Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. – Heidi Byrnes, George M. Roth Distinguished Professor of German at Georgetown University, will present her paper “Advanced Language and Content Acquisition in Collegiate Education: Challenges of the MLA Report.” at the Modern Language Association annual convention, held this year in San Francisco. Byrnes will respond to a number of structural and conceptual challenges set forth for collegiate foreign language departments and their faculty in the 2007 MLA report “Foreign languages and higher education: New structures for a changed world.”

With regard to the conceptual challenges, the report calls for foreign language programs to make recommendations regarding one of the report’s central concerns, namely that departments create integrated curricula that link the acquisition of cultural content and language and do so throughout the four-year undergraduate program.

“That educational goal inherently requires ways of conceptualizing advancedness in a second language and demands that a principled curricular progression be imagined, that a pedagogy toward advancedness be envisioned and substantiated, and that forms of assessment be created,” says Byrnes

“Each one of those areas is complex in and of itself,” says Byrnes. “The task becomes even more daunting considering that both second language acquisition research and practice have essentially been silent in all these areas as they apply to collegiate foreign language study.”

In her paper, Byrnes will lay out a conceptual framework for a four-year curricular progression that explicitly integrates cultural content and language acquisition, as developed and refined over more than a decade in Georgetown’s German department. For example, language learning at the third curricular level, the early Advanced level (often the third semester intensive course), is framed by learning about developments in post-World War II Germany, including the division of Germany into two separate states, the building of the wall and ultimately its fall in 1989, and the development of a highly diverse multicultural society. Those topics involve a gradual move from personal narratives to public narratives, a trajectory that fits well with the kind of language learning one expects of students at that level.

The framework being used is by now bolstered by rich quantitative and qualitative, cross-sectional and longitudinal data in the area of writing development. It is functionally oriented, semiotically grounded, and realized through a variety of thematically organized oral and written texts. She will also address the framework’s rationale and the nature of its curricular trajectory as well as principles for determining textual genres that are most appropriate along the articulated progression.

Heidi Byrnes' current research focuses on analysis of students’ writing development across the curricular level using the theoretical framework of systemic-functional linguistics. Based on data gathered at the end of four of the five curricular levels of the German Department's integrated genre-oriented and task-based curriculum, this research provides the first extended look at writing development in a foreign language at the college level, crosssectionally and longitudinally. In addition, she continues to explore the assessment of writing and speaking abilities of advanced instructed learners within a programmatic setting.

About the Modern Language Association

The Modern Language Association, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

About Georgetown University

Georgetown University is the oldest and largest Catholic and Jesuit university in America, founded in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll. Georgetown today is a major student-centered, international, research university offering respected undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar and around the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit www.georgetown.edu.