Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach through Multiple Literacies (review)

The fourth volume in the new MLA series on the teaching of languages, literatures, and cultures, Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach through Multiple Literacies, proposes a new vision for foreign-language (FL) studies based on the "unique cross-cultural literacy" (5) FL departments instantiate. In the introduction, "The Case for Remapping the Curriculum," Swaffar and Arens note that although the FL faculty's intellectual identity has changed in recent years, teaching practices have failed to keep abreast of this development. The book therefore seeks to remedy that problem.

The first chapter, "Scholars, Teachers, and Program Development," after laying down a critique of teaching practices that separate language learning from meaning, communication, and critical thinking, then suggests how to capitalize on the students' abilities as adult learners (and how to reduce their fear of advanced FL courses): by bringing form and content together from the start, and by introducing "intellectually challenging materials" (14) right away in the FL undergraduate program. The challenge then becomes how to create "teaching practices that integrate the field's intellectual content with language instruction" (15), a project described in chapter 2, "Linking Meaning and Language: Remapping the Discipline." Because the holistic approach to curricular planning proposed by Swaffar and Arens deals with the program as a whole—instead of individual courses viewed "as separately owned property" (12)—it also demands that faculty attention be refocused on that larger context, i.e., that all syllabi attend to "linguistic, conceptual and communicative framework in tandem" (29). Chapter 3, "The Holistic Curriculum: Anchoring Acquisition in Reading," describes how this can be done by drawing on the faculty's expertise with textuality and genres. (Some might object that the proposed curricular emphasis on reading will be achieved at the expense of oral communication). Learner's tasks combining language learning and the development of multiple literacies are presented for each stage of a holistic undergraduate program. They are further described in chapter 4, "A Template for Beginning- and Intermediate Learner Tasks: The Text Matrix for Staging Genre Reading," and chapter 5, "A Template for Advanced-Learner Tasks: Staging Genre Reading and Cultural Literacy through the Précis." The last two chapters demonstrate how to incorporate textual and cultural studies once "genres" are redefined as "texts for communication" (chapter 6, "From Reading to Reading Literature"); and once the cultural studies are linked "to a solid notion of cultural literacy" (chapter 7, "From Multiple Literacies to Cultural Studies: Constructing a Framework for Learning Culture"). The stakes of this curricular reform are spelled out in a coda: "Departments of FL can ill afford indifference to their own needs and ultimately to their future role in higher education" (193).

If Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum can be of great interest only to those who share the authors' concerns about the future of FL language studies in the United States, it also provides any FL department undergoing curricular reform with valuable information and with theoretical as well as with practical food for thought.