Dr. Leon James
Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii
1980
We characterize our analysis as an "ethnomethodological" enterprise (see Garfinkel, 1968; 1972; Sacks, 1972; Schegloff, 1972; l968; Jakobovits, 1973. In this mode of analysis the units of description are to be defined in terms that are relevant to the participants whose interactional system forms the area or object of analysis. In the present context, we are focusing on the practices of future FL teachers, and therefore, the observational units in our analysis must be of the sort that would be of relevance to FL teachers practicing their art in the year 2,000. At the same time, because the audience of this paper is the current FL teacher, the units of our analysis must meet the additional requirement of being relevant to the future FL teacher's contemporary equivalent.
This double requirement makes the task difficult to accomplish, yet that problem is unavoidable, given the topic of futurism itself.
A convenient entry point to the problem is an examination of current practices as displayed in widespread educational slogans shared in the FL teaching sub-culture. We will then examine what kind of changes in educational slogans are likely to occur, and how these new slogans may affect the future practice of FL teaching.
2. SOME CURRENT EDUCATIONAL SLOGANS IN FL EDUCATION: "THE CURRICULUM'
When teachers talk about "the FL curriculum", they are displaying adherence to an instructional philosophy that is as old as formal education itself. The current reader can recognize this philosophy when we state some of its implicit and integral assumptions To wit: education is to educate; to be educated is to be able to display possession of encyclopedic knowledge as contained in the authoritative literature; the school educates people; the encyclopedic knowledge to be acquired in school is reposited in the curriculum; the curriculum is a body of knowledge divided into categories called academic subjects identified by titled courses; courses are arranged on a teaching-grading scale that allegedly reflects an appropriate learning sequence from simple and easy to complex and difficult; courses are divided up into contact hours known as periods; activities during a period are controlled by a lesson plan, the latter being a chunk within a sequence of lessons, the whole of which forms a unit to be evaluated by means of discrete-point tests of memory and achievement under controlled observation; the obtention of minimum score on tests for these instructional units allows the student to graduate to the next unit, until all the units of "the minimum adequate curriculum" or the "program" have been successfully completed as defined by the testing and promotion procedures in force; the student then graduates into the next level of the educational echelon, receiving after each, certification papers that are valued increasingly as one moves up in the system; most students end their educational career at some point and pour into the general work force of educated citizenry, but a small fraction of them, presumably those who can cope best with the educational enterprise, go on to be certified at the highest level of authority, after which they are entrusted with the task of contributing new knowledge to the existing body of knowledge; eventually, this new knowledge will filter down to the curriculum and be incorporated; in this way, the curriculum keeps up to date with scientific developments and the continued increase in society's recorded encyclopedic knowledge.
We would like to point out three particular features of this philosophy:
(a) it is circular and cyclical; it feeds itself; the production of new knowledge is managed by those most adaptive to the old ("the school achievers" who become civic leaders who control educational policy that rewards those who achieve in school by allowing them to become civic leaders who in turn ... etc.).
(b) it insures standardization of knowledge so as to establish a socio-politically relevant scale of sub-cultures placed on a power and status echelon defined by the educational institution. Members of a particular sub-culture then serve as a population pool from which economic institutions draw their employees.
(c) it creates a separation between "knowledge of everyday living" and "academic knowledge" as formalized by the curriculum. In advanced technological societies, academic or encyclopedic knowledge is valued and respected above that of living 'wisdom'', though it is customary to dispute this relative judgment under the topic of "spiritual growth" or "humanistic philosophy".
What we have said thus far is already well known, though we needed to present a characterization of it so that we could more easily focus on some particular consequences of this educational philosophy. It is our belief that as these consequences become better known and understood, that realization will form the dynamic force that will shape the format of education in the future.
3. SOME CONSEQUENCES OF CURRENT EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
We shall be discussing the consequences of the three features of current educational practice, as described above, namely its selectional function, its standardization function, and its specialization function.
A. Selectional function. The selectional function of the educational establishment operates at all levels and at all times, in analogous fashion to the selectional function of biological evolution, though it is most evident at crisis points (e.g. examinations and yearly graduation which give us figures such as drop-out rates, failure rates, percentile placements). a is much is well understood generally. What is less known, or not generally understood at all, are the dimensions of intellectual control which this kind of selectivity insures, though in the case of biological evolution, our understanding of the functional dimensions of environmental survival by individual species is considerably greater than in the area of social and intellectual evolution.
We believe that the next quarter of a century will see some important ethnomethodological developments that will enable us to observe and understand the functional dimensions of socio-cultural evolution, in a sense parallel to the effects brought about by the invention of the microscope and telescope The development of these new self-analytic techniques of observation will bring about a more complete understanding of the counterproductive nature of the current educational philosophy, of the wasteful selectivity that now feeds the system. A new educational philosophy will then arise and spread as a challenge to the established, its destiny being, ultimately, to replace and alter the current picture.
B. Standardization function .The standardization function of current educational practices will come to be seen as serving an institutional function to the disservice of the individual. Increasingly, parents will refuse to compromise the creative development of their children for the sake of insuring future economic security. A separation will be made between "general education of the person" and "training for a profession" either creating a two-track educational system, or a hierarchical system in which economic institutions will take over the task of training their employees for specific tasks.
C. Specialization function. Stripped from its current despotic functions of economic and academic training, the school curriculum will change its character from its current involvement in task-orientation to an orientation beneficent to the creative growth of the individual person. Performative wisdom in the course of one's daily life, intellectually creative productions of an individually expressive nature, and aesthetic considerations will replace the current criteria of performance on achievement oriented discrete-point topical information tests administered in artificial and controlled environments
4. THE FUTURE OF THE FL CURRICULUM
We believe that FL teachers will have the opportunity of playing a unique and important role in the future evolving conception of the school curriculum. They will be the first to apply innovations in the spirit of the new educational philosophy. We present here a list of our predictions.
(a) The FL course will be the first in the curriculum to de-topicalize itself. The topical structure characteristic of school subjects is visibly nonproductive in the teaching of a second language, so that only tradition or the absence of a seen alternative still stand in the way of a change. We predict that the next decade will see the appearance upon the scene of tests of transactional performances which will gradually replace the current spate of knowledge oriented language achievement tests. This will free the FL teacher to pursue innovative instructional techniques that are responsive to the new criteria of instructional evaluation. The dynamic emphasis of the Ft teaching profession will switch from a focus on method of teaching to a focus on method of evaluation of the goals, i.e. monitoring the evolving complexity of the transactional performances of the learner in the target code. The instructional activities during the contact hour unit will not be controlled by a pre-defined lesson plan, but rather, will be dictated by the on-going requirements and needs of the existing instructional climate during that particular Period. We call this type of futuristic instruction "performative teaching" and will continue to elaborate upon it in the succeeding discussions.
(b) The FL course will be the first in the curriculum to become student-oriented. The FL part of the curriculum has retained, perhaps by its very nature, a relative independence of other parts of the curriculum. Its difficult to argue with success. FL teachers will experiment with novel instructional interpersonal climates in the classroom because these will be precisely the kind that will lead to the more effective acquisition of a new transactional code, that being a desirable criterion emphasized by the new tests which are soon to make their appearance .
These new instructional techniques will lay the groundwork for the development of "performative teaching" which will be adopted subsequently by the rest of the curriculum. Student-oriented teaching is a feature of performative teaching. The goal of the instructional transaction is defined in terms of the student's forward motion (see Rogers, 1969) in his conceptual space, viz. in terms of the individually experienced feeling of an insight about the topic or some personally and individualistically selective feature of it. e learning course is not being chartered by the teacher or the topical structure, but rather by the forward motion steps of the individual student, a course that is unknown and unpredictable, as observation shows.
(c) The FL course will be the first in the curriculum to individualize instruction totally. Already it is the case that FL teachers have played