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Issues in Designing the Framework
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A document of this type never comes to exist in a vacuum, and therefore
in reading it one must review the issues of the day in order to be clear about
which issues are particularly salient at the time. The sections below address
relevant issues in the following spheres: trends in education at the national
level, in foreign language study more specifically, and in Russian language
learning as the most particular subcase. Each of these issues is of central rele-
vance to defining programs that seek to foster the learning of Russian. There is
no new research described here, rather we attempt to bring together information
and ideas from a variety of sources and present them in a coherent fashion. It is
our hope that the process of reading (or rereading) about these ideas will help
organize the challenging task of developing the conceptual structure of a cur-
riculum.
National trends in education
The field of secondary education in the United States has been the focus
ofa great deal of public discussion in the last decade. In particular, a
government-sponsored national standards effort has led to proposals in most of
the major academic disciplines. ACTFL has been charged with establishing
such standards for foreign languages, and their work will be discussed below.
There is probably no such thing as a "complete" theory of the classroom,
but numerous focal areas addressed by various mini-movements in recent
years are important to the overall structure of the classroom. For the purposes
of this document, their importance has to do both with the support they lend to
the six principles of chapter 3 and to the discussion of implementation in
chapter 5. In the paragraphs that follow are brief synopses of some of the more
significant of these focal areas. As with national standards, the role of
technology is discussed below in the section on trends in foreign language
instruction since its implementation in the foreign language profession is
relatively well advanced.
Howard Gardner is well known for promoting the view that we possess
not a unitary form of intelligence but multiple "intelligences," as he calls them3.
This belief carries with it numerous implications for how we assess the
3See especially his Frames of Mind and Multiple Intelligences .
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