|
profession be involved in setting up a framework that is useful at the national
level. This framework, thus, needs to address concerns that are much too broad
for individual programs and, in the United Stages, at least, not in the purview of
the government.
The two critical issues actually both fall under the heading of articulation,
and require a solution at the national professional level precisely because they
involve movement between programs. The first such moment is the step from
high school to college, and it is this that we have referred to as the "articulation
problem". The second moment comes when students participate in in-country
programs. This, too, has to do with articulation, but most salient issue is
learning management because it is in such programs that learners must have
the tools to manage their own learning, typically to a greater degree than they
have had to do before in their lives.
As we address these issues below, it will be clear that they are, in fact,
outgrowths of three of the principles discussed above. The issue of articulation
arises because we are dealing with language learning careers (principle 1).
Since the learning of Russian (like other less commonly taught languages)
necessarily takes place across at least two programs, our profession is obliged
to recognize that we need to design programs that promote such progress. The
first of the boundaries that is crossed (high school to college) is one that is
complicated by significant developmental changes in the learners. This means
that if we are to facilitate movement across this boundary, we must be aware of
what it means to be learning centered (principle 3). Finally, the belief that a
general goal of our profession--whether in linguistics of literature--has to
involve language use: performing in a cultural setting (principle 4). This
functional orientation is crucial to the elaboration of the staged framework that
we are proposing.
As mentioned above, we take the definition of stages to be a critical step
in coming to grips with the articulation problem. If we take the two-for-one rule
as a beginning point, we need to define two stages for some idealized high
school program whose students will feed into equally idealized college
programs. These ideals may turn out to be inaccurate, but this is the approach
that we believe must be followed and subsequently refined by the profession to
minimize the articulation problem. Important:this assumption does not mean
that all high school programs must complete the intermediate stage in order to
be judged successful. Each program will examine its setting ("local conditions,"
in the terms of the six principles), and its designers will determine how to
integrate their program into the stages. We have chosen the two-for-one rule
because this is generally the most aggressive that high schools can be in their
goal setting.
Assuming that the framework outlined at the beginning of this chapter is
appropriate, we need to open a national discussion about the specifics of
stages. We need to define these stages in a way that acknowledges the fact
that the elementary stage will be covered more and more frequently at the high
school level. The intermediate stage should be viewed as transitional to
college.
|
|
