Journal•ISSN: 0148-7639
Adfl Bulletin
Modern Language Association
About: Adfl Bulletin is an academic journal published by Modern Language Association. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Language assessment. It has an ISSN identifier of 0148-7639. Over the lifetime, 473 publications have been published receiving 3513 citations. The journal is also known as: Association of Departments of Foreign Languages bulletin.
Topics: Higher education, Language assessment, Language education, Foreign language, Comprehension approach
Papers published on a yearly basis
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the epistemological bases that underlie the two sets of goals tend to conflict and to lead to an articulation gap between beginning-intermediate and advanced course work.
Abstract: LANGUAGE teaching has historically alternated between scholarly and pragmatic approaches. Whereas the former emphasize grammatical analysis and literature study, the latter emphasize communicative skills for personal and professional purposes. We currently find ourselves in a time when both dimensions of language study are valued but at different levels of the curriculum. In the United States, the first two years of college or university study generally aim to develop learners’ functional ability to communicate their everyday needs, thoughts, and feelings in interpersonal contexts. Advanced-level study (i.e., the third and fourth years) generally aims to sharpen learners’ analytic skills, to improve their ability to express their ideas formally, and to enrich their cultural and literary sensibilities. Although these two sets of goals are not in themselves incompatible, the epistemological bases that underlie the two have traditionally tended, in practice, to conflict and to lead to an articulation gap between beginning-intermediate and advanced course work (Barnett; Henning; Hoffmann and James). Those who teach pragmatic skills generally operate from a belief that the most important learning occurs in the actual process of using a language and that formal analysis, while useful, is of secondary value. Those teaching advanced-level courses, however, put great stock in formal analysis (from the level of sentence grammar to the level of whole texts) as a means to learning. The debate about use versus analysis often leads to methodological dissension between those
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