To establish a more benign climate that is marked by freedom to teach and freedom to learn, the teaching contract itself will have to take on a new basis. Task -, topic -, and curriculum orientation must be replaced in favor of a student-centered orientation. The FL teaching enterprise has played an important innovative role in public education by experimenting with new forms of contractual arrangements made explicity between teacher and each individual student at the beginning of the semester. In these newer methods, known as "individualized FL teaching", the student shares with the teacher the responsibility of decision making in many significant areas of the course activities: content, amount, pacing, test readiness, and evaluation.
We expect this enlightened experimental attitude in FL teaching to continue in the future and stand as a model to be followed by the rest of the curriculum specialties. By the year 2,000 FL teaching will be student-centered, de-topicalized, performance oriented, and largely authentic. The FL teacher will act in the new roles of facilitator, friend, and counselor, and will stand as a model to be emulated by other teachers.
(e) The FL course will be at the base of a humanistic education.
Performative, authentic, student-centered teaching of a FL will involve the student in a self-analytic examination of the transactional register whose effects will be general and will spill over to the general educational context of the student's condition. Learning to transact in the target code through the self-analytic process will change the student's conception of himself, his native transactional code, his transactional
performances in and out of school, and the authenticity basis of his daily living pattern. Thus the FS course will incorporate and yield the combined benefits of current ineffective attempts made in curriculum programs dealing with mental health, drama, psychology, linguistics, social sciences, and anthropology.
(f) The FL course will continue to be a leading force in the innovation and use of new instructional devices. The tape recorder, the language laboratory system, the audio-visual teaching aids, the self-instructional program, the individualized student contract, the performance oriented evaluation tests -- these are some major innovations already pioneered by the FS teaching enterprise. Some additional innovations we expect to see within the next three decades include: (i) the making of 'field experience' a necessary and integral part of training as it has been traditionally done in such service fields as medicine, psychotherapy, and social work, and more recently, in more academic fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics Living abroad for specified periods, attending summer language camps, participating in cultural maintenance activities (see Fishman, 1966), taking regular curriculum courses through-the medium of the second language, and others like these, will be means by which the authentic cultural aspects of the student's life experiences will be incorporated in school work, thus rendering education more "relevant", less specialized. (ii) the enlargement of the teaching base from the school and the teacher to outside social agencies and individuals by the use of such techniques as the employment of para-professionals and non-professionals as contact persons for transactional practice in the target code, not excluding the use of fellow students working in teams. (iii) a greater use of the 'live' mass media of communication and transportation, permitting direct and personal involvement: radio and T.V. broadcasts, newspapers, books, correspondence, overseas telephone lines, weekend exchange visits, direct cultural exchanges at the school level, international FL festivals, and the like.
The FL student will, more often than not, specialize in the acquisition of multilingual transactional performances. It would not be unusual for a student to become proficient in as many as a dozen FL' s. He might take arithmetic in Russian, drama in French, History in Chinese, Geography in Rumanian, the Bible in Hebrew, Literature in Black English, and social studies in Japanese. all of these -while studying conversational Arabic and scientific German. While currently it takes anywhere up to 400 hours of intensive study to become proficient in some of these languages, in the future this time factor will dwindle to a single semester's work.
Thus, while the world's major languages will continue to spread in general use through international bilingualism, at the same time more and more people will come to know third languages and beyond through widespread multi-lingualism.
In this picture, the FL curriculum has a bright and promising future.
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