CHAPTER 8: Standards Through the Perspectives of Postsecondary Students

CHAPTER 8

Standards Through the Perspectivesof Postsecondary Students

THE PRESENT STUDY HAS EXAMINED THE AFFINITY OF TODAY’S POSTSECONDARYstudents with the goals put forth in the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century(National Standards, 2006). As part of a national effort to improve educational outcomesthrough standards-based instruction, the Standards were developed by foreign languageeducators in the late 1990s. Reflecting educators’ informed beliefs about learning andteaching at that time, they were designed to represent and further best teaching practices aswell as to enlarge the scope of foreign language instruction through a greater interdisciplinaryperspective. The Standards thus offer the potential of a common framework for pedagogy andassessment that purports to apply to all levels of instruction, K–16. As North (2009) points out,“a common framework is a social construct, a constructed consensus” (p. 374). Research showsthat this consensus, such as it exists, lies among educators, particularly at the K–12 levels (cf.Bartz & Singer, 1996; Phillips, 1999). In higher education, again, it is the educator’s voice thathas been heard, this time questioning the applicability of the framework (H. Allen, 2009; H.Allen & Maxim, 2011; Byrnes, 2002b, 2012a; Huhn, 2012; Knight, 2000; Magnan, 2008a;Paesani & H. Allen, 2012; Scott et al., 2009; ter Horst & Pearce, 2010; Terry, 2009).The essential missing actors in this national effort at all levels of instruction are the students.

Dornyei and Ushioda (2011) have cautioned that goals set by institutionally sanctionedoutsiders (especially policy and curriculum makers) may not represent actual goals of thelearners, a worry that Bell (2005) extended to foreign language study in showing thatindividual students and their teachers may differ greatly in how they envision the ideal focus ofthe language course. On the one hand, the effect of this lack of exclusion of student voices,Dornyei (2001) warns, could lead to a disconnect between teacher and student goals,which could negatively affect learner motivation (Graham, 2006; Moeller et al., 2012;Tremblay & Gardner, 1995; Worth, 2007). On the other hand, if students find affinity withtheir personal goals and those of the Standards, it could encourage their active engagement inlearning.1

The current study offers insight into whether postsecondary students have goals consistentwith those subsumed in the Standards, and whether they expect to achieve these goals by theendof their university experience. It offers a counterpoint to theprevailing teacher-centric viewthat, because instructors will bring students around to their beliefs (Horwitz, 2007), the beliefsof students at the onset of learning donotmatter. A student perspective is critically important ata time when the profession advocates placing the learner at the center of instruction, looksincreasingly toward learner agency and responsibility in the learning process (Magnan, 2006),and considers learners as co-constructors of the learning environment (Kramsch, 2008).McClure (2003) suggested expanding the role of standards to educating parents and students

about what is expected through instruction. The findings of this study lead us to speculate howstudents might use the Standards to set goals for themselves, to construct environments to fostertheir achievement, and even to enlarge their understanding of what should be learned. Although

it is clearly educators who have broader goals of what education should bring to students, it isnonetheless imperative to consider student thinking when assessing whether the Standardsshould, or could, apply to foreign language learning in higher education.Before discussing the results and speculating on questions they raise about the conception

of the Standards and their possible instructional applications, a caveat is in order. The studentsin this study read the Standards statements without any prior coaching on their meaning. Wedo not know if they had previous exposure to the Standards, which would be unlikely, giventhat the document is intended for educators and used nearly exclusively by them, or if they hadbeen taught in a Standards-based classroom. Clearly, past learning experience andanticipation of future success influence current thinking about the learning process andmotivation for it (MacIntyre, 2007). Once students have succeeded in a particular learningframework—the Standards or another—they will likely look to that framework for futuresuccess. In this scenario, an affinity that students might show with the Standards could playinto a self-perpetuating system of support for that framework even if the framework isfundamentally lacking.Revisiting questions posed in Chapter 1 through the lens of the study’s findings, this

concluding chapter will discuss the following points: (a) consistency of students’ goals andexpectations with the Standards, (b) priorities of goal areas, (c) students’ expectations and thelocus of learning, (d) fit of the Standards with today’s learners, (e) fit of the Standardswith learners of different levels and languages, (f) student thinking that highlights issues withthe Standards, (g) fit of the Standards with postsecondary instruction, and (h) needs forresearch.

CONSISTENCY OF STUDENTS’ GOALS AND EXPECTATIONS WITH THESTANDARDS

We suggested in Chapter 1 that if postsecondary students have goals and expectations forachieving those goals that are consistent with the Standards, there is reason to believe that theStandards could fit with the mission of higher education. The study showed that indeedstudents’ goals and their expectations were largely aligned with the Standards: About 90% ofthe survey respondents responded positively with respect to the importance of the goals of theStandards, as well as with respect to their expectations to achieve those goals; in the interviews,students talked enthusiastically and in detail about how they hoped to be able to do what theStandards described. In addition, both student responses to the survey and their commentsduring the interviews revealed that students saw interrelationships among goal areas andcontent standards, as the Standards document would intend. Moreover, a separate probing ofstudent goals apart from the Standards revealed that, when talking about their goals withoutthe Standards as a point of reference, students included all notions found in the Standardsexcept lifelong learning and the specific mentions of cultural products, practices, andperspectives, although they did express a desire to develop cultural interests. These findingsand observations cast an initial positive light on the suitability of the Standards to the goals andexpectations of university students.

PRIORITIES OF GOAL AREAS

Although the five goal areas of the Standards are clearly meant to be interrelated, they areoften prioritized in practice by language teachers who, as research shows, favor

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Communication and Cultures over three goal areas that they view primarily as application oflanguage skills: Comparisons, Connections, and Communities (ACTFL, 2011a, 2011b).Instructional implementation of the Standards has thus deviated dramatically from theStandards’ underlying construct. Although we might expect less favoring of certain standardsat the postsecondary level than in K–12, the assumption that the Standards find their greatestpostsecondary application in the first two years of language instruction (Barnes–Karol, 2000;Knight, 2000; Schulz, 2006) encourages this same concern for higher education. We need toconsider then how learners at these lower levels prioritize the goal areas.The study revealed a hierarchy for learner goals and expectations that contrasts, in

important ways, with the hierarchy that typically underlies the instructional decisions ofeducators. As suggested in Chapter 1, finding different priorities between educators andstudents provides a new lens for assessing the suitability of the Standards, as they have beenimplemented, for learner goals and for shaping instruction toward them.

Communication and Communities

Learners in this study placed the most value on the Communities and Communication goalareas. This finding is in contrast with the tendency of educators to prioritize Communicationand Cultures and to relegate Communities to a nearly lost or untaught status, in part becausethey believe that it requires them to take students into the local community or abroad, and thatlifelong learning is beyond their control (ACTFL, 2011a, 2011b;H. Allen&Dupuy, 2012; Bartz& Singer, 1996; Cutshall, 2012f; J. Phillips, 1998; Schultz, 2009; Troyan, 2012).2 In the survey,Communities and Communication ranked at the top of students’ goal and expectationpriorities, with Cultures, Comparisons, and Connections ranked below them. Studentsgenerally placed the highest priority, both in terms of their goals and expectations, onStandards 1.1, 1.2, 5.1, and 5.2—the standards within the goal areas of Communities andCommunication, with the exception of 1.3 (presentational mode). Interviews showed thatwhat united the interpersonal and interpretive modes of the Communication standards (1.1,1.2) and the two Communities standards (5.1, 5.2) was students’ strong desire to use the targetlanguage in social interaction as well as the pleasure they received, and anticipated receiving,from that use. In talking about these standards, students expressed a desire to interact withdifferent groups of people and to develop social relationships. For the Communities standardsin particular, students evoked an ideal self (Dornyei, 2009) who would interact with targetlanguage speakers easily in a variety of situations.For these students, the goals of both Communication and Communities were often

anchored in a future that they expected to reach, although their expectations for theCommunication and Communities standards, as for all goal areas, were lower than the valuethey placed on their goals. Partly because of the high value they placed on these goal areas, thelargest difference between student goals and expectations was found in these same top-rankedfour standards.Particularly interesting here, from the perspective of comparing student and teacher

priorities, is that although teachers may find Communities important, they feel unable toaddress these standards in class and thus spend much less time on them than onCommunication. If educators persist in thinking of the five goal areas in terms of hierarchiesand ofmaking policy decisions based on that thinking (such as selection of power standards orof which standards to describe in the Performance Descriptors, ACTFL, 2012a), their choiceswill likely be out of sync with the priorities of at least lower level postsecondary students. Asthe motivation literature (cf. Dornyei & Ushioda, 2011) and research in language learning

224 Standards Through the Perspective of Postsecondary Students

(A. Brown, 2009b) demonstrate, a lack of fit between the goals or expectations of educatorsand learners could result in learner frustration or even disillusionment in instructed learning.In contrast, students can be empowered and motivated when they connect language learningwith their personal goals and interests, and when they believe that instruction will help themmeet their learning expectations.One possible response to the discrepancy between the value that teachers and students place

on these goal areas is to reprioritize them in instruction based on learner input, that is, toaccord Communities a priority status alongside Communication (Magnan et al., 2012).Another response, more true to the Standards’ intention, is to place less emphasis onindividual goal areas and more on the interrelationship among them, such as how goal areascome together in language use and the pleasure they bring to the user, consistent with thedriving forces behind student values in the present study. This latter response of focusing onthe mutual dependence of goal areas would be consistent with student thinking becausestudents perceive the first two Communication standards (1.1, 1.2) and both Communitiesstandards (5.1, 5.2) as interrelated.

Cultures

Still highly valued by students in the study, but to a noticeably lesser degree, was the Culturesgoal area. Not a single student in the study saw Cultures as the “Main point of languagelearning,” in contrast to frequent mentions of this subtheme for both Communication andCommunities. The interviews revealed that Cultures was considered by many studentsprimarily as a knowledge rather than usage domain, although most students recognized therelationship between cultural knowledge and situationally appropriate language use andbehavior. Some students did not find the Cultures standards teachable in language class(similar to Chavez, 2002); others believed they weremost suited to advanced-level learning (cf.Chavez, 2005), looking more to classes in other disciplines or to life experience for gainingcultural understanding. Other students disagreed, however, finding that their instructors,especially those from the target cultures, transmitted cultural behaviors through stories theytold in class. Although in the hierarchies of student goals and expectations Cultures rankedbelow Communities and Communication, high correlations between student goals andbetween student expectations were found within these three goal areas (excluding 1.3 inCommunication). An instructional decision to focus on the interrelationship of these goalareas would therefore be consistent with student thinking and would emphasize the intimaterelationship among culture, language, thought, and social interaction that is consideredfundamental by the profession (MLA, 2007), a connectedness thatmany students talked aboutin their interviews.

Comparisons and Connections

Students attributed the least value to the goal areas of Comparisons and Connections, andconcomitantly expressed more modest expectations of achieving the goals in these areas. Ofall the goal areas, this finding is most similar to the perspective of teachers as shown in theACTFL Decades Project survey (ACTFL, 2011a, 2011b). If we assume that students share thepriorities of teachers and relate their expectations for achievement to what they think they willlearn in class, it would be easily understandable that, in comparison to other goal areas,smaller (yet still statistically significant differences) were found between student goals andexpectations for both Comparisons standards (4.1, 4.2) and also Connections standard 3.1. Inother words, students saw less difference, in comparison with other goal areas, between how

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much they wanted to attain the Comparisons and Connections standards and how much theythought they would attain them, but their goals still exceeded their expectations.Explaining their relatively low expectations for attaining the goals of the Connections

standards, students expressed a belief that the language they were studying was not thelanguage of the disciplines they worked in, that English would suffice, or that their proficiencylevel in the target language was too low for connections in other disciplines to be possible.Focusing on images of their current self, students with this perspective did not envision arealistic use for the Connections standards. Explaining further that they looked toextracurricular activity more than to class for progress in the Connections goal area, a thirdof the students did not closely associate language instruction with Connections. The samemight be said for the Comparisons goal area, but, in this case, most students saw it more as alearning strategy, an inevitable tendency to compare the new language and culture with one’sown, than as a goal they sought to reach. Students sometimes found it helpful when teachersapplied the strategy of making comparisons in class, but believed that they would use thisstrategy on their own anyway.Arens (2009, 2010a) attributed a greater cognitive load to the Comparisons and

Connections goal areas than to Communication and Cultures, because, as she explained,the former two require learners to situate themselves in both cultures, while the latter twotypically play out within the frame of one culture.3 It could be that these lower level learnersare sensitive to a cognitive load that they feel is presently beyond their reach.Wemight wonderif different findings would obtain from upper level learners or from learners in programsdesigned tomake connections such as Language for Specific Purpose (LSP) or Content-BasedInstruction (CBI).

Interrelationship Among the Goal Areas

Aswe consider where student goals (according to this study) and educator goals (as reportedin the profession) are most alike and different, we need to ask whether the profession haswatered down the Standards through its hierarchical thinking, which takes focus away fromthe interrelationship among the five goal areas. In the current study, the overall picture fromthe correlations of the 11 content standards is not of hierarchies.4 Rather, the correlations, aswell as student comments, demonstrate an interrelatedness among content standards fromthe perspective of students’ goals and expectations. Sometimes, as expected, interrelatednessexists for content standards within the same goal area; at other times, more interestingly, itcrosses goal areas (such as standards associated with language use—1.1, 1.2, 5.1, 5.2—andstandards addressing culture in some way—2.1, 2.2, 3.2, 4.2—, thereby suggesting aninterrelationship among the goal areas themselves. Evidence from the interviews supports thefinding of these correlations in how some students associated a particular standard directlywith another one, or talked about another standard than the one they were asked about(tendencies that were found particularly for standards 1.1 and 1.2).It is thus clear, fromboth the quantitative results and the interview data, that students see the

standards as interrelated, although the relative value they place on individual standards can bedescribed in terms of priorities that would seem hierarchical in nature. Dornyei (2005)claimed that “hardly any research has been done to examine how people deal with multipleactions and goals, how they prioritize between them, and how the hierarchies of superordinateand subordinate goals are structured” (p. 87). These findings might contribute to thatexamination, but, when talking about the Standards, the ultimate finding of interrelatednessshould not be forgotten.


STUDENT EXPECTATIONS AND LOCUS OF LEARNING

As they did for goals, students’ expectations aligned with the Standards: Approximately 90%of the students in the survey responded that they expected to reach the Standards by the end oftheir formal study. The level of their expectations was lower, however, in comparison to theimportance they placed on the goals: Regardless of the value that students attributed to a goalarea, their expectations to meet it were lower than their desire for that goal. As previouslydiscussed, this finding could be expected, especially for lower level learners, who might berealistic about their ability to reach high levels of performance when starting language study incollege. It might, however, be equally troubling in that low expectations can lead students tobecome discouraged and less motivated (Busse & Walter, 2013; Mantle–Bromley, 1995) oreven discontinue language study (Arnold, 2008; Cooper, 1985; Fernandez, 2008). However, inthis study, the students interviewed—who were volunteers and thus might be expected to beamong the more motivated students—spoke optimistically about their expected learningsuccess. Overall, it is encouraging that students’ expectations for achievement align with theStandards, even if to a lesser degree than their goals. This finding too speaks positively to the fitof the Standards with postsecondary education.What is particularly interesting is the locus of learning for how students expect to meet their

goals. First, the students voluntarily talked about their language courses as a way to meet theStandards’ goals, which although expected—andhoped for—is worthy of note. A sizeable 86%of students talked about different aspects of instruction (including in-class activities,instructors, classmates, and course content, structure, and materials). Perhaps moresurprising, nearly an equal percentage of students (81%) talked about extracurricularactivities that they would seek out, or that instructors identified for them, as highly importantto their learning. We can thus conclude that, for the students in this study, the locus oflearning was nearly equally in instruction and in life experience, an observation that supportsthe high value these students placed on lifelong learning in standard 5.2.We also observed that these learners saw considerable personal agency in their learning. A

substantial 70% of them talked about personal attributes such as their own motivation, priorlearning experience, and background as driving their language learning. They envisionedusing this agency to pursue extracurricular activities they found interesting and necessary tomeeting their learning goals. Given the high value learners placed on language use and socialinteraction, it is not surprising that most of these activities had a largely social dimension:language tables, language partners, life in international dormitories, interactions with friendsand family, community involvement, internships, travel, and study abroad, and veryoccasionally, online social networking. Students mentioned other more solitary activities aswell, especially online and book reading for obtaining information and listening to the news.Although students clearly valued their coursework, it was clear that they also expected theirlanguage learning to be advanced by their use of the target language outside of class.The message to the profession is clear and consistent with students’ interest in the

Communities standards: Students situate their learning both within and beyond theclassroom, as specified inCommunities standard 5.2. They do not expect instruction to suffice.During the interviews, 92% of students offered a timeline for meeting the Standards.

Twenty-six percent (adjusted) said they expected tomeet the Communication standards, 12%to meet the Communities standards, 11% the Cultures standards, 8% the Comparisonsstandards, and 8% the Connections standards by graduation. The larger percentages might betaken as suggesting that these learners envision a learning experience that reaches beyond the

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classroom and their college education. Indeed, for the highly valued Communities standards,another 12% of students expected their undergraduate years to give them the skills towardmeeting the standards, although they believed it would take time beyond their formaleducation to achieve them. Not only is the locus of learning extended beyond the classroom,the time of learning is also extended beyond instruction. This finding is consistent withKramsch’s (2008) recognition that learning develops in nonlinear, discontinuous ways that gobeyond what can be reflected in a linear syllabus. It is also consistent with a 21st-century visionof higher education in which education is seen as life-preparing and life-shaping, more aspaving an entry to life experience than as providing students with a fixed body of knowledge tosustain a life’s work.

FIT WITH TODAY’S LEARNERS

When we suggest that the Standards fit a modern vision of higher education, we mustremember that they were developed over 15 years ago, beginning in the early 1990s. In thattime, learners may have come to have goals that educators had not predicted, the populationof postsecondary learners may have changed, and certainly the world of the learner has beenreshaped. Through students’ comments in the interviews, this study can offer some insight onthese critical possibilities and what repercussions these changes might have for theprofession’s consideration and use of the Standards.

Goals Not Represented in the Standards

To consider students’ goals that are not represented in the Standards, we draw on thepersonal goals that students identified in the open response question asked at the beginningof the interviews, before students had seen any of the Standards statements. As discussed inChapter 7, many of the goals students identified were highly reminiscent of goals in theStandards, especially in the interpersonal and interpretive modes of Communication. In twoareas, however, they were different: references to the fluency students wished to obtain andinstrumental reasons for language study.

Fluency. Approximately one-third of the students (34%) stated their goals in terms of thefluency they wanted to achieve. Students’ perceptions of fluency in this study contrast sharplywith definitions found in the professional literature. Early definitions of fluency mirrored layusage of the term to describe a global, high level of oral ability (Housen & Kuiken, 2009), witha focus on qualities of natural language (Brumfit, 1984), and those “features which give speechthe qualities of being natural and normal, including nativelike use of pausing, rhythm,intonation, stress, rate of speech, and use of interjections and interruptions” (Richards, Platt,&Weber, 1985, p. 108). More recent scholarship (see Kormos &Denes, 2004, for a review) hasrefined the focus in arguing that:

Speech fluency is a multi-componential construct in which different sub-dimensions can bedistinguished, such as speed fluency (rate and density of delivery), breakdown fluency(number, length, and distribution of pauses in speech), and repair fluency (number of falsestarts and repetitions). (Housen & Kuiken, 2009, p. 3)

It has also attempted to measure components of fluency that correlate with specific aspects oforal performance, including automaticity (Levelt, 1989; Schmidt, 1992) and speechmanagement strategies (Brad & Gotz, 2011), with a standard set by native speaker judgments


(Lennon, 1990). Thus, we see in the professional definition of fluency a strong focus on orallanguage use and its performance features, compared against a native speaker norm.In contrast to the primacy given to oral performance in the profession, the students

associated fluency withmany different aspects of language use, in allmodes of communicationand all skill areas, and including (for a very small number of students) cultural understandingand knowledge of the linguistic system. Also striking is the emphasis by nearly half the students(42% of those mentioning fluency) on effective use of the language for communication andon using the language to accomplish specific tasks (e.g., read a newspaper) or achieve certaingoals (e.g., career goals, study or work abroad). Many students talked about fluency in terms ofsocial interaction, especially to communicate with native speakers (25%). A small number ofstudents (9%) talked about ease and naturalness of speech. A similar number (7%) wereconcerned about how native speakers would perceive their use of the language; even fewerstudents (3%) talked about fluency by comparing their desired language abilities with those ofa native speaker. In short, the students in this study considered fluency primarily in terms ofthe language they felt they needed to meet their personal goals. In some ways, this visionresembled traits of fluency seen in the professional literature and in other ways it was broaderand more use-oriented than those definitions.For students, then, the notion of fluency was especially associated with how well someone

uses a language, a proficiency measure that is gauged by the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelinesand Performance Descriptors for Language Learners but is totally absent from the Standards.In contrast, the Standards describe “what students should know and be able to do” (NationalStandards, 2006, p. 15).5 This separation of the what and the how wellmay make the Standardsless pertinent to students’ goals than students themselves would like.What is more, we might question whether the distinction is necessary or helpful in a

document such as the Standards that aims to stimulate curriculum and provide a frameworkfor assessment. For example, the Common European Framework of Reference weavestogether goal domains and competence levels, in that the goal statements specify both what isto be done and at what level of ability. Even the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, whose purposeis to describe competence, do so in conjunction with what functions learners can perform indifferent contexts, similar to students’ remarks regarding their desire for the ability to use thelanguage to achieve their personal goals. If the Standards are to represent the mindset oflearners, this study suggests that notions of fluency, broadly understood, are central tostudents’ primary goal of language use, and that students see steps toward fluency as markersof what they can do with language.In fact, notions of fluency also came up when students were talking directly about the

Standards statements, especially the interpersonal and interpretive modes of the Communi-cation standards, even though the Standards do not reference proficiency directly. Most oftenstudents wanted to be “fluent” or “bilingual,” which they qualified as being able to haveconversations with many people on a variety of topics; some students had a lesser goal ofknowing enough language to “get by,” especially when traveling. Several students, especially ofLCTLs, expressed the need to understand and be able to use language registers and dialectsappropriately, in order to be polite and interact effectively. The recognition of this need showsa beginning understanding of conversational power: “Conversational power comes less fromknowing which communication strategy to pull off at which point in the interaction than itdoes from choosing which language to speak with whom, about what and for what effect”(Kramsch, 2008, p. 390).6 In these ways students read fluency into the Standards descriptions,through their association with their future selves and language use.

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To bring fluency into the Standards, educators would need to work through the thorny issueof norms for language learning, which is instrumental to how fluency is defined. How shouldfluency goals be defined: by a prescriptive norm of a standardized, prestige variety of languageassociated with monolinguals? By the multicompetence of bilinguals (Cook, 1992; Ortega,2013, 2014)? Or perhaps by the language of tourism and its fleeting, light-hearted encounters(Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010)? Because the slippery concept of fluency is popularly seen as anindicator of language ability, its inclusion in a document like the Standards would mesh withcurrent national dialogue about language use and expectations for the outcome of languagestudy. In fact, a level of fluency is implied in what we frequently call advanced language proficiency(Byrnes, 2012b). Its absence in the Standards may be one reason that the document hasbecome attached more to K–12 and lower level college instruction than to the upper levels ofthe undergraduate major and beyond. In this study of first- and second-year postsecondarylearners, students considered fluency a desired element, which refutes suggestions that thenotion is only pertinent to the upper level learners.

Instrumental Reasons for Language Study. Also voiced by students in the open responsequestion but not included in the Standards are several reasons for language study with aninstrumental orientation: to advance a career, to fulfill requirements, to validate previouslearning and not lose time already spent studying the language. In a document intended toadvance the profession’s view of what language learning entails, bringing it to a greaterinterdisciplinary perspective, these instrumentally oriented reasons would seem to have littleplace. However, they appear to be important to students, and have, at least in the case of careeradvancement, been used by educators to promote language study. The issue is a distinctionbetween goals for language learning and reasons for language study, which has beenmuddledin the professional literature, and, according to these comments, in the minds of thesestudents. Although it would not be wise to confuse the issue further by putting reasons forlanguage study into the Standards’ goals statements, it could be valuable to clarify thesenotions for the students who would rely on the Standards for directing and monitoring theirlearning, and for the teachers whomight use the Standards as promotional tools in a variety ofvenues.

Representation of Multilingual, Multicultural Learners

The Standards document claims that the Standards are for “all” students (NationalStandards, 2006, p. 31). There are, however, several charges in the professional literature(Jernigan & Moore, 1997; Kramsch, 2009; Kubota, 2004; Leeman, 2011) that argue that theStandards reflect a monolingual and monocultural bias, and thus contend that the Standardsare noninclusive of today’s growing population of multilingual and multicultural learners.This criticism is focused on the Comparisons standards, which set a goal of learners’ makingcomparisons “of the language studied and their own” (4.1) and “of the cultures studied and their

own” (4.2) (italics added). The singularity of both their own and the language studied implies thatstudents have only one language and one culture, their native language (taken generally asEnglish), which is to be compared to the single additional “foreign” language they arelearning.7 In reality there is an increasing proportion of Americans with competence inlanguages other than English, most of whom learned the language at home as part of theirethnic heritage (Rivers & Robinson, 2012). Anecdotal evidence also suggests that, in schools,more students are studying more than one foreign language at some point during theireducation. The discrepancy is widening between the vision of the Standards and the reality of


today’s multicultural learners and their multilingual language use. In fact, Kramsch (2009)goes so far to advise that the monolingual learner today is a myth.In the interviews conducted for the current study, a noticeable number of students (28% for

4.1; 13% for standard 4.2)8 queried or even objected to the wording their own, often explainingthat they had more than one language and culture from their life at home, their ancestors, ortheir experience studying other languages, and that, when making comparisons, theyjuxtaposed several languages and cultures.9 In other comments, about 10% of the studentsexplicitly recognized the heterogeneity of culture, saying that no unified nature of cultureexists. Indeed, students talked about multiple layers of culture (national, regional, ethnic orreligious, social and highly personal), which they saw as influenced by history and personalcircumstance and as being so context dependent that they weremutable and fluid (cf. Arnold,2008; Nikitina & Furuoka, 2007). In this sense, all students would have more than one cultureavailable for comparison with an equally diverse number of cultures in language(s) they werelearning. Clearly, this understanding of the heterogeneous nature of culture contributed totheir pause when being asked about comparing the language/culture they were studying and their

own.In today’s world of multicompetence (Cook, 1992), it is indeed difficult to define what is

foreign, a label we can no longer relegate to languages other than English or to cultures otherthan an essentialized and idealized notion of what is American. The complexity ofmultilingualism and multiculturalism brings forth notions of ownership of norm (Ortega,2014) with its challenge to what is native competence and what is, in contrast, deficientperformance (Cenoz & Gorter, 2011; Cook, 2008; Kramsch, 2008; Ortega, 2014). It denies thenormalness of codeswitching, or as Canagarajah (2012) prefers, “codemeshing” (p. 404), andother natural language phenomena that the monolingual bias in education and testing(McNamara, 2011; Shohamy, 2011) has typically seen as nonnormative but that learners wouldneed to understand, even manipulate, in order to reach their goals of language use in variedinteractions. The Standards document makes no mention, or allowance, for codeswitching inlanguage learning, although it does provide a role for English in conducting some learningtasks to foster critical thinking skills (National Standards, 1999).Given the interest of students in the present study on language usage in social situations,

their goals of becoming “fluent” or “bilingual” might be best seen through the bilingual turnsuggested by Ortega (2014), which embraces natural language use, rather than through aprescriptively normative lens. Especially in instructional materials, recognition ofmultilingualandmulticultural speakers brings up notions of representation. Azimova and Johnston (2012)and Hickman and Porfilio (2012) demonstrated how ethnic or other minority groups can bemade invisible in textbooks that portray the target culture as homogeneous, a situation that,according to hooks (1992), leads to erasure or invisibility of individuals. Might not theunfortunate singularity of wording in the Comparisons standards encourage the erasure of themultilingual or multicultural identities of many learners today and serve to devalue themultiples lens through which they view languages and cultures?This criticism is not new. Jernigan and Moore made their observation in 1997. That same

year, Davis examined the political discourse surrounding the Standards to charge theprofession with not taking into account the social subjectivity aligned with the multipleidentities of the Standards’ audience. That audience has now expanded to include an ever-increasing number of multilingual and multicultural learners. The persistent monolingualand monocultural bias in the Comparisons standards might thus be seen as reflecting theessential conservatism of American education with an avoidance of uneasy issues of

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immigration and nationalism. It is reinforced by communicative language teaching, which isframed around authenticity of the native speaker with an archetypal monolingual upbringing(Kramsch, 2012; Ortega, 2014), and, in the limited representation of cultural diversity in itstextbooks (Azimova & Johnston, 2012), it may essentialize and polarize cultures of self andOthers (Barnes–Karol & Broner, 2010). The students in the current study did not carry theirobjections to these conclusions, but they were confused by the Comparisons standardsbecause they did not know how to respond to statements that they saw as not pertaining tothem, their lives, and how they learned and used language.

Learners in a Globalized World

The planned fourth edition of the Standards (J. Phillips, personal communication, May 15,2012) and the 2012 Performance Descriptors (ACTFL, 2012a) recognize the globalized natureof the learning environment in their update on technology and by broadening the locus oflearning from the classroom and abroad to learning online. Given how the Comparisonsstandards fail to account for multilingual and multicultural learners, we should considerfurther whether this recognition goes far enough to situate the Standards documentappropriately in today’s globalized world. In addition, wemight ask how students see languagelearning in relation to globalization. The present study offers some insight and encouragesspeculation about how learners recognize the need for cultural awareness and about howtechnology interfaces with language learning and use.

Need for Cultural Awareness. In their interviews, students brought up the need to be globallyaware when they were explaining their goals for different content standards, especiallycultural Comparisons 4.2. They were concerned about being well perceived by others andbehaving appropriately, both of which they felt were needed so they would be goodambassadors for the United States when they were abroad. Some students expanded on thisnotion to talk about helping target language communities by offering their personal expertise,perhaps through internship or work opportunities. For their personal benefit, most studentsassociated having appropriate cultural knowledge with an ability to have effective and positivesocial interactions, which, as shown by their goals for the Communities and Communicationstandards, were high priorities for them. These observations from students might be taken asthe beginnings of recognizing the cultural and linguistic knowledge and sensitivity that isneeded to interact effectively.A few of the heritage speakers in the study recognized how the globalized economy has made

their language and cultural knowledge amarketable commodity (cf. Heller, 2003), but all of themexpressed thedesire to learn their family languagemore tomaintain a connectionwitholder familymembers and for reasons of personal identity than forfinancial gain. In that these comments relatebroadly to civic engagement and social action of learners, which Abbott and Lear (2010) andWeldon and Trautman (2003) stressed are necessary as learners become active participants in acommunity, they could be taken as consistent with Phipps and Levine’s (2010) suggestion toexpand the Standards to include notions of compassion and conflict. Indeed, several studentsstudying Arabic saw their ideal selves as able to negotiate intercultural differences.When talking about how they would meet these goals, students looked mostly to eventual life

experience, especially abroad, and to stories told to them by their teachers. Their emphasis onlearning from teachers’ stories conflicts with Glisan’s (1999) belief that, as a result of the Culturesstandards, the profession has moved cultural instruction beyond anecdotes to a more systematicapproach. Students also acknowledged cultural knowledge they gained from other courses,


especially in anthropology, which could encourage the greater anthropological stance on culturethat Phillips (1999) found associated with the Standards, but that Wellmon (2008) said waslacking. It is curious, and perhaps disappointing to educators, that no student specificallymentioned a desire for service learning or LSP courses (as suggested by Lafford, 2012, and Lear,2012) during their first two years of instruction or subsequently. However, several second-yearstudents talkedabouthow their current language classes included service-orientedor collaborativeprojects, which put them into target language communities either face-to-face or online.

Technology and Language Learning and Use. It was abundantly clear in the interviews thatstudents considered technology in their plans for language learning and use. Theymentioned, with their personal action plans and in regard to their courses, the Internet,YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Livemocha, gaming, and chat. What is interesting is that theymentioned these technologies as tools for learning or for gathering information more oftenthan for interaction with target language communities. For personal interaction, studentsdescribed face-to-face encounters; they envisioned their future selves in similar circumstancesto those they experience now, just in more diverse locations and with more speakers. Thisstrong preference for conventional forms of social engagement runs counter to growingtendencies which, according to Thorne (2009), reflect a decline in the face-to-face interactionand a rise in use of social media where collective engagement comes through networkedcommunication and information technologies.Technology, especially the Internet, was most often cited by students as a reading and

listening tool, for news and cultural stories, and as an information source, particularly ofcultural knowledge. What is curious is that students expressed mostly the need for morevocabulary and grammar to use these sources to their advantage, such as the need to writemoreaccurately in order to send emails overseas. They did not talk about features of multimodalliteracy or seem to be aware that the ability to use digital sources is not a static, acultural skill(Cenoz & Gorter, 2011). In short, while they recognized themultiple layers of literacy involvedin human interaction, they failed to talk about it for multimedia technology. Their remarksechoed the view of Castells (2009) who believes that today’s “protocols of communication arenot based on the sharing of culture but on the culture of sharing [information]” (p. 126).The students in this study also placed the locus of technology use primarily outside the

language classroom, and only sometimes associated with it. For the students in this study, usingtechnology was mostly a way of learning language on their own, while they were in school, andcontinuing throughout their lives. This extracurricular locus of use would deny educators thepossibility of helping students develop multimodal literacy toward transcultural competence.Following the query of Phipps and Levine (2010), it questions what the Standards lose by notincluding the context of learning more specifically or explicitly.From the students in this study then, we see an interest in global awareness and digital

communication, but that interest is underdeveloped and underused from the point of view ofwhat educators see as necessary for the translingual and transcultural competence describedin the 2007 MLA report. Kramsch (2011) offers a 21st century view:

Seen from California in 2010, culture today is associated with ideologies, attitudes, andbeliefs, crafted and manipulated through the discourse of the media, the Internet, themarketing industry, Hollywood and other mind-shaping interest groups. It is seen less as aworld of institutions and historical traditions, or even as identifiable communities ofpractice, than as a mental toolkit of subjective metaphors, affectivities, historical memories,

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entextualizations and transcontextualizations of experiences, with which we make meaningof the world around us and share that meaning with others. (. . .) Our culture is nowsubjectivity and historicity, and is constructed and upheld by the stories we tell and thevarious discourses that give meaning to our lives. (p. 355)

As the students talked about expectations for language and culture learning in this study, theymentioned the belief that their language education would give them the tools to continuelearning about and through other cultures. They looked heavily to the stories told by theirteachers, especially those from target cultures, as ways to learn about cultural attitudes andbeliefs, practices, and perspectives, almost as if these stories provided them a historicalmemory or vicarious personal experience. Some looked to literature to fill this same function.For information, they looked to the Internet. What they did not do is describe what they werelearning, or knew, about culture from the multiple, critical perspectives described in thequotation fromKramsch. If we are to speculate that the Standards could help learners developa more sophisticated notion of what it means to have translingual and transculturalcompetence, we need to query what ismissing in these students’ comments. Either the notionsare absent from the Standards or students need more guidance than their own reading of theStandards statements to see them.

FIT WITH LEARNERS OF DIFFERENT LEVELS AND LANGUAGES

A question related to how the Standards fit with today’s learners is: Do the Standards assumean overly homogeneous student population? Writers of the Standards echoed nationalrhetoric that Standards “meet the needs of all students” (Jackson, 1996, p. 121; cf. NationalStandards, 2006, p. 7). Standardization theoretically requires that students have a similar set ofbeliefs and goals (Foster, 1999), but it is easily questioned whether all foreign languagestudents share the same goals and expectations for meeting them (Paesani & H. Allen, 2012).Data from this study provide insight into two substantiations of this question: Are theStandards equally applicable to students of different levels? To students of differentlanguages? This study has examined these two groups of postsecondary students (first vs.second year and CTLs vs. LCTLs) for a first look at potential group differences.These two groups are important starting points for considering how the Standards might

fit—or not—the goals and expectations of different groups of learners. In the case of level ofinstruction, motivation literature has shown that desire and investment in language learningfluctuates over time, especially as learners face increasing curricular demands (Dornyei &Ushioda, 2011; Ushioda &Dornyei, 2012). This dynamic nature of motivation brings forth thelikelihood of different responses to the Standards from students at different points in theinstructional sequence. Research on language learners’ beliefs, reasons for language study,and strength of motivation likewise shows differences according to instructional level(Horwitz, 1987; Kern, 1995; Murphy et al., 2009; Rifkin, 2000; Rubin, 1987). In the case oflanguage groups, A. Brown (2009c) and Murphy et al. (2009) identified differences betweenstudents of CTLs and LCTLs in their demographics and reasons for language study. What ismore, the Standards were initially brought into the profession by educators of the CTLsalthough they were subsequently endorsed by LCTL professional organizations. In thissection, we review the findings for students in first- and second-year language courses and forstudents of CTLs versus LCTLs to consider homogeneity behind the main question: Do theStandards address the goals and learning expectations of postsecondary learners?


First- and Second-Year Learners

The survey revealed that student goals and expectations are generally consistent for studentsat these two instructional levels: Students at both levels demonstrated that they could find theirpersonal goals in the Standards and that overall they expected to meet them. Interviewcomments reinforced this finding and also the finding that for both levels, the value studentsput on the goals exceeded their expectations formeeting those goals. In addition, the two goalareas students valued the most—Communities and Communication—showed the moststability across instructional levels in terms of students’ agreement with the Standards’ goalsand their expectations of meeting them. This finding is positive for the profession as a first,and, of course, quite partial, response to concerns that the Standards would not fit aheterogeneous population. Of course, to consider undergraduate education, even by level ofinstruction, research would be needed for the critical advanced level, especially consideringthe bifurcation of the college language programs into the first two years and the upperdivision programs (MLA, 2007), as well as for differences in student profiles.This general finding of fit for the first two years of instruction must be qualified, however,

with differences that were found between students in the two years. First-year studentsreported significantly higher goals than second-year students in the Cultures andComparisons goal area, and in Connections 3.1 (other disciplines), which is curious giventhe students had barely begun their language studies.10 First-year students were more driventhan second-year students to respond to an image of the ought-to self and by avoidance of afeared self. They were more positive about meeting their goals by graduation or at least ofhaving the skills needed to do so. These observations, taken together, could reflect theoptimism of beginning learners that, according to the data from second-year students in thisstudy, becomes tempered as instruction advances.Second-year students placed (statistically) significantly more value on Communication goal

1.3 (presentational mode) and Communities 5.2 (enjoyment and lifelong learning). In theinterviews, second-year students revealed more growth of a language learning persona, takinggreater ownership over their language learning and sayingmore often that they did not expectcoursework alone to get them to their goals. However, for Cultures, Connections, andComparisons, despite lower value on these goals, second-year students, more than first-yearstudents, looked to coursework to meet them. The expectation that coursework would helpthem toward these goals might reflect their curriculum, the expectations of their teachers, ortheir greater language ability, whichmade them feel that they would nowmakemore progresstoward these goals in their courses. Second-year students offered more action plans to guidetheir learning, especially for the Communities and Communication standards, for which theyoften saw meeting the goals as a co-constructed effort with their teacher, target languagecommunities, themselves, and their resources.However, expectations were (statistically) significantly lower for second-year students for all

11 content standards and second-year students seemed more realistic about the timeline formeeting their goals. They seemed more driven by images of their ideal selves as users of thetarget language. They also showedmore awareness of what itmeans to be a language user and amore elaborated awareness of cultural difference and the intimate relationship betweenlanguage and culture. Yet, they expressed less personal motivation than first-year students,except for the Connections goal area. Students at both levels talked about how they lookedforward to engaging in lifelong learning and talked eagerly about the pleasure, fun, and joythey experienced in the learning process, from using the language, and from their anticipatedfuture entry into target communities.

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The progression suggested here from first year to second year (toward greater agency inlanguage learning despite lower expectations; to a more elaborate vision of their ideal self; togreater understanding of culture and its relationship with language; to looking more tocoursework for meeting the Cultures, Connections, and Comparisons standards) enhancesthe need to look at advanced-level learners. This need is reinforced by a finding associated withthe controls of the present study: Students who intend tomajor or minor in the language havedifferent (and higher) goals and expectations than do other students, as indicated by theresults of the bioprobit model presented in Appendix C.

CTL and LCTL Learners

The survey revealed that both CTL and LCTL students had goals and expectations that wereconsistent with the Standards. This finding further supports the notion that the Standards areapplicable to different groups of students. However, students in the two language groupsdemonstrated interesting differences in the strength of their agreement that the Standardsrepresented their goals and expectations for achieving them. Without controls for studentcharacteristics, LCTL students had statistically significantly higher goals and expectationsthan CTL students for all five goal areas and 11 content standards. With controls (bioprobit),LCTL students still had higher goals except in the Communities standards (5.1, 5.2) andCommunication standard 1.1. It was particularly due to the inclusion of the importance of“Personal Interest” for taking the course as a control variable that LCTL goals were statisticallysignificantly lower than CTL goals in these three content standards. This finding supports thatof Murphy et al. (2009) that CTL and LCTL students have different reasons for enrolling inlanguage courses and that those reasons should be taken into account (controlled for) whenmaking such across-group comparisons.The finding was similar for students’ expectations to meet the Standards goals. Again,

without the controls, LCTL expectations were found to be statistically higher in all five goalareas and 11 content standards. Including the controls, LCTL expectations were statisticallysignificant and higher in the Cultures, Connections, and Comparisons goal areas, while nostatistical differences between LCTL and CTL students were found in the Communities andCommunication goal areas. Including the controls, in no content standard were LCTLstudent expectations statistically significantly lower than those of CTLs students. Thus, whileboth CTL and LCTL students demonstrated that they found their personal goals in theStandards and had expectations of meeting them, LCTL students often placed a higher valueboth on these goals and on their expectations to meet them. These findings strongly suggestthat the Standards are an even better match for LCTL students than they are for CTL students.In that professional dialogue and activity are often grouped according to the language taught,this result goes a long way toward countering an argument that the Standards might not beappropriate for lower level university learners broadly.In addition to this overarching picture, the survey analysis and interviews revealed intriguing

observations about the two groups. LCTL students had overall, across all standards, highergoals than CTL students. For Communication, Cultures, Comparisons, andConnections, it wasLCTL students especially who looked toward the current self to explain how a personalinvestment in family and friends, as well as an engagement in other cultures, shapes theirthinking when talking about what the Standards might mean for them. It thus followsthat LCTL students looked more to personal relationships (family, friends) and expressed agreater desire for fluency than CTL students. LCTL students also reported higher goals forCultures, even when those with heritage backgrounds felt they knew enough about the target


culture already, and expressed a broader notion of benefits of understanding culturaldifference.LCTL students seemed to have greater motivation and more personal engagement in their

learning than CTL students. They relied less uniquely on coursework, perhaps because, morethan CTL students, they considered language courses to be primarily about language and notabout other content. LCTL students thus appeared to expect a distinction between languageand content courses more than CTL students did (except for the Connections standards forwhich both groups saw the goals as beyond the language course). LCTL students talked abouthaving a dual focus on learning both in class and outside of coursework, reminiscent of Noels’s(2003) study confirming two motivational substrates, one pertaining to the immediatelearning situation and the other to social relationships in the broader society. LCTL studentshad more action plans and seemed to draw on a wider variety of resources to help theirlearning. In comparison to CTL students, they reported more often making linguisticcomparisons (related to 4.1) as a learning strategy, which could relate to the likelihood of theirhaving studied more languages than CTL students.11 When they talked about their classes,LCTL students looked especially to their instructor, whom they often valued as a nativespeaker, to transmit cultural experience apart from the curriculum. For them, it seemed liketheir instructor was an extracurricular resource.In contrast, CTL students reported focusing more on the Communication goal area, where

they engaged the ideal and ought-to selves. A greater percentage of CTL students also lookedto the feared self (especially with Communities) and to a current self, guided by the negativeimage of “someone who does not do this” as they devised priorities for language learning awayfrom things other than interaction. For them, interaction was often envisioned as involving amore distant (co-workers, people met while traveling) than personal (friends, family)relationship. CTL students more than LCTL students looked to their coursework to meet theStandards’ goals, even when they did not believe their courses would deliver enoughinstruction for them to meet their expectations, as they did especially with the Connectionsgoal area. These observations from the interviews support the statistical findings that the fitwith the Standards is even greater for LCTL students than for CTL students, although bothgroups had goals and expectations of meeting those goals that corresponded with theStandards statements.

Need to Consider Other Groups of Learners

Of course, an exploration of whether the Standards assume an overly homogeneous studentpopulationmerits the examination of many groups of students beyond those distinguished bytwo years in lower level instruction and by the distinction between CTLs and LCTLs. Even inthese lower level courses, students have different language learning backgrounds. Mostnotably, national trends point to a large number of false beginners (those who studied thelanguage in high school) in first-year CTL courses (Frantzen & Magnan, 2005). To refine thefindings of this study, the true beginner/false beginner continuum could be investigated asstudents worked through the first two years of instruction and even beyond. A related issue,particularly relevant to LCTL learners, is the number of other foreign languages that a studentstudied before coming to the current one.More diversity is also needed to get a fuller picture of students’ perceptions of what a

language class can and cannot provide toward helping them meet these goals. Beyondlanguage groups and level of instruction, it would be interesting to look at LSP learners,students in CBI programs, Flagship students, and heritage learners, for example. Perhaps LSP

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students would embrace standard 1.3 (presentational mode) more than other students if theysaw giving presentations and writing reports as professional activities. It would seem thatstudents in CBI programs should have higher expectations for the Connections standards.Might Flagship students, because of their mandated study abroad and frequent work withnative speaker tutors, place considerable value on the Cultures goals and perhaps seeComparisons as a goal, and not just a learning strategy?The survey for this study revealed that about a quarter (23%) of the students used the target

language at home. From this mention, we constructed a variable “language used at home” as acontrol in the bioprobit. Particularly for the Communities standards and Communicationstandards 1.1 and 1.2, this variable had a positive significant effect for both goals andexpectations. A direct comparison of heritage versus nonheritage learners suggested thatheritage learners placed greater importance on all goals areas, but the difference between thetwo groups was significant for only two content standards (1.3, 3.1). The differences in thereported goals and expectations in these heritage learners merit a more focused and complexinvestigation than the current study can provide. However, Appendix C provides a detailedmap of correlations, which allow for a comparison by content standard of the languagelearning goals and expectations of these two groups (heritage vs. nonheritage learners).Finally, given the impact on goals of the student variable “Personal Interest” as a reason forenrolling in the course, it could be fruitful to consider how students with different reasons forlanguage study align their goals and expectations with the Standards.Arens (2009) contends that “in a sense, all language learning will best be seen as language

for special purposes, requiring learners to acquire distinctive patterns of competence orcultural literacy” (p. 174). Although the findings of this study support the notion that theStandards can apply to a broad range of learners, it also raises the question of differences inuse, and perhaps interpretation, of the Standards by different individuals and groups.

STUDENT THINKING THAT HIGHLIGHTS ISSUES WITH THE STANDARDS

Beyond indicating that the Standards generally fit with the goals and expectations ofpostsecondary learners, the study highlighted four issues of confusion or coherence with theStandards. Byrnes (2012a) has stated that the Standards framework has “contributed little tothe reconceptualization of the whole of collegiate FL education” (p. 17, italics original). Theseconcerns may have stood in the way of the Standards’ impact on the postsecondary level. Wewill discuss them in the following order: transparency of the Standards statements, coherenceof the three standards of the Communication goal area, portrayal of Cultures in the five Cs,and notions of fulfillment of self.

Transparency of the Standards Statements

Especially if educators are to follow the suggestion of McClure (2003) and Phillips (2009)that the Standards can be used by students to form their goals and guide their thinking aboutlanguage learning, it is critical that the Standards statements are readily understandable bystudents. The issue of transparency might also be important for educators, especially at thepostsecondary level where professional development built around the Standards framework isnot as common as it is for K–12 teachers (Davis, 2000).It is assumed that students in the study were not schooled in the Standards, although it is

possible that some of them had experienced a Standards-based curriculum in high school. Tothe researchers’ knowledge, none of the universities used a curriculum developed around the


Standards to the extent that the students would have been educated in them. No studentinterviewed said that he or she had seen the Standards before. In the pilot phase of this study,volunteer students were asked to read the Standards and comment on what they did and didnot understand. As explained in Chapter 2, this exercise led the researchers to addparenthetical examples for the products, practices, and perspectives of the Cultures standards.The following discussion of how students in the present study understood the Standards isthus with the addition of these parenthetical examples.12 The study did not ask studentsdirectly whether they understood the Standards, but in the interviews, students voluntarilyasked questions about their meaning or indicated if they did not understand.From their comments in the interviews, most students seemed to readily understand the

standards. Interestingly, the frequency of hesitation that students expressed about themeaning of standards corresponded with the value they placed on the goal area. With the twomost highly valued standards, students showed no hesitation for Communities and only 5% forCommunication, mostly for 1.3 and the notion of audience. For Cultures, 14% of studentsseemed a bit confused about products, practices, perspectives, and even relationships, a confusionthat focused at times on the need for precision about the examples added to increase clarity.For the least two valued standards, 12% of students hesitated over the Comparisons standards,all with 4.1 for the expression nature of language, and 27% over the Connections standards for adefinition of discipline often followed by incredulity that a foreign language could be used tolearn something in another field. It was thus terminology that gave students pause, amessage to the profession that, for all students, it would take some guidance to assure thetransparency of the concepts in the five goal areas. The message is not just one of vocabulary,however; it also appears to involve the concepts behind the terms, some of which seemed to beunknown to students (e.g., products) and others of which were known but not expected in thecontext of foreign language learning goals (e.g., audience for communication or use in anotherdiscipline).The parallel between the value students attributed to the goal areas and how readily they

understood the standards may be elucidated by Arens’s (2009) reading of the goals areas interms of their cognitive load. She suggested that the cognitive load of the standards follows thenumber assigned to them in the Standards document—1 Communication, 2 Cultures, 3Connections, 4 Comparisons, 5 Communities—because the first two goal areas requirelearners to situate themselves in only one culture, while the latter three require themincreasingly to situate themselves in two cultures simultaneously.13 This concept of cognitiveload would explain the students’ ready understanding of Communication in contrast to theirgreater hesitation over Comparisons and Connections. A heavier cognitive load would also beassociated with the abstract terminology questioned by students in the Cultures, Comparisons,and Connections goal areas. The lack of any hesitation about the Communities goal areawould run counter to Arens’s conception, however. Perhaps the Communities standards arethe most easily understood by students because they convey to them the highly valued notionof language use—even having the words use and using in them—making them, withCommunication, the highest priority for students. This association of Communities withCommunication may thus lighten the cognitive load of Communities and account for whatwould otherwise be a misplacement in Arens’s scheme.Recalling that the developers of the Standards aimed to create a “mindset” for teachers in

their lesson planning and a “guide” for students in thinking about how language works andrelates to their lives (Phillips, 2009, p. 37), the observations about the transparency of thestatements suggest that students, and perhaps some faculty as well, would need education in

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this secondary discourse (Gee, 1998) in order to benefit from the thinking behind theStandards.Confusion over the intent of individual content standards was not limited to direct

comments by students about their meaning. More than half the students, at one time oranother during the interviews, talked about a different standard than the one the interviewerhad asked them about. Furthermore, quite a few comments evoked more than one standard,sometimes even several. This confusion may indicate that the content standards were notclearly distinguishable one from other, that is, that students did not perceive them as havingunique traits. More likely however, given the other findings of this study, it illustrates how thestudents saw the content standards as interrelated, which, of course, is what the Standardsdocument intends. The notion of interrelatedness is supported by the fact that about a quarterof the students mentioned specifically that certain standards were similar or related in natureto others, which occurred especially for Communication standards 1.1 (interpersonal mode)and 1.2 (interpretive mode). Might the interrelatedness of the Standards be made moreexplicit throughout the document?Part of the rejection of the Standards at the postsecondary level, or the disinterest in them by

college faculty, might be related to the simplicity the Standards may seem to convey, which isreinforced by the profession’s tendency to prioritize among them and talk about the twoprioritized goal areas, Communication and Cultures, without reference to the others. A moretransparent and expansive model of interrelatedness could serve to elucidate the complexityof the notions involved and provide an opening for reconsidering how the Standards couldcorrespond to the mission faculty see for higher education.

Coherence in the Communication and Communities Goal Areas

There is an inherent assumption in the Standards that each of its five domains—Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, Communities—represents a coherentconcept, or that the content standards within each domain are related to each other. From theperspective of students in this study, this assumption would appear to be generally true, withthe questionable exception of the Communication goal area.In contrast to students’ relatively similar responses about the two individual content

standards within the other goal areas, the three content standards of Communication werevalued very differently by the postsecondary learners in this study, both in terms of their goalsand their expectations for reaching them. Analysis of correlations between students’ goalswithin the five goal areas revealed a distancing of standard 1.3 (presentationalmode) from theother two Communication standards, 1.1 (interpersonal mode) and 1.2 (interpretive mode).There was a similar finding for expectations. Whereas standards 1.1 and 1.2 consistentlyranked at the top of the student hierarchy for both goals and expectations with respect to the11 content standards, standard 1.3 consistently ranked at the bottom, pulling down the relativeweight of the Communication goal area below Communities.In Chapter 3 we speculated whether this distancing of 1.3 from 1.1 and 1.2 might call into

question the coherence in students’ minds of the three modes of communication as relatedmeaning dimensions. In other words, do students see, or value, the presentational mode aspart of the same dialogic linguistic system as the interpersonal and interpretive modes? Thefear, expressed by Byrnes (2008a), is that readers of the Standards revert to a mindset thatlanguage is divided into four skills and reduce and redefine the interpersonal mode asspeaking, the interpretive mode as listening and reading, and the presentational mode aswriting. Student comments in the interviews suggest that this association of standard and skill


would hold for standards 1.1 and 1.2, where students talked about speaking with people andunderstanding them respectively (except where students read 1.2 and talked about oralinteraction). For these standards, they did not talk about texting or chat, for example, asspontaneous interaction but through writing. For 1.3, the association of skill and standard heldless neatly. Over half of the students focused exclusively on oral presentation when talking aboutstandard 1.3, while far fewer talked only about writing.Moreover, their focus when talking aboutstandard 1.3 did not seem to be on the skill but on the notion of an audience.In terms of coherence of the interpersonal and interpretive modes of the Communication

standards, the statistical analysis across other goal areas adds strength to this argument. Arelative proximity was uncovered between the distribution of responses on student goals for1.1, 1.2, and the two Communities standards 5.1, 5.2. Comments in the interviews suggestedthat students valued these four content standards similarly highly, because they saw all four asdealing with oral language use, that is, with social interaction. In fact, these twoCommunication standards and the two Communities standards were in many respects nearlyinseparable for students. This finding evokes another question about where coherence lies inthe five Cs. How distinct are the Communication goal area (taken only as 1.1 and 1.2) and theCommunities goal area? It would appear that language use, in social interaction, is a strongeruniting concept for the students in this study than the intended concepts of Communicationand Communities.Thorne (2009) sees the Communities standards as “defined only implicitly as an

encouragement for FL learners to ‘participate in multilingual communities at home andaround the world;’” instead, he suggests that “the use of community here indexes a warmlypersuasive metaphor suggesting affinity and enriching interaction between language-definedgroups” (p. 82). In this sense, the Communities standards become near synonyms of how thelearners appear to read standards 1.1 and 1.2: using language tomeet and interact with peoplewho speak the target language.This argument is bolstered by how, in the interviews, students evoked a sense of their

possible selves (Dornyei, 2009). In their comments, students often associated reaching thegoals of standards 5.1, and especially 5.2, 1.1, and 1.2, with their ideal selves. Thorne (2009)continued to explain that the warmth of the term community, especially as the Standardsappear to redefine it, is associated with pleasure fundamental to standard 5.2. According to thestudents in this study, they receivemuch enjoyment and satisfaction from talking with speakersof the target language, and anticipate even greater reward when they think about their idealselves. Indeed, in this way, these four standards relate to the valued goal of fluency that nearlyhalf of the students declared to be a personal learning goal in the open response part of theinterview before they read the Standards statements. This line of thinking points to coherenceamong standards 1.1, 1.2, 5.1, and 5.2 around the concepts of language use and the pleasure itbrings. Standard 1.3 would not be part of that constellation. Not only do most studentscorrectly not associate standard 1.3 with interactive language use, but not a single studentassociated it with pleasure. It was also the only Communication mode that evoked anxiety,generally associated with the unappealing image of speaking before an audience. Perhaps thatis why students most often associated standard 1.3 with their current self, split between“someone who does not do this” and “someone who does this.” In short, of the Discourses(Gee, 1996) that educators see as relevant to second language learning, students in this studysaw informal, primary discourse as most related to their learning goals.A potential counterargument to noncoherence of the three Communication modes comes

from the interviews. A limited number of students associated standard 1.3 with interactive

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language use, talking about it as if it were standard 1.1 or 1.2. Furthermore, sometimesstudents described ways of developing ability in the presentational mode that educators wouldconsider more suitable for the other two modes (e.g., discussions in class, living ininternational dormitories, watching movies). It seemed that these students were reducing allcommunication to the oral interaction they valued most.We speculated, in Chapter 7, that this confusion might point to students’ seeing the

interrelationship among the content standards. This conjecture is supported by the findingthat second-year students valued the presentational mode more than first-year students andthe related observation that some second-year students saw the presentational mode as part ofthe nature of communication. Perhaps greater understanding of the three modes as threerelated meaning dimensions underlies this view, which could be fostered by second-yearstudents finding they are making progress in the presentational mode, even without theirexplicit intent. The students’ self-assessment of progress appears to indicate that, althoughthey are not expecting to gain ability in the presentational mode, they would welcome it if theydid.The current study thus demonstrates how the coherence among the three modes of the

Communication standards is messier than the document intends. Beyond this discussion, itcould simply be a matter of student value: In terms of their personal goals, students aspire touse the interpersonal and interpretive modes and they do not care as much about an ability touse the presentational mode. Their expectations follow, in that they expect to achieve whatthey want to be able to do. Regardless of the conclusion about students’ reaction to thepresentational mode, what is clear is that coherence lies around language use in socialinteraction, a notion that crosses the Communication and Communities standards.

Portrayal of Culture

Perhaps the most longstanding critique of the Standards concerns how they portray cultureand situate it within the five Cs. As early as 1999, Lange alerted the profession that restrictingcultural notions to one Cultures goal area would misconstrue prevailing views of theinterconnectedness of culture and language in society (cf. Bennett, 1993; Byram, 1989; Byrnes,2008a; Kramsch, 1993a, 2010; Swaffar & Arens, 2005). Since then, several scholars have arguedthat culture resides inmore content standards than 2.1 and 2.2 of the Cultures goal area: in 3.2(Byrd et al., 2011;Oskoz, 2009; Shrum&Glisan, 2009); in 4.2 (Byrd et al., 2011); in 4.1, 5.1, and5.2 (Arens, 2009); and that it permeates all goal areas (Lange, 1999, 2003).From the student perspective, the present study supports the notion that culture resides in

goal areas beyond Cultures. The correlational analysis showed a close proximity amongstandards 2.1 (practices and perspectives), 2.2 (products and perspectives), 3.2 (distinctiveviewpoints), and 4.2 (cultural comparisons), for both goals and expectations. The highpolychoric correlations uncovered among these four standards suggest that these fourstandards are the essence of the strongest grouping for notions of culture, from the students’perspective. Probably not coincidentally, it is also these four standards that have the wordculture(s) in them.For all four of these content standards, students talked about culture generally, as well as

addressing the main point of the standard, if they did so at all. In the interviews, studentsbrought up similar issues and concerns with regard to several of these standards: a concern fora better self, being a global ambassador, and being globally aware for 2.1, 2.2, and 4.2; andappreciation of the benefits of cultural knowledge and understanding for 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, and 4.2.At times students seemed to confuse these four standards, talking about notions associated


with one of them when asked about another. This confusion appeared especially withstandards 4.2 and 2.1 or 2.2; it appeared considerably less often with 3.2, a possibleindication that the association with culture is intuitively less strong for 3.2 than the other threestandards.Even if culture is regarded as occurring across these four content standards that span three

goal areas—Cultures, Connections, and Comparisons—the profession has voiced strongdissatisfaction with how culture is portrayed in the Standards. In 1999, Lange charged that theStandards focus mostly on knowledge, which can be static, and on the communicative abilitythat draws on that knowledge. In the present study, students clearly saw this focus: They talkedabout cultural knowledge as a personal benefit; they grounded their concern for appropriatebehavior in a need for cultural knowledge; when talking about how they expected to reach astandard involving culture, they frequently said that they would gain cultural knowledgeabroad. A focus on knowledge was particularly strong when students were talking about thepractices of standard 2.1 and the products of 2.2, and for CTL students who saw it as necessary foreffective interpersonal communication but, antithetically, considered it a lower priority goalthan language use.We cannot tell if the students’ strong focus on cultural knowledge was in direct response to

the focus of the Standards statements or if it reflected how students think about learningculture generally. One indication that both reasons might pertain comes from the openresponse question. Students’ goals as stated without reference to the Standards generated onetheme about culture: “Develop Cultural Interests,” in which students talked primarily abouthow knowledge of other cultures would help them read or interact with others. Anotherpossible reason for the heavy emphasis on cultural knowledge might be that students were intheir first two years of language study where Arens (2009) believes the cultural knowledgeinherent in standard 2.1 is emphasized.Dykstra (2009) expressed concern about an overemphasis on knowledge in her charge that

the Standards have insufficient emphasis on ways to interact with other cultures, which goesbeyond learning about them and learning to understand them. The concern is that tooexclusive a focus on cultural knowledge gives insufficient room for other aspects ofintercultural competence including pragmatics (Dykstra, 2009); attitudes, critical awareness,or the discovery process of understanding another culture (Lange, 1999); and for embracingthe dynamic connectedness of culture, language, and thought. These criticisms are oftenmade with reference to the 2007 MLA report, which details that “language is understood as anessential element of a human being’s thought processes, perceptions, and self-expressions;and as such it is considered to be at the core of translingual and transcultural competence”(MLA, 2007, p. 235) and specifies that a language curriculum must be grounded in arecognition of the inseparableness of language and culture. Although theMLA report has notled to the transformation of collegiate language departments asmany had hoped, its notion oftranslingual and transcultural competence has been widely cited and accepted as the mostcompelling available description of language competence related to the humanisticmission ofhigher education.In the present study, over a third of the students interviewed voluntarily commented on

relationships of culture, language, and thought; a quarter of them explained how languageand culture were inseparable, with regard to 8 of the 11 content standards (1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1,3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.2). It could be that students would have thought about culture this wayregardless of the Standards. However, one might hope that the content standards, which theyhad just read before making these comments, stimulated them to do so, although it is clear

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that the standards are not as specific as the student comments. Nonetheless, Savignon andSysoyev (2005) see the Cultures and Comparisons standards as encompassing thisinseparability, which is fundamental to how the Comparisons standards develop insightinto the nature of semiotic systems (Arens, 2009, 2010a).Barnes–Karol and Broner (2010) find that the MLA report asks students “to go beyond

comparison and contrast to be able to understand both themselves and the members of theC2 as culturally situated beings and to see themselves through the perspective of the C2”(p. 423). We might infer that the students in this study are beginning to see themselvesas culturally situated beings from their talk about how culture is heterogeneous andhow people have personal cultures, as well as from their objections to the singularity of ahome culture and native language, voiced with regard to Comparisons standards. We mightalso see a desire to understand culturally situated notions in how students, especially thosestudying LCTLs, praised their instructors and their instructors’ stories for helping themvisualize the experiences of people living in target cultures, and in the way one student lookedto literature to provide images of “lived reality.” What the students in this study did notconvey, however, is that they understand that all such images have a point of view and thatthere is a need to deconstruct these stories to find multiple interpretations (Barnes–Karol &Broner, 2010), that is, to scrutinize the discourse worlds through which the stories werecreated (Kramsch, 2011). Nor did they talk about how systematic use of these stories cancreate a larger cultural narrative; rather, they seemed to take the stories as accurate,generalizable portrayals with the belief that their understanding of the target culture wouldcome naturally through listening to them. It is a metacognitive level of reflection that is inquestion.The Standards seem to lack, overtly and in how students read them, the recognition of

multiple interpretations of events, or in other words, that different articulations of meaningcome forth for different contexts according to the speakers or writers, the genre, audience,and purpose. The deconstruction of multiple perspectives is fundamental to translingual andtranscultural competence and to gaining symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2009, 2011) and,according to Byrnes (2012a), is central to the mission of higher education. It is suchcompetences that Barnes–Karol and Broner (2010) associated with the nuances required inacademic analysis that will

(. . .) make students more aware of both themselves and the persons who speak the languagethey study as culturally situated persons whose perspectives are deeply rooted in ideas andvalues shared by members of their cultural community but also informed by individualexperiences and reflection. (p. 441)

They are thereby fundamental to transforming the self into another multilingual self, which,according to Dykstra (2009), is a needed college-level goal.How culture is constituted in research colors the research results (Alalou, 2001; Chavez,

2002; Martin & Laurie, 1993). The findings of the present study on the Standards can be nomore than reflections of what the students understood and thought about culture when theyread the Standards statements. It is not in the scope of thismonograph, or its research, to delvemore deeply into what culture is, or how someone might come to understand or enter aculture. These speculations are necessarily limited to what the data has provided and to thesilences through which the data can be seen as reflecting concerns from the professionalliterature.


Fulfillment of Self

Students in the present study spoke a great deal about how the goals of the Standards wereconsistent with their possible selves, especially their current and ideal self. In these images offuture selves, they looked to language study to fulfill dreams of accomplishment, realizeideals of future activity and interaction, build greater self-awareness, and bring personalreward and satisfaction. Indeed such personal fulfillment is a stated aim of the Standards(National Standards, 2006), although it appears in the content standards explicitly only instandard 5.2.In using the Standards to envision themselves positively in the future, students come close to

Kramsch’s (2009) view of why students study languages. She said:

The impulse to learn a foreign language, and when learning it, to actually acquire it well ornot, might have less to do with the objective demands to get a job, become integrated into anative speaker community, identify with native speakers or with a particular ideology, andmore to do with the fulfillment of the self. (p. 75)

Phipps and Levine (2010) contend that this affective side of humanism, which is at the heart ofa liberal education, is underdeveloped in the Standards. The present study opens thepossibility that students can see this dimension in the Standards.Following Dornyei’s (2009) conception of possible selves, the thematic analysis of the

interviews revealed that 77% of students saw their current selves in the goals of the Standards,58% their ideal selves, 27% the ought-to self, and 27% the feared self. In terms of the goalareas, the percentage of students who evoked the ideal self followed well the relative value thatstudents placed on goal areas. The ideal self was evoked bymost students for the Communitiesand then Communication goal areas, the most highly valued goal areas with their desiredemphasis on language use, and by the fewest students for Connections, typically the leastvalued goal. Identification with the self thus appears to relate to the value students placed ongoals.This observation is consistent with possible selves theory in which learners seek to reconcile

notions of their ideal, ought-to, and feared selves by pursuing abilities that match an image ofwhat the learner wants to become andwhat others think he or she should become, and to avoidrealizing the image of what he or she is afraid of becoming (Dornyei, 2009). According toMacIntyre et al. (2009), “the strength of the concept of possible selves lies in (. . .) its focus onwho individuals plan to use language with apart from a specific cultural group, and its ability tointegrate multiple, sometimes conflicting motives” (p. 58). It is thus well suited to learnerswhose primary goal is language use in social interaction. It is also particularly well suited totoday’s learners, whose idealization appears to be increasingly legitimized and even promotedby the media, the market, and the community, in a poststructuralist expression of posture andits correlate imposture (Kramsch, 2012).The question is whether the Standards would benefit from being more overt in their

expression of fulfillment of self. Van Lier (2008), writing from an ecological perspective,positions fulfillment of self as contributing to developing self-awareness as well as awareness ofthe Other:

Every perception of the target language is simultaneously an act of self-perception. Learningan L2 and becoming engaged in a new culture thus involves adjusting one’s sense of self andcreating new identities to connect the known to the new. (p. 177)

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Especially if the Standards are to apply broadly to different types of postsecondary learners, forexample heritage learners whose diverse backgrounds and goals interact with languagelearning inmultiple ways to challenge their identity and visions for their future, the fulfillmentof self should merit more than covert or one-word attention. A more elaborated developmentin the Standards of how language learning develops the self would support an effort to redirectthe framework toward translingual and transcultural competence. It would reflect the affectivedimension of humanism and thus increase the fit of the Standards with the mission of highereducation.

FIT OF THE STANDARDS WITH POSTSECONDARY INSTRUCTION

The question “Do the Standards fit postsecondary instruction?” can be answered from twoperspectives: Do college students see a fit for themselves? Do the Standards fit the mission ofhigher education? The answers to these questions can be quite different in that one can beanswered solely on student perspectives, and the other must be seen through the wider lens ofhow society—defined primarily by college faculty—construes the value and goals of thecollegiate experience.The present study provides a strong affirmative response to the first question: The students

surveyed and interviewed demonstrated a strong affinity with the goals of the Standards, andalthough to a lesser degree than they valued these goals, expected to reach them eitherduring their formal study or as an eventual consequence of that study. However, in termsof how the profession has prioritized the Standards in teaching, the students differed in thehigh value they placed on the Communities standards as a goal to be associated withCommunication in aiming toward language use in social interaction. If the intendedinterrelationship of the five goal areas, and its associated interdisciplinarity, is truly taken upby the profession, then the students in this study, who also perceived and seemed to value thatinterrelationship, would see a further fit with the Standards and their language learning incollege.The second question, about the fit of the Standards in higher education, is more elusive for

this study, given that students are only part of the constellation of actors that need to beconsidered. Student voices demonstrated that, in the Standards, they saw reflections of theiradult needs, desires, and visions of self. Representing a societal view about what foreignlanguage study brings to higher education, faculty have most often looked to the 2007 MLAreport, picking up its goal of translingual and transcultural competence which allows someone“to operate between languages” (p. 237). This goal would require educators to take aconstitutive view of language study (language represents what we are, think, and reveal aboutourselves) as opposed to an instrumental view (language consists of communicative andinformation-gathering skills; Terry, 2009). In their comments, students revealed a sensitivityand understanding of a constitutive view, as well as a desire for communicative skills associatedwith the instrumental perspective.To consider the fit of any framework with education, it is necessary to ponder possible

curricular and pedagogical implications of that framework, and the reception of thatframework among students and faculty. In Chapter 1, we put forth two pedagogies andtheories of language associated with them: communicative language teaching (CLT), with itsaim toward communicative competence, and literacy-based approaches, which attempt to takelearners beyond communicative competence to symbolic competence. Kern (2000) arguesthat:


Aims of teaching face-to-face verbal interaction [associated with CLT] and developinglearners’ ability to read, write, and think critically about texts [associated especially withliteracy-based approaches] are not incompatible goals, but, in fact, mutually interdepen-dent (. . .) there is a symbiotic, mutually-reinforcing relationship between literacy andcommunicative ability. (p. 45)

What this study can contribute is how student thinking, done in associationwith the Standards,might support these two pedagogical visions. Not purporting to prescribe between them, wehope that student input from this study will help inform professional thinking about how theStandards could fit the two orientations. Ultimately a fit between framework and pedagogy isneeded for the profession to have a consistent vision and educational path for languagelearning K–16.The most prevalent finding in the present study is the high value that students place on

language use. What does language use mean in the two pedagogies?

Communicative Language Teaching

With its focus on oral use and functionally basedmaterials, CLT clearly has high face validityfor language use (Canale & Swain, 1980; Knight, 2000), which in itself, should attract studentsin this study to it. It places top priority on communication, aligning well with the high valuestudents place on the Communication goal area. Its classrooms and materials stresstransactional communicative activities, often with a touristic orientation, which relate directlyto the goal of some students to “get by” abroad. Communicative power comes from whichstrategy to use at which point in the interaction (Kramsch, 2008), built on the authentic normof a native speaker, for whom students showed appreciation in this study.In CLT, the learning of culture emphasizes products and practices, which interested

students in the study, even more than it emphasizes perspectives or relationships, whichstudents spoke of less (Barnes–Karol &Broner, 2010). Culture is conveyed through a sanitized,pseudo-authentic environment construed by images with minimal linguistic and culturaldiversity (Azimova & Johnston, 2012) and by the vicarious experience that the instructor offersto students in the personal anecdotes relayed in class. Seen in this way, culture might indeedbe seen as additive in the curriculum, as feared by Byrnes (2002a), and become a by-product ofinstruction, as suggested by Chavez (2005) and Worth (2007) and, most importantly, bystudents in this study. Saying they appreciated the products brought into class and how muchthey relied on the instructor for his or her cultural knowledge and experiences, studentsexpressed considerable enjoyment for learning, such as that found by Green (1993) for theexperience of his students with CLT. Students in the study felt that the classroom wouldadvance their language learning, but did not look to it exclusively, turning also, and for someeven equally, to personally motivated extracurricular activity. This personalized and variedroute to language learning would seem to fit well enough with the hypothesis-testingphilosophy of an interlanguage model associated with communicative competence (Canale &Swain, 1980) as well as with today’s advancement in technology use in CLT.

Literacy-Based Approaches

The value that students place on language use can also be suited to literacy-basedapproaches. In that regard, relying on different observations from the students would lead to avery different picture of language learning. Although the face validity of literacy-basedapproaches would be more obtuse for transactional language use, it would be clearer for the

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social embeddedness of language ability (Byrnes, 2005), for which students in this studyshowed a concern in their desire to understand cultural connotations of language and tomanipulate registers to interact appropriately with a variety of people in differentcircumstances. How literacy-based approaches highlight the centrality of discourse anddialogue in all human meaning-making (Byrnes, 2005) would fit with the top priority thatstudents expressed for the Communities goal area. In conjunction with Communities,students in this study looked to an ideal self who would have more than passing encounterswith people in target communities. Literacy-based classrooms aiming toward symboliccompetence see “[l]anguage through all of its facets—conversational, functional, literary,cultural—and all its modalities—spoken, written, filmic, virtual” (Kramsch, 2008, p. 403).They thus provide for students’ expressed attraction to multimodal ways of learning, as well asthe greater interest in the presentational mode of second-year students.In a paradigm that valorizes semiotic choice, communicative power comes from choosing

which language to speak with whom, about what, and for what effect; in discursive flexibility;and in finding positions of self and other in language. Language use in literacy-basedapproaches is a social semiotic praxis in which interactants are construers of reality andlanguage learning is a participatory experience (Byrnes, 2002a; Hasan, 1995; Kramsch, 2009).Students in the present study appeared to recognize this culturally situated trait of languagein their comments about the inseparability of language and culture and the relationshipamong language, culture, and thought. Aligning this understanding with the interrelated-ness of the Standards, they appeared to be searching for what it would mean to go beyondtransactional language to deal with multiple interpretations of meaning conveyed in socialencounters and through different disciplines. Indeed, students often characterized theirdesire to be “fluent” or “bilingual” as acquiring the type of language they needed toaccomplish their personal objections typically. For this language competency, theyenvisioned broad contexts for their future language use—especially the heritage studentswho saw language use at home, with distant family abroad, as well as with and around theacademic community. Such desired contexts of use would necessitate a fluid bilingual normas proposed by Ortega (2014) and associated with a usage-based or an ecological theory oflanguage.Culture—and language—in literacy-based approaches are transmitted through awide range

of texts, in all modalities. Byrnes (2012a) declared that the Standards are insufficient forenvisioning such textually oriented learning goals. Indeed, the students, when responding tothe Standards, looked far less to texts—including literature as might be expected inhumanities in higher education—than to oral interaction to describe their learning goals, anindication that, taken at surface value, Byrnes may be correct. Nonetheless, the goal oflanguage use that the students advocated would be enhanced by a pedagogy developingmultiple interpretations and multiple dimensions of meaning. Such pedagogy would putComparisonsmore at the center of learning than themoremarginal position relegated to it bystudents in this study: as a learning strategy rather than goal. It could also map out a route toproviding sufficient substance for higher education, something that Dhonau and McAlpine(2011) claimed the Standards lack. This repositioning could perhaps be accomplishedthrough the reflection for which students found stimulus in the Standards but never quitetook far enough to suggest symbolic competence.The role envisioned for teachers would also need to evolve from conveyors of culture

through stories to co-construers of meaning, which is relational and multidimensional(Kramsch, 2008), an elaboration that students in the present study did not specify. In short,


what was especially lacking in the students’ views in the present study was the appearance of anunderstanding of the history and subjectivity of others (Kramsch, 2008), although manystudents, especially the multilingual and multicultural ones, recognized the existence ofmultiple subcultures and struggled to position their current and ideal selves in themonolingual and monocultural view they saw in the Standards.

Professional Needs

If the profession is turning from CLT (Schulz, 2006) toward literacy-based approaches, itneeds to consider how the Standards could play into this orientation. As discussed in Chapter1, many scholars have criticized the Standards for a lack of fit with literacy-based notions,findingmore harmony between literacy and the 2007 MLA report. These student perspectivesprovide insight about where, on an initial reading of the Standards, students might be poised,or not, to move in that direction.Regardless of pedagogical approach, these insights can be useful in helping students set

goals andmonitor their progress toward these goals during instruction, an effort that is widelyrecognized for igniting student interest in language study (Dornyei, 2001; MacIntyre et al.,2009), elaborating the vision of how reaching the goals will transform the self (Dornyei, 2009;Sampson, 2012), building autonomy and self-efficacy throughout the learning endeavor(Graham, 2006; Williams & Burden, 1997), and confirming that teachers and students share acommon understanding of directions and expected outcomes of courses (Dornyei, 2001;Williams & Burden, 1997). In that effort to build a common understanding of courseoutcomes between teachers and students, these insights can also be used by the educationalleadership responsible for renewing and reviewing programs especially at the first two years ofinstruction targeted by this study.14

There is, unfortunately, on the collegiate level—where faculty autonomy is valued morethan ideological adherence to national, state, or local initiatives—little professionaldevelopment beyond that received by teacher educators in frameworks such as the Standards(Davis, 2000) or in research relating pedagogies to them (H. Allen & Negueruela–Azarola,2010; Byrnes & Kord, 2001). The task of informing college faculty lies mainly withpublications and conferences. It behooves the profession to use this route to bring studentvoices into the conversation, as the profession debates the role of the Standards in highereducation.

NEED FOR RESEARCH

On the national level, standards were developed to enable measurement of studentachievement toward improved educational outcomes. Although foreign languages are notamong the assessed areas under the No Child Left Behind Act, the issue of assessment is stillcritical with regard to informing learners and their teachers how well the Standards help themreach learning goals. Troyan (2012) warns that the Standards are further reduced to theCommunication goal area because the only form of assessment developed for them is theIntegrated Performance Assessment (IPA), which features the three modes of that goal area(Adair–Hauck et al., 2006). Research is clearly needed to develop assessment techniques,ideally those that could also serve to direct learning such as Hammer and Swaffar’s (2012)rubrics built on the Standards’ relationship between language and culture, which they see asbuilding on a pedagogy that would respond to both the Standards and the MLA call fortranslingual and transcultural competence.

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If student thinking is to inform decisions about the use of the Standards in highereducation, research must be conducted on students from different types and sizes ofinstitutions.15 It is also needed with students of different profiles, including, as discussedpreviously, true and false beginners, advanced learners, learners with heritagebackgrounds, and also learners in programs with specific aims such as LSP, CBI, and theFlagship, and those on internships and in study abroad programs, as well as learnerswith different backgrounds and reasons for language study. Although lower level learnersare the most numerous in higher education, that level alone cannot respond to the fullmission of higher education. Research on upper level students is urgently needed fordeveloping goals for that level and for building an articulation through the undergraduateexperience and, more broadly, throughout the K–16 experience. This research mightwell reach beyond the Standards to consider also goals inherent in the MLA report, perhapsin a comparative fashion, to provide a fuller picture of any relationship between studentgoals, educational frameworks, and U.S. higher education. In addition, it should considerlearner goals and needs that may yet be unrelated to any document in the professionaldiscourse.Given the dual locus of language learning described by the students in this study, more

research is needed on student learning beyond the classroom. Lafford (2013) drewprofessional attention to the need for research in study abroad and especially in experientiallanguage learning, in which she included community service learning and internships in theworkplace. In addition to these circumstances, the locations and resources identified bystudents in this study both at home (e.g., language tables, residential living units, communityactivities) as well as abroad (e.g., study, work, and internships) give researchers places to lookin an investigation that should occur over the lifespan of language learning (Dornyei &Ushioda, 2011). As the analysis of student comments reveals, and as Lafford contends, thisinvestigation must include interaction with the multiple norms that exist in any naturalisticsetting.The need to look beyond the classroom does not mean that research should overlook the

critical role of teachers and course content. Indeed, as Lafford (2013) stressed, each newsetting for language learning should be considered as existing with and without concurrentclassroom instruction either at home or abroad. Studies of how student goals and expectationsalign with the Standards should be paralleled with studies of teachers’ goals and expectationsat the same level of the postsecondary curriculum. In terms of expectations, new researchshould examine the sequencing of learning that students and teachers expect in differentlearning situations as well as outcomes.In these studies it would also be useful to have an understanding of the curriculum that

students experience because, given the effect of prior knowledge on motivation, goal setting,and expectations of success (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Dornyei &Ushioda, 2011), how students havelearned language is likely related to responses they would make to the Standards. By studyingteachers and their teaching in regard to student expectations, researchers could trace thepossibility of a Pygmalion effect of learners setting aspirations only as high as those theirteachers envisage (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1992), which could give insight into why, in thisstudy, student expectations were lower than their goals. Such research on the classroomexperiencemight be comparative across levels, to include upper levels of collegiate instructionas well as lower levels, as a way to gain insight about the bifurcation of college foreign languageprograms into two divisions, the lower with a traditional language focus, and the upper with aliterary and cultural focus.


Studies about student motivation in language learning, broadly conceived as in thismonograph, can contribute to the understanding of how motivation functions in languagelearning, especially under the pressure of a national framework developed without learnerinput or feedback. In a country where there is no national language policy and where highereducation prides itself on the intellectual autonomy associated with academic freedom,student voices have the potential to yield a powerful influence. The study presented in thismonograph offers a first, large-scale attempt to hear those voices.

NOTES

1 See Dornyei (2003) for a review of how goal orientation is related to language learning strategies and self-regulatory behavior.

2 Troyan does point out that recently postsecondary educators have been increasing emphasis on the Communitiesstandards by using technology to connect students with target language communities.

3 Arens also attributed a high cognitive load toCommunities, in fact the highest, as she sequenced the cognitive loadof the Standards according to their numerical order: 1 Communication, 2 Cultures, 3 Connections, 4 Comparisons, 5Communities. In that learners value Communities most among the five goal areas, a concern for cognitive load, asArens sees it, does not seem to apply. Perhaps this lower cognitive load for Communities relates to how learnersassociate Communities tightly with Communication.

4 However these correlations reflect student priorities shown in the hierarchies, as would be expected given thatthey come from the same data.

5 Onpage 15 of the 2006 Standards document, the sentence reads “Standards preparation is forcing attention to thebroader view of second language study and competence: what should students know and be able to do—and howwell?[sic]” However, in the broader literature the added mention of “how well” is generally not used and the contentstandards themselves do not refer to proficiency level or quality of expression needed to meet the Standards goals.

6 In this comment, Kramsch is writing in particular about the multilingual individual who needs to decide whichlanguage to use for certain speakers and purposes in certain contexts. This choice could be at the start of aconversation or moment to moment through codeswitching during the interaction.

7 As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, the Standards do not say that students cannot, or should not, comparemultiple languages. It is likely possible that the Standards writers and language teachers would welcome multiplecomparisons. The issue here is how some students saw the Comparisons standards as singular and were troubled by it.

8 For 4.1, this figure represents 29% of first-year students and 26%of second-year students; for 4.1 it represents 12%of first-year students and 14% of second-year students.

9 With 23%heritage learners in the study’s sample, we note a similarity to the 28%figure. The possible impact of thisproportion of heritage learners in this study should be remembered throughout the discussion.

10 Although the study did not collect data onwhich first-year students had studied the language in high school (falsebeginners) and which had not (true beginners), it should be assumed based on national trends (Frantzen &Magnan,2005) that there was a sizeable percentage of false beginners among the first-year students in theCTLs in this study. ForLCTLs, which are much less available in the high school curriculum, the issue is less pertinent.

11 The current study does not have the information on other languages students studied, so this mention isspeculation.

12 See Appendix B for the survey questionnaire.13 We recall to readers from Chapter 1 that the forthcoming revision of the Standards will not include the

numbering scheme.14 An anonymous reviewer suggested that in such program renewal faculty might be motivated to make changes,

such as a more direct appeal to students’ interest in Communities and language use beyond the classroom. Thereviewer cautioned also that if faculty members consider integrating cultures or building programs around literaciesand find that students are not thinking in these directions, they would know they needed to do some proactive work indemonstrating their commitment to these orientations.

15 Issues related to institutional size include academic mission, course offerings, teaching loads, and, as a reviewerpointed out, even who teaches, such as a greater number of faculty at smaller schools and teaching assistants, especiallyin the first two years, at large institutions.

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Documents

CHAPTER 8: Standards Through the Perspectives of Postsecondary Students