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2.1.Teaching for Communicative and Cultural Competence: Spanish through Contemporary Mexican Topics.
The course was proposed as a result of a commitment on the part of the directors of SIPA to the concept of the integration of language and culture. In order for students in the U.S. to conduct significant research about other
countries, extensive knowledge of the culture, the politics, the economics, the literary history, and the sociology of those countries is essential. It was felt that this could best be accomplished by studying language as the concrete expression of a society. Mexico was chosen because of its special relevance to students in the United States whose specialization within the area of Latin American studies focused on Mexico or United States-Mexico relations from different disciplinary approaches. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, with its
economic, social, and political consequences and cultural implications on both sides of the border, added to the growing Mexican-origin populations in the United States, especially in the Southwest, makes this a fundamental
course for any Latin American or global studies program today.
The course at SIPA was modeled on a course created in the Spanish Section of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), described in the previous chapter. The success of the FSI program suggested that language students at an ILR level 2 of proficiency could benefit from the study of subject matter, rather than advanced grammar, syntax, and phonology.
The FSI program caught the attention of SIPA during the time when some language departments at Columbia University were moving toward proficiency testing as the best way to judge the degree of communicative and professional competence in a foreign language. The FSI, in an effort to improve its curriculum preparing Foreign Service personnel to serve in the American Embassy and consulates in Mexico, experimented with a "Mexican Spanish Course" as early as 1984. Statistical results between 1984 and 1986 showed that students who had already reached oral and reading proficiency levels of Speaking and Reading-2 could increase their levels to Speaking and Reading-3 in a significantly shorter period of time and, in addition, students were more culturally competent to work and live in Mexico. Through a partnership established between the FSI and the SIPA, the FSI Spanish Section cooperated with the author by sharing models, methods, and materials from its four-week immersion "Mexico Program." Although a course at Columbia had to take into consideration the goals of university students and an academic semester, the two fundamental goals of the FSI program remained the same at Columbia:
language competency and cultural literacy. Attention was directed to achieve total integration of language studies and area studies by focusing on a specific country, while raising students' Spanish proficiency. In order to adapt the FSI course to a university setting a rethinking had to occur that took into consideration the level of content preparation of the graduate students and the particular programs in which they were enrolled.
This reconceptualization brought about several changes, some major and others of a more technical nature.
One of the changes made in adapting the FSI model to Columbia was to use a valid yet more cost-efficient proficiency testing instrument. At the FSI the official oral proficiency test requires two testers and takes about ninety minutes to administer. Furthermore, the format and content of the FSI test is tailored to the Foreign Service population. For these reasons, the ACTEL proficiency test in Spanish was adopted for use in the SIPA pilot courses. It was generally agreed that the ACTFL test met acceptable scientific standards and was much more economicala fifteen- to thirty-minute exam administered by one individual. Since growth in oral proficiency was one of the central goals of the SIPA course, students' proficiency was measured both before and after the course. The requirement for admitting students to the course was set at ACTFL level 2, although nine of the thirty-six initial participants entered at the 1+ (Intermediate-High) level.
The Columbia course also differed from the FSI course in the teacher-student ratio and the intensity of the course.
Whereas the FSI classes averaged six students and met for six hours a day, the Columbia course averaged twelve
students and followed an eight-hour week in a fourteen-week academic program of study. Out-of-class reading was extensive: students were expected to do about seven to ten hours of homework a week.
Whereas the FSI program included little emphasis on formal writing, it was seen as an essential part of the Columbia course to reinforce vocabulary and grammar, and to improve overall language skills.
Goals and Objectives of the Course
The course on Mexico at Columbia was designed to fulfill the foreign language requirement for advanced-level language and literature for either the certificate or regional specialization in Latin American and Iberian studies for students in the School of International and Public Affairs. Students who took the course were graduate students studying for a master's degree at SIPA, Ph.D. students in history, political science, or anthropology, graduate students in Columbia Teachers College, law students, journalism students and other advanced undergraduate students who met the entrance requirements. The Mexico course also became a favorite course for Chicano students who had reached an advanced level of Spanish but who had little formal knowledge of the history, culture, or political system of Mexico. Chicano students especially appreciated the final topic of the course on United States-Mexico relations and Mexican-Americans in the United States.
The Philosophy and Organization of the Course
The Mexico course was designed to provide language students (especially graduates) with an alternative to upper division language courses that focused purely on grammar or on literature. The course was carefully designed to emphasize the acquisition of language through activities focused on themes, topics, and content; there was little focus on explicit rule learning or overt correction of errors. Every effort was made to assure that the content of the course was sequenced in such a way as to facilitate student comprehension. This was accomplished by carefully controlling the quantity and quality of the content of the material so that each lesson guided the student to a higher level of competence.
To facilitate student comprehension, all lessons were focused on specific topics, and a great deal of extra linguistic information was presented, especially visual stimuli. Each topic included at least one video
component. Receptive skills were initially emphasized in the design of the course so that in the beginning of each module, students were provided with both listening and reading activities on the specific topic. They were then required to present oral reports, to engage in discussion and debate, and finally to produce an essay, commentary, or editorial. Frequently, a study of a particular topic culminated with a visit to the class by a guest lecturer who led discussion and conversed with the students on the topic. Visitors to the class included many Mexican nationals visiting the New York area and Mexican graduate students from other departments at the university. The participation of Mexican guests was an essential component of the course, providing the students with "authentic" exchanges with a broad variety of Spanish-speakers on current, relevant, and ongoing debates. When possible, the colloquia of the guest speakers was filmed. The videos were used to review the discussion the following day or to introduce the same topic in a subsequent course the following semester. The formal study of morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and vocabulary was not overlooked. Discussion of grammatical topics, always in the context of the specific content activities, were an ongoing part of the curriculum and were always conducted in Spanish. For example, if students manifested problems using certain complicated verb structures in expressing their views and opinions, the correct usage of that structure was discussed within the specific communicative context, and not as an abstract topic perse. Correction techniques in the classroom were confined to unobtrusive, informal, and indirect methods and focused only on errors which interfered with communication. Attention to grammatical errors was more explicit in teachers' responses to written work, which was either corrected or discussed individually with students.
In the organization of the course content, every effort was made to orient the topics to the students' needs and specializations within the university curriculum. The topics were taught in a specific sequence, using the ACTFL proficiency guidelines to establish an order of gradual language acquisition. Although the Spanish instructors at the FSI felt that the order in which the topics were presented was not crucial, at Columbia this instructor became aware that the different topics lent themselves to the performance of certain linguistic tasks and that, studied in a specific order, they facilitated students' progress from 1+/2 to 2+/3. Thus, the topics were sequenced as follows: 1) The History of Mexico, 2) The Political System, 3) Means of Communication, 4) The Mexican Economy, 5) Geography and Demography, 6) The Arts, 7) Popular Culture, and 8) US-Mexican Relations. We began with history and used this topic, rich in facts and description, to emphasize narration and description in the past using, naturally and authentically, the preterit, imperfect, and other past verb forms. Literature was presented as reading material only after students had some insight into the overall cultural context which had produced the texts. A selection of some of Mexico's most important literature was studied after the students had a good grasp of the history, culture, and literary tradition of the country and were closer to a 2+ level of proficiency.
It was at this point that the study of literature became "comprehensible input" and a careful reading of the works of Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Martin Luis Guzman, or Elena Poniatowska took place. The topic of the Mexican world view and current US-Mexican relations (Appendix D) was saved for last because it required students to demonstrate a high degree of abstract and analytical thinking, defending of opinions, and hypothesizing activities associated with level 3 proficiency.
Course Materials and Activities
All the materials used were examples of authentic Mexican discourse. They included historical, biographical, and autobiographical accounts, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, film reviews, economic predictions and graphs, political speeches, poems, short stories, popular traditions, interviews, business letters, recipes, and tourist brochures. Some of the audio-visual materials included excerpts taken from the radio, popular songs, authors reading their works, movies, television programs, documentaries on the Mexican Revolution, interviews of prominent Mexican personalities, commercials, soap operas, slides and photographs. These materials formed the "text" of the course and, as such, required constant revision, addition, deletion, and editing. The focus on current events was an important factor in maintaining a high degree of student engagement. There were, of course, basic information topics, such as history and geography, that formed the core of the course, while other topics were updated on a regular basis in order to maintain maximum relevancy. Materials were selected and, in some cases, edited so that they became progressively more difficult and challenging. Listening activities began with videotaped interviews directed to a general audience on very specific topics and progressed toward films such as Luis Buñuel's los olvidados, a complex view of Mexico City in the fifties, in which the characters, representing different sectors of society, speak in their respective dialects.
Reading activities ranged from straightforward news articles and reporting of facts and events to interpretative articles in specialized journals and, only in the final weeks, to literary fiction and the highly metaphorical languages and imaginative structures of poetry and popular expressive forms. Speaking activities were designed to progress, over the course of the semester, from oral reports on factual information or events to defending the differing positions on controversial topics such as the "English Only" movement, the maquiladora industry (border assembly plants), the one-party system of government, the debt crisis, current social movements, and the environment. Using different speech registers and styles, students reported the news, sold a product, promoted a tourist attraction, reviewed a film, described a painting, interpreted a poem, gave a political speech, acted as advisor to the president, justified a foreign loan from an international bank, or took a position in the current debates on neoliberalism, democracy, and social justice.
Writing activities were structured so that students began by summarizing factual descriptions and ended by advancing an analysis of the bilateral relations between the United States and Mexico. There were many assigned readings and mini research projects. To complete assignments, it was essential that the students use Mexican periodicals such as La Jornada, Excelsior, Nexos, and Proceso.⁴
Overall, this course had very positive results in the cognitive, linguistic, and affective domains. The statistics given above, combined with the overwhelmingly favorable student reactions to the course, were very encouraging. Student evaluations demonstrate the potential for a course of this kind to achieve the goal of greater socio-cultural understanding through increased foreign language fluency.