of linguistic science will not be in the direct shaping of teaching methodology, but in the precise and scientifically meaningful formulation of the questions and answers concerning foreign language teaching. (p. 151)

However, as we know from hindsight, events turned out decidedly differently, and linguistics dominated the selection of topics of conversation and how they would be talked about for close to 50 years, although, increasingly, other voices strove to change both the focus of that conversation and its performative aspects, thereby leading to dramatically different interpretations of an issue, potentially even within a particular teacher's

professional life (e.g., Politzer, 1964; Postovsky, 1975; Shaffer, 1989).

Finding a New Conversational Partner: Considering a Role for Psychology

Given the now well-acknowledged interdisciplinarity of applied linguistics and second language (L2) teaching, it is often difficult to determine the disciplinary background of a particular re- searcher in second language acquisition (SLA). However, that is decidedly not the case with a number of contributions that appeared in the Journal within a few years, in the late 1950s and 1960s. They are all the more noteworthy because

they were published alongside some of the above- referenced articles that privileged a near-exclusive relationship to linguistics. Written by some of the best known researchers of the time (e.g., Ausubel, 1964; Carroll, 1965; Lambert, 1963a, 1963b; Pimsleur, 1967), these articles suggest a


route that can strike us only as highly current

today, an indication that its insights remain even now to be addressed by the profession as a whole. Furthermore, not one of these articles offers an endorsement of a behaviorist approach, the

learning theory that was simultaneously elevated to near unassailable status under the auspices of a "scientific-linguistic" approach.

In particular, Lambert's two-part article (1963a, 1963b) deserves to be called a classic in its comprehensive treatment of theories of learn-

ing that are of relevance to language specialists-those pertaining to meaning and the sym- bol-referent problem; and those pertaining to verbal behavior, how words are used in communication, either as units or as elements in larger response sequences. He discussed classical and

operant conditioning, the neurophysiological bases of thought and language, and the newest efforts to measure individual difference in lan-

guage learning capacity through a battery of tests. In light of some of the actions I reported on in earlier articles, Lambert's (1963a) finding that "man's abilities are not permanently fixed by he-

reditary background" (p. 61) deserves special mention, and his general conclusions are worth

contrasting with the kinds of recommendations we have just heard:

. . that the learning of languages should be shifted to early age levels, and that experimentation on such a shift should be undertaken with very careful consideration given to ability requirements and their se- quencing. It suggests that modern movements should be carefully studied to determine which students, according to their patterns of abilities, will profit from such new approaches. For example, the generalized plan of commencing second language audio-lin- gually at all age levels probably has not taken into consideration age level changes in ability structures, nor individual differences in visual and auditory pref- erences at any age level. It may well be that the audio- lingual method is appropriate for second language learning at very early levels for certain children, but it may, for older subjects, run counter to ability patterns developed over many years. (p. 62)

Aside from making recommendations regarding the learner as an individual, Lambert (1963a, 1963b) in these articles also explored the rich research from the Canadian context, which takes a sociopsychological perspective on learning and

language use, particularly in its investigation of

bilingualism. At that point the MLJ's readership was being invited to a totally new line of thinking. However, in general, the U.S.-American FL teach-

ing community, as contrasted with its Canadian

counterparts, with the possible exception of En-



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glish as a Second Language (ESL) instruction in the K-12 contexts, continues to this day to be

remarkably unattuned to the social context of its work and to specific social issues that relate to the role of language for multilingual and mul- ticultural societies (cf. Bolinger, 1971; Valdes, 1995, and my concluding observations in the

present article). New ways for addressing language learning

were suggested as well by Carroll (1965), most

notably in reference to the realization that "one characteristic of foreign language learning that

may differentiate it from many other kinds of

learning is the sheer volume of the material to be learned" (p. 277). In other words, what is criti-

cally required are theories of learning that address the issue of "converting short time [sic] memories into long term ones" (p. 276). More

directly applicable to our point, however, is Car- roll's review of major theories in FL learning. For

audiolingual habit theory, "more or less the 'official' theory of the reform movement in foreign language teaching in the United States of Amer- ica" (p. 218), he identified the following princi- pal ideas:

(1) that since speech is primary and writing is secon-

dary, the habits to be learned must be learned first of all as auditory discrimination responses and speech responses; (2) that habits must be automatized as much as possible so that they can be called forth without conscious attention; (3) that the automat- ization of habits occurs chiefly by practice, that is, by repetition. (p. 278)

Similarly, for the Cognitive Code theory, he stated that it

may be thought of as a modified, up-to-date grammar- translation theory. According to this theory, learning a language is a process of acquiring conscious control of the phonological, grammatical, and lexical patterns of a second language, largely through study and

analysis of these patterns as a body of knowledge. The

theory attaches more importance to the learner's un-

derstanding of the structure of the foreign language than to his facility in using that structure, since it is believed that, provided the student has a proper de-

gree of cognitive control over the structures of the

language, facility will develop automatically with use of the language in meaningful situations. (p. 278)

Continuing his careful analysis of the situation in FL teaching, Carroll noted with bemusement that "some teachers act as if they believed in both of these theories, appealing to one of them for some of their teaching procedures and to the other for different aspects" and added that "we need information on which of these theories is a better basis

485

for foreign language teaching" because they "represent rather fundamental differences in teaching method and style that show up in the way textbooks are written andforeign language courses are taught" [ital- ics added] (p. 278).

In other words, Carroll (1965) realized that the dramatic shift brought about by the incorpo- ration of linguistics primarily manifests itself in and perpetuates itself through materials preparation and teacher training in the methodology of

audiolingualism, neither of which are well motivated by evidence from research in language learning. Getting right to the heart of the matter and referring to Scherer and Wertheimer's

(1964) methodology comparison study he concluded: "the average differences between the

groups were small; small enough, at any rate, to

suggest that it does not make any material difference whether one uses the audio-lingual method as opposed to the traditional grammar-translation method" (p. 279). With only insignificant variations, that same finding was reiterated over and over again in the pages of the MLJ and else- where (e.g., Aleamoni & Spencer, 1969; Chas-

tain, 1970; Chastain & Woerdehoff, 1968; Clark, 1969), thereby highlighting the dramatic conse-

quences for our discourse and our practice when an approach-and here I purposely use the concurrent dominant assessment format of multiple- choice questions-

(a) has been invested with high prestige and high stakes through the backing by professional groups or other powers of institutional influence;

(b) has been institutionalized in the educational

system, through materials, methodologies, teacher education, and assessment;

(c) has received significant public funds which drive major assessment instruments, in their form, focus, and interpretation, and lead to preferred em-

phases in research and its reporting; (d) all of the above.

Exploring the implications for instructional practice, Carroll observed that a focus on methods must understand the following:

First, it is almost impossible to control the techniques that the student himself will adopt to acquire a given skill.... Second, it is doubtful that the theoretical bases for the contrasting teaching methods in the

experiment were sufficiently well-formed to make for

highly contrasting methods of teaching. (p. 279)

As a consequence, Carroll arrived at the follow-

ing conclusion:

neither the audio-lingual habit theory nor the cognitive code-learning theory is closely linked to any con-

temporary psychological theory of learning. The



486

audio-lingual habit theory has a vague resemblance to Thorndikean association theory, while the cognitive code-learning theory is reminiscent of certain

contemporary Gestaltist movements which empha- size the importance of perceiving the "structure" of what is to be learned, without really relying on such movements. (p. 280)

Years later that point, backed by an extended

study, was made by Swaffar, Arens, and Morgan (1982), who summarized their findings in the

following way:

Unless an activity is analyzed in terms of its position in a learning sequence, teachers cannot locate its function as it delineates a methodology. It is not the characteristic activities per se that discriminate between methodologies, but the ways in which those characteristic activities reinforce each other in the foreign language learning process. Apparently, any analysis of methodologies needs to commence with definitions of their characteristic activities in terms of task, order, and learning strategies. This is the way we, as

foreign language teachers, interpret the pragmatics of the classroom. (p. 32)

The incompatibility of the audiolingual methods with psychological principles of language learning was also the topic of a contribution by Ausubel (1964), who pointed to problematic con-

sequences based on "the widespread cultural belief that children learn languages much more

readily than adults do" (p. 420). In contrast, he claimed overwhelming advantages of adult learn-

ers, most specifically,

First, they have a much larger native-language vo-

cabulary than children, particularly with regard to abstract concepts. Hence, in learning a foreign lan-

guage, unlike children, they need not acquire thousands of new concepts but merely the new verbal

symbols representing these concepts. Second, in

learning the structure of a new language-both in

comprehending oral and written materials and in

speaking-they can make conscious and deliberate use of grammatical generalizations and can explicitly apply them to suitable exemplars. (p. 421)

The linkage between L2 verbal symbols and

existing or new concepts in L2 development is

today seen as less straightforward than Ausubel's

(1964) explication would seem to recognize. Even so, the conflation of child and adult lan-

guage learning that he questions-for our purposes instructed adult learning-took forms, particularly with regard to the use of materials and

methodologies, that tended to become fertile

ground for so-called "movements" and "paradigm shifts" (see Asher, 1969; Krashen, 1989; Terrell, 1986, 1991). It goes without saying that these movements required appreciable personal capi-


tal in the sense that teachers felt compelled to

profess one or the other direction, that they con- sumed significant professional energies across the range of our activities, and that they led to serious misconstruals of both teaching and learn-

ing. By way of concluding this probing into conver-

sations not pursued though they might have suggested themselves, I refer to Pimsleur, Mosberg, and Morrison (1962) and their consideration of

important student factors in FL learning. In con-

junction with an extensive review of the experimental literature, they observed that, of the hun- dreds of items that initially suggested themselves as influential for learners age 12 and above, only approximately 40 seemed to be pertinent. The researchers grouped these items into a total of seven headings: (a) intelligence, (b) verbal abil-

ity, (c) pitch discrimination, (d) order of lan-

guage study and bilingualism, (e) study habits, (f) motivation and attitudes toward FL learning, and (g) diverse personality factors. To each cate-

gory they added a brief discussion of the research evidence and concluded:

The areas which have been most completely investi-

gated are intelligence and native language (English) verbal ability. Since they are known to be highly related, it may be well to think of them as a single factor of verbal intelligence. One of the few secure results of the research performed thus far is that this factor, verbal intelligence, appears to correlate about .45 with FL achievement. It is thus the largest contribut-

ing factor, but the correlation of .45 means that it accounts for only about 20% of the variance in FL achievement. There still remains 80% to be ex-

plained by other factors. A number of studies have dealt with the factor of

motivation; they indicate a positive relationship which may be as high as .40. If this is the case, then verbal intelligence and motivation together account for perhaps 35% of the variance in FL achievement. This is as much as can be concluded with reasonable assurance from the evidence now at hand. Clearly, the greater part of the variance in FL achievement remains to be investigated. (p. 169)

CONTESTING THE CONVERSATIONAL FLOOR: THEMES AND VARIATIONS

Shifting from the close-up view of the Journal's first 50 years, which I have taken for most of the

paper, this third section is a highly condensed and perspectival summary that brings us to the

present. I had interpreted the period from the 1940s to the 1960s as a formative period that defined the field through an increasingly strong bond between linguistics and modern language



Heidi Byrnes

teaching and learning. At least in the abstract sense, the possibility for an equally strong influence of psychology on teaching practice seemed to have existed. In reality, however, that is not what happened. A number of considerations suggest themselves as explanations. First, the labora-

tory and experimental setting of much psychological research seemed to be far removed not

only from language learning but also from classroom practice. When researchers did focus on

language, they seemed much preoccupied with first language learning by children in naturalistic

settings, a trend that became particularly pronounced in the 1960s under the influence of the

cognitive turn in linguistics brought on by Chom-

sky. Finally, even general implications for L2 learning and teaching were suggested in indirect ways that seemed to lack the possibility of a

straightforward application in decision-making pertaining to curriculum, materials selection, pedagogical practice, and learning goals and outcomes.

Though these same limitations would also apply to linguistics as a formal area of inquiry, a sufficient number of FL practitioners, perhaps most prominently exemplified by Fries and Lado, did find ways of making that connection. In so

doing, they not only claimed for their proposals the much coveted mantle of intellectual rigor, academic-institutional probity, and scientificness as expressed by the dominance of rules in both theorizing and classroom practice, they also offered eminently practice-oriented recommendations, if not to say prescriptions. Finally, by creating methodologies and classroom practices that could become the basis for rigorous teacher de-

velopment efforts, they facilitated the critical move into professional and, ultimately, institutional behaviors and the creation of standards for teacher education and classroom performance, both on the part of teachers and on the part of learners. It is this strand that for nearly 3 decades, from roughly the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, pervaded all aspects of the discourse of our practice. Its own elaboration within that time span, as well as the various overt or more subtle counter- moves against its near-hegemony, indicates not only the fecundity of that initial link which placed FL teaching under the aegis of linguistics, but also its limitations.

Thus, at the beginning of the 1960s we find extensive elaboration of the basic premises, practices, and specific ways of talking about our work in three areas: (a) materials development whose products, however, are not published in the pages of the MLJ; (b) an expansive and increasingly

487

more solid methodological edifice, which in some fashion is validated by the repeated methods comparison studies, no matter what their results (Aleamoni & Spencer, 1969; Chastain, 1970; Chastain & Woerdehoff, 1968; Clark, 1969; Swaf- far, Arens, & Morgan, 1982); and (c) assessment

practices that critically depend on the centrality of linguistic rules and their accurate application in forms as indicators of language acquisition. The role of assessment is all the more noteworthy because it breaks the boundaries of classroom

practice, reaching into national standardized test-

ing of individuals based on psychometric principles, and targets the assessment of program outcomes as well as teacher competence, all with enormous washback effects in their respective areas based on their specific construal of what constitutes the criteria for measuring quality of performance.

As stated above, the influence of linguistics on

teaching and learning was hereby solidly institutionalized, and only more recently do we find

energetic attempts to reconsider this dominant role or, at least, its particular manifestations in our professional discourse, in our institutions, and in our practice. The fact that one dynamic strand in these efforts should once more come from assessment specialists is thus at once surpris- ing and altogether appropriate.

Although transformational grammar was experienced as a major sea change that encouraged us to move from a behaviorist to a rationalist foundation for the human capacity for language, on another level it continued, even massively elaborated, the rule-based character of this competence, this time in the area of syntax, as compared with the earlier emphasis on phonetics. Thus, despite Chomsky's (1966) deliberately and strategically elevated claim that he was making a radical break with the immediate past in linguistics and, by implication, with the immediate past of FL pedagogy, researchers whose primary concern was, in fact, instructed FL learning could find enough insights in his proposals to respond with cautious optimism to some of the emphases made by transformational-generative grammar. Most tell-tale in that regard, Barrutia (1967) hailed it for its potential to bring meaning back into the discussion on account of its distinction of deep and surface structures, whereas much classroom practice based on structuralist linguistics seemed by then to have succumbed to mindless drills. Likewise, building on the central concepts of competence and performance, Rivers (as cited in Banathy, 1968) pondered the possibility of two types of grammars. One would be a linguistic



488

grammar that gives an account of competence which "does not necessarily represent, and may not even attempt to parallel, the psychological processes of language use" (p. 207). The other would be a pedagogical grammar, "dependent on such factors as the objectives of the language course, the age and intellectual capacity of the students, the length and intensity of the study, and the degree of contrast between the foreign and native languages" (p. 207). The Chomskian notion of kernel sentences and transformations was even seen as a way to motivate instructional

sequences on the basis of meaning (Politzer, 1964), something that might, among other

things, have implications for the rising impact of

technology, particularly in a kind of programmed instruction. It was hoped that this might redefine the learning context and particularly the role of the teacher as someone who would assure "positive attitudes toward language as a cultural phenomenon and provide insights into the language learning process" (Valdman, 1964, p. 284). In contrast, taking a more critical stance toward Chomskian theoretical linguistics, Oiler (1970) rejected "the TG [transformational grammar] notion of a self-contained system which is inde-

pendent of its use" and proposed that we recognize that "language is a tool for communicating something to somebody " (p. 504) which would mean that the student would "be using language in

response to a paradigm of situations" (p. 507). In the end, it was not Chomskian linguistics

that would extend in an influential way the professional conversation regarding appropriate classroom practice. Nor could critiques, such as the following one by Belasco (1967), do much to redirect the full-throated chorus of those practitioners who were singing in unison as a result of the kind of professionalization efforts from which

they had clearly benefitted, particularly through the many activities associated with the NDEA. Be- lasco's judgment that "the practical assumption that dialogue memorization and intensive pattern practice will ultimately lead to conversation is as naive as the 'natural assumption' that acquiring a second language should ideally approxi- mate that of a child acquiring a first language" (p. 86) is almost a wistful counter-statement to prevailing ways of doing things. And Newmeyer's (1973) observations from the theoretical perspective of generative semantics, a direction which had surfaced in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a way of assuring the importance of

meaning in language, were equally unsuccessful in capturing the practitioners' attention and initi-

ating a reconsideration of the enormous costs of


a near-exclusive emphasis on language forms and

accuracy of learning. Not by accident, a gradual rethinking occurred

only when proposals were made that spoke di-

rectly to teachers' worlds. The first of these, the influence of Krashen's Natural Approach, is a

particularly curious phenomenon inasmuch as its

major tenets, easily encapsulated in the forced distinction between learning and teaching, actu-

ally deny a substantive role to instruction and the instructor. Because that distinction also largely equated adult and child language learning, one

might have expected little uptake for his proposals in the FL teaching community. However, in some instructional environments the exact opposite occurred, and enthusiastic support devel-

oped. Of the many reasons behind this curious

development, I mention only two: first, an in-

creasing awareness of the shortcomings of the

privileged structuralist-inspired methodological approaches, which seemed to leave little room for

meaningful communication and marginalized the reasons why many teachers had entered the FL profession in the first place, namely their love of the literatures and cultures that their language represented; second, the concurrent need for re-

laxing some of the dominant teacher roles that came with the approach, with all their burdens of teacher responsibility in the face of a highly com-

plex and seemingly unpredictable phenomenon such as language learning, burdens that were par- alleled by concurrent high levels of learner frus- tration. As with previous shifts, the Natural Ap- proach, as well, was remolded to fit teachers' needs, in this case serving as an important precursor to communicative language teaching.

A similarly gradual impact and a similarly im-

portant reshaping can be observed with a line of

thinking that Corder (1975) introduced with his seminal article on error analysis. In preferring an interactionist to a nativist view of language, he asserted that "language learning is no different in kind, from any other sort of cognitive learning" (p. 410). In particular, he proposed that error

analysis allows us to gain valuable insights into the

"processes of second language learning and to understand something about the various strate-

gies of language learners" (p. 409). Given the

ubiquity of errors in the language classroom, this notion could, over time, become one of the most

powerful ways in which language teachers could rethink their own and their learners' efforts and usher in an increasingly more prominent learner focus. As Spolsky (1979) pointed out in an excel- lent summary article of the major developments of the 1960s and 1970s, we can witness in these



Heidi Byrnes

three foci the initially dominant influence of linguistic considerations (e.g., Hadlich, 1965), the gradual inclusion of learners' cognitive processes in language acquisition, and some impact of the sociocultural and pragmatic context of language learning in interlanguage performance.

A particularly instructive example of the con- tested nature of these shifts, which primarily occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s, is the so-called Proficiency Movement, which received extensive comments in the Journal for a number of years (Bachman & Savignon, 1986; Byrnes, 1992; Higgs, 1985; Kramsch, 1986; Lantolf & Frawley, 1985; Lee & Musumeci, 1988; Magnan, 1988; Savignon, 1985; Valette, 1991). Whereas its particular thrust is not centrally concerned with the relationship of either linguistics or psychology to the teaching of languages, but reflects more instructional concerns and assessment, it nonetheless sits squarely at the center of the debate over how students are deemed to succeed in learning a FL, through a largely decontextualized, ana- lytic, rule- and grammar-based approach, often associated with linguistics and the notion of competence, or through a learner-driven communicative focus that is generally taken to be indicative of psychological and processing approaches to language learning and teaching and captured in the notion of performance or proficiency.

It is not by coincidence that in other parts of the world this issue arose in terms of learning goals, that is, in terms of communicative competence. In the American context, however, the debate was initially sparked through testing; that is, through the assessment of the outcomes of language teaching. On the basis of evidence from assessment through the ACTFL oral proficiency interview (OPI)-a spreading knowledge base that initially benefitted from substantial federal funding-FL practitioners often received their first introduction to the communicative and learner-focused turn that research had begun to take much earlier through OPI tester training. On that basis, classroom teachers, materials and curriculum developers, teacher educators, and assessment specialists began to ask a host of questions in light of the previously assumed centrality of the linguistic focus of the field, along with its particular emphasis on grammar and accuracy. The enormity of that project, its contentiousness as to what counts as evidence as we make decisions in instructional practice, and its pervasive impact in K-12 education can be seen in many articles in the 1980s and 1990s. Though the origi- nal goals and much of the terminology of the Proficiency Movement are now subsumed by the

489

Standards project, it continues in varied ways to this day (see Garrett, 1986; Scott, 1989; Swain & Lapkin, 1989; Tschirner, 1996; VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993).

Most recently, we can add connectionism to the voices that questioned the early formative influence of linguistics (Ney & Pearson, 1990). Here the whole edifice of the centrality of rules, or at least of the prominence of rule-governedness in language learning, is being put into the context of modern models of information processing. As Ney and Pearson argued, connectionism "would change the notion of competence from rule- based to 'lawful' or change the notion of 'rule' to a generalization of series of connections or associations" (p. 486), insights that now surface in conjunction with a surging interest in the acquisition of vocabulary (see Chun & Plasse, 1996; Hulstijn, Hollander, & Greidanus, 1996; Koda, 1996).

These diverse voices readily exemplify the mul- titude of relationships that continue to be conver- sationally topicalized and enacted even now, between theory and practice, between research and teaching as general goods, between the re- searcher and the teacher as valued members of the profession, between those who initiate change on the basis of the exigencies of the classroom and those who prefer to base it on research evidence that can more easily garner an intellectual primacy, between those who determine the focus of research and those who are relegated to being only its consumers, and between linguistics and psychology as social science disciplines and the more recent influence of an educational linguistics, which attempts to straddle both the social sciences and the humanities. Most important, these voices exemplify both the dramatic advantages of professionalization and institutionalization, the availability of a well-established discourse, and, at the same time, the dangers and limitations that inhere in those very practices.

REFLECTING ON OUR DIALOGUES: PROJECTING FUTURE CONVERSATIONS

As I look back over the Journal, particularly its contributions during the last 50 years, it seems that, beyond the particulars, two major explana- tory constructs, two metastories, occur with some frequency as a way of telling our received history: (a) the notion of a series of diffuse "movements," which seem to have the kind of single-minded following associated with religious movements that can inspire many people into enthusiastic and goal-directed action; and (b) the notion of



490

impressive, powerful theoretical constructs in lin-

guistics and psychology, which often dominated a

particular period to the exclusion of everything else.

Though these constructs imply quite different

ways of understanding how our profession creates and acts upon knowledge-one more affective- holistic and grass-roots, the other more rational-

analytical and top-down-we often resort to both in order to make sense of the bewildering professional scene. In fact, they actually form a curious

symbiotic relationship with each other, full of in-

teresting overlaps. The powerful theoretical edi- fices-and we help maintain them by interpret- ing them in this way-are at the same time

strangely subject to major revolutions or paradigm shifts. In their wake, it seems, very little of what was once held to be true is maintainable and maintained, and totally new hypotheses and principles must be acquired intellectually, perhaps even put into practice. Because these cataclysmic events are occurring at increasingly shorter inter- vals, they necessitate movements or fads as ways of

coping, both with the ensuing period of uncer-

tainty and with the need to realize their tenets in action.

Substantial energies on the ground have to be marshaled and expended in each case to assure that applications occur in the appropriate manner in the classroom. These efforts involve significant commitments of time and financial resources, in terms of personnel and personnel development, material, technological equip- ment, and space. Just as important, they need

well-functioning professional organizations. The

MLJ, as a publication founded and supported by a federation of FL teacher associations, has ac-

tively responded to that need and, particularly in the postwar period, also helped to shape it.

Those metastories and metaphorical frames

notwithstanding, I have also found it necessary, in these pages, to show that our history is consider-

ably more complex than the claims for dichoto- mous movements permit, indeed that perhaps these metastories are themselves part of the construction of a certain kind of professional iden-

tity. In particular, it seems that our theories are both less of a break with the past than they make themselves out to be and command less influence on practice than they often imagine, a matter

quite apart from whether they could or should have that influence (see the various contributions in Dostert, 1960; Herschensohn, 1990; Politzer, 1964; Valdman, 1964).2 And our practice, too, is less akin to a paradigm shift than to a gradual orientation of the sum total of its various move-

The Modern LanguageJournal 84 (2000)

ments in a certain direction. It is not that classroom teachers apply agreed-upon theories, but that they make instructional choices that are more or less "grounded examinations of lan-

guage teaching within the broader framework of teacher-learner, context, and process" (Freeman, 1994, p. 195). That broader framework is often better expressed in terms of metaphors rather than in terms of theories applied and methods used. Indeed, metaphors such as the mind-body metaphor or the production metaphor maintain a hold on our imaginations and give coherence to what we do in a whole range of otherwise

incompatible contexts (Herron, 1982). As already indicated, that messy, unscientific

reality, of course, has had numerous conse-

quences, both in theorizing and in establishing the nature of the relationship between classroom

practice, SLA research, and linguistic theory. As to the first issue, the lack of disciplinary coherence, substance, and status leads to repeated calls in the field to take corrective action and develop a comprehensive theory of L2 learning. For without it, little progress in our collective knowledge and relief from the bandwagons seem possible. This is the modern instantiation of the demand for scientificness where, not surprisingly, dis-

agreements begin with just what the term scientificness can and should mean in an age that has

increasingly come to question the epistemic as-

sumptions inherent in the Enlightenment enter-

prise and its subsequent influence on the dominant construction in Western thinking of the nature of knowledge, particularly scientific

knowledge (see also Shapin, 1994, 1996). More akin to the second issue, the relationship

between theory and practice, Firth and Wagner (1997) saw a profound imbalance in methodolo-

gies, theories, and foci within SLA "between cognitive and mentalistic orientations, and social and contextual orientations to language" (p. 285), a

position that is most frequently associated with

Vygotskian approaches to cognition and lan-

guage, and more broadly with sociocultural the-

ory (Donato & McCormick, 1994; Lantolf, 1994). In response to Firth and Wagner, Long (1997) argued that "SLA, as the name indicates, is the

study of L2 acquisition, not (except indirectly) of 'the nature of language' in general or 'most cen-

trally the language use of second or foreign lan-

guage speakers'" (p. 318). But the implications of even that kind of focus

on learning are far from clear. Reminiscent of critical discourse theory, Crookes (1997) pursued a critical applied linguistics, which points out that the nature of learning in an instructed setting is



Heidi Byrnes

itself affected by the fact that "schools are instruments for the transmission of culture" (p. 73) rather than being built on preexisting and fixed

disciplines and curricula. So in an important way, "the role of schools ... in society's self-reproduc- tion, must be considered when asking how S/FL teaching comes to be 'constructed' as it has been"

(p. 75). As a consequence, neither teaching nor learning a L2 are the culture-independent and unsituated enterprises they were generally taken to be, and the teacher and the curriculum become central considerations in the investigation of language learning, a point made particularly forcefully by Markee (1997). Or, worded differently, the long-standing question of whether the

principles of linguistics can be applied to lan-

guage teaching at all, is being raised again, this time with the benefit of the intervening years of

experience. As early as 1958, Politzer had advo- cated that

language teaching should not look to educational psychology or linguistics for revelations or discoveries on how to teach language, but should learn to utilize these disciplines to make our vast practical experience in the teaching of foreign languages more meaningful, to evolve definite principles of language teaching and consolidate them in a true Science of Language Learning. (p. 68)

In some quarters today the answer is negative not only for the above-stated reasons, but also for the near total absence of social and cultural considerations in the way we have gone about our research and our teaching practice, a charge repeatedly raised in the 1950s and 1960s and reiterated recently by Hall (1997) and Rampton (1997). However, it seems to me that this very concern also has a positive strain. Most basically, I see it in the ready acceptance nowadays of classroom-based research, the expanded methodological possibilities that attend to such research-even as a preference for quantifiable, decontextualized, and positivist evidence is still much in evidence-and the more insistent call for ecologically valid and longitudinal studies.

Taking these matters even further are notions provided by a recent special issue of the MLJ on how language teaching is constructed (MLJ, 81,1). Its various contributions speak most powerfully on one matter, the need to reconceptualize what it is to become and to be a FL teacher. For example, taking a discourse analytical approach, Kinginger (1997) proposed the applicability to the FL field of a model of teacher education that has been advo- cated for some time in other settings: 'The approach to analysis is inspired by the 'reflective

491

practice' model, which characterizes the process by which teachers develop their professional competence, iteratively cycling through informed

practice and reflection upon that practice" (p. 6). The result of such a practice would be that even

novice teachers can begin to achieve an examined approach, which may be revised as necessary via judi- cious use of different kinds of expertise, according to the demands of experience. Educated teachers can reject expert opinion when its relation to their practice is questionable. This rejection limits their vulner- ability, for example, to the pressures of fashion and marketing when making informed decisions about teaching. (p. 13)

Though his focus is on the perennially vexing issue of how to teach grammar, Blyth (1997), too, parted company with the notion that professionalization and professional competence are best attained when teachers follow readily packaged prescriptions, whether those prescriptions come from their own in-service education, their state or

language-specific professional organizations, or, most insidiously, from materials with their particular brand of methodological dominance. He concluded by saying, "a constructivist approach to teacher education is well-suited to instructional reform because it helps teachers decon- struct the traditional conception of grammar and in its place reconstruct a new one, a conception of grammar as a mental process" (p. 63). Finally, referring once more to Crookes (1997), we hear of an urgent need to look to the "political status of language(s) under consideration and continue, inevitably, by considering the necessity of political action" (p. 75).

Leaving aside the particulars of these recommendations, one thing seems clear: The discourse of our practice is our most valuable tool for finding a careful balance between internal and external forces, including those of other forms of inquiry as they have been formalized in other disciplines. It is the way in which we nego- tiate between unifying and dispersing dynamics, between the need to assure high standards of ethical practice to which we can pledge ourselves publicly and high standards of contextualized decision-making that is the prerogative of individual teachers. That discourse has increasingly become as multivoiced as the languages we teach and as multilayered as are the societies within which we practice, powerful unifying, centralizing, and standardizing moves notwithstanding. No longer is it necessary for practitioners to become members of the field by suppressing their misgivings about certain forces that put pressure on them to




resolve discrepancies in favor of external fixed

categories, which are allowed to stand unchal-

lenged and unchanged, or attribute them to personal failures. No longer need they privatize those areas where their actions and beliefs are at odds with prevailing doxa, no matter what disci-

pline provides them. No longer need they be mere consumers of others' research; they are in-

creasingly challenged to influence that research, if not in its actual conduct, at the very least in the

topics it should address and how it should address them.

In short, as the field is responding to enormous

opportunities and challenges, we must be vigilant on the following point: When official stories con-

sistently characterize contingent ways of knowing as deviations, as positions that need to be cor-

rected, then they misrepresent important aspects of our past identities, both of our own individual identities and of the field as a whole. They also

preclude us from elaborating the knowledge of our practice by overstating the value of decontextualized theorizing. In so doing, they affect the entire professional community's power to create the very kind of meaningful knowledge that allows its members to take moral public actions. If the pages of the MLJ are to be taken as valid indicators of developments throughout the 20th

century, we, as a profession, need this knowledge of our practice, and, at the beginning of the new

millennium, perhaps there is hope that we are also capable of taking such moral action, starting with our conversations.

As its own history indicates, the MLJ, as a professional journal,and its readers and authors play important roles in determining the topics that will shape our particular interests in FL teaching and learning and in influencing the particular form that these interests will receive. There seems to be good evidence, in our printed as in our

face-to-face conversations, that we benefit from

keeping lines of communication open, most particularly those that allow unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable voices to state their opinions in

less familiar, less easily recognized forms of discourse and less familiar forms of evidence, some-

thing that the academy often designates with the term interdisciplinarity. Professionalization, in-

cluding the professionalization through our ma-

jor journals, inherently has the potential for

standard-setting, standardization, and privileging only a few, and thereby conveying power to individuals or entire groups. It is in everyone's interest to assure that professionalization can also mean professional multilingualism.

NOTES

1 In preparing this manuscript I relied heavily on an

immensely useful compilation prepared by Suzanne S. Moore and David P. Benseler, a former editor of thejour- nal: A Comprehensive Index to The Modern LanguageJour- nal (1916-1996), now available as a searchable document

through the Web page of Blackwell Publishers. Their elaborate keyword categorization of the 4191 articles (as of the end of 1996) allowed me to focus my reading on those listed under acquisition theory*, adult learner, ap- titude, attitudinal factors, discourse analysis, early lan-

guage learning, error analysis, grammar*, learner differences, linguistics*, phonetics*, psycholinguistics*, psychology [of language teaching and learning] *, sociol-

inguistics, vocabulary*, with particularly close attention to the starred categories. Needless to say, I made choices in my reading and made additional choices regarding the articles to which this paper in fact refers.

2 For an interesting discussion of the continuity with much in Western theorizing about language even in transformational generative grammar see Thomas (1995), who pointed out a much greater relationship between Universal Grammar and L2 acquisition theory and pedagogy than has generally been recognized. Like- wise, Rivers carefully compared and contrasted the notion of rule-governedness in TG grammar with the place of "rules" in American Structuralism (as cited in Dos- tert, 1960).

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