The MLA's Articulation Initiative:
High School to College in Foreign Language Programs

Building Trust: Who Articulates with Whom and How?
Claire Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley

The problem of articulation in language study has four aspects, in my view: sites, levels, knowledge content, modalities. For each aspect, I suggest a possible principle of articulation.

Articulation of Instructional Sites: A Matter of Educational Development

One generally thinks mainly of the articulation of language instruction between high schools and colleges, but in my view it is more of a developmental problem than an institutional one. Each stage has a different focus, although there is, of course, some overlap. Trust will increase between a language teacher at one site and a language teacher at the next if they become more aware of the unique role each fulfills at each stage of the game. Children learn languages playfully, to get a feel for the language, and to experiment with shapes and sounds. Adolescents, who are busy getting socialized and finding their identity, find in a foreign language a way to communicate with others, and to find out new aspects of themselves and others. For young adults, learning a foreign language may relativize, destabilize their world by making them understand their place and that of others in larger social and cultural contexts.

Articulation of Instructional Levels: A Matter of Final Goals

Whether we seek to articulate the beginning level with the intermediate, the lower division with the upper, we need to establish some continuity and coherence to gain the trust of students, who want to see a payoff for their efforts. The only way to do this is to build the curriculum not piece by piece from the bottom up but altogether from the top down. Keep your eyes on the prize, get the faculty to agree on the final goal, and shape each stage according to this final goal. Note: even the national standards will have to be translated into the idiom of each institution!

Articulation of Knowledge Content: A Matter of Discourse

There seems to be a widespread belief among administrators that language study is in need of content, hence the success of initiatives like content-based instruction and foreign languages across the curriculum. As if learning to mean in a foreign language were devoid of meaning! No wonder administrators see FL instruction as remedial and don't trust chairs' requests for funds. The only way to improve the articulation between language classes and content classes is to view both as the study of discourse - language at work in creating the very cultural realities that we teach.

Articulation of Modalities: A Matter of Critical Reflection

Students often don't see any continuity between speaking/listening and reading/writing. Moreover, with the hybrid genre of the Internet "text," the difference between the two modalities is getting blurred. We need to recapture the unique educational benefits that each modality can bring by using every discourse form actualized in the classroom as an opportunity for critical reflection as to its purpose, its audience, its form and genre.

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