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a foreign language teacher questionnaire on classroom practices. 1 This questionnaire was administered in conjunction with a performance study designed to contrast the classroom implementation of rationalist and empiricist approaches to foreign language instruction. The questionnaire under discussion produced an admixture of distinctive and non-distinctive responses. When we attempted to identify the features which led to the relative success or failure of our items, we uncovered as well the criteria which distinguished the two approaches. In seeking to quantify attitudes about these two approaches to language teaching, we identified fundamental task hierarchies which distinguished them. Therefore, in the analysis of our data, we identify the problems presented by inconclusive items in order to illustrate the essential differences in the two teaching philosophies which contrasting items revealed. We underscore the importance of the assessment of actual curricular practices in any methodological comparison and go on to suggest the implications of our analysis for future foreign language research. HISTORYSince the decision during World War I1 to orient foreign language instruction toward production rather than grammar-translation skills, numerous methods have emerged, all of which have promised to produce superior results. Extensive testing under a variety of constraints has led to inconclusive results which obscure rather than clarify inherent strengths and weaknesses of different methodologies.One consistent problem is whether or not teachers involved in presenting materials created for a particular method are actually reflecting the underlying philosophies of these Modrm h g u a g e Journal, 66 (Spring 1982): 24-33 methods in their classroom practice. The perception of this problem is of recent date. Only within the last decade has the profession realized that two fundamental philosophies govern foreign language education. Various methods -cognitive code, audio-lingual, structural, total physical response, communicative competence -can be grouped under one or the other of these approaches.The view which arose with World War 11, the empiricisthkills approach which assumes that language learning is the result of behavior and largely conditioned responses, contrasts sharply with the rationalist/process approach, which asserts that language learning is primarily the result of critical thinking and that it springs from the desire to communicate. Diller points out that neither approach has total jurisdiction over a particular method, but within general parameters, we assume that materials and methods which are predicated on the notion of four discrete language skillslistening, speaking, reading, and writingare largely empiricist in nature. Those approaches which see language learning as a function of comprehension preceding production and view all aspects of language learning -speech production, reading comprehension, and the likeas part of an interrelated whole can be designated as rationalist, a processoriented appr...

Based on National Standards for Foreign Language Learning (1996), this essay presents a heuristic designed to challenge both the language‐teaching and the literature‐teaching sides of a typical language‐and‐literature department by offering a reconceptualization of what it means to teach language and literature as texts in different genres, anchored in their cultures.

IN INTRODUCING THE LAST PERSPECTIVEScolumn on the role of foreign language (FL) departments in internationalizing the curriculum, I observed that claiming such a role was rather akin to asserting the obvious. This column, too, with its focus on Revisiting the Role of Culture in the FL Curriculum, seems at first sight to fall into the same category: affirming the tried and truenamely, that culture has an established place in FL curricular discussions. However, the title already and quite deliberately signals a certain distancing from any self-satisfied stance toward the topic, inasmuch as it probes the implied reconsideration of culture in FL curricula with at least two kinds of "why"s: a retrospective and causative query and a more prospective and purposive "why" that would illuminate the path forward with regard to the role of culture in FL programs.As is to be expected, the two go hand in hand. What might be less expected is how much innovative thinking has of late gone into a seemingly "checked-off" construct like culture in FL curricula and pedagogy. Indeed, might the proposed "revisiting" approximate a "revising," a typographical slip that I encountered in the very writing of this introduction? There is good reason to at least consider that possibility, precisely because the context of culture and the context of situation within which FL specialists in their particular professional culture now discuss the nature and the role of culture in their educational work has shifted dramatically in the last decade or so.We know that these two prominent terms were originally used by the anthropologist Malinowski (1935) as a way of capturing the fact that any understanding of words depends on and is em-bedded in the "active experience of those aspects of reality to which the words belong" (p. 58). Malinowski came to extend that notion of the significance of context to an entire culture, thereby yielding the two pivotal notions of context of situation and context of culture in a linguistically oriented anthropology. Considering the implications of such a position over 40 years later, Halliday (1999) interpreted Malinowski's as follows:language considered as a system-its lexical items and grammatical categories-is to be related to its context of culture; while instances of language in use-specific texts and their component parts-are to be related to their context of situation. (p. 4, original emphasis)

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