In search of relevance: The standards and the undergraduate foreign language curriculum

Abstract

Beyond the Standards’ influence on K-12 language education policy and continued discussions of their relevance and application to foreign language (FL) instruction and assessment, the tangible impacts of the Standards in shaping curriculum and classroom instruction have not been wide-ranging in university-level FL departments. This chapter identifies and discusses three factors that have contributed to the reception of the Standards in higher education and, more specifically, in terms of the advanced undergraduate FL curriculum. Based on the discussion of these factors, I respond to the question of whether the Standards provide a framework adequate for addressing the critical challenge facing university-level FL programs today of the meaningful integration of language and content across the curriculum. Ultimately, I argue that although the Standards continue to serve as an important document within a historical continuum of pedagogical change, they fail to provide principled guidance for university-level FL departments struggling to identify pathways or approaches to inform how curricula are articulated.