Whither critique in the world language department?

Introduction

As Ham and Schueller (2012) affirm in their chapter “Traditions and Transformations: Signature Pedagogies in the Language Classroom,” world language departments in the USA face an identity crisis. Language professors, broadly speaking, self-identify as literary and cultural critics, performing and teaching the same type of textual analyses as their colleagues in departments of English or composition and rhetoric. Yet, for others in the university, language departments are “mere ‘service departments’ responsible solely for providing students and presumably more essential disciplines with secondary language skills” (Ham and Schueller, 2012: 27). This view eschews the high-level research work done by language professors—the production of which is central to their identities as academics—and instead privileges the discrete skills learned in lower-division language courses. Teaching a “foreign” language is not the sole or even primary goal of most courses taught by language department faculty. ¹ To receive their degrees, undergraduate world language majors—many of whom arrive on campus with intermediate or even advanced linguistic competency in their language of study—must study the literature from different periods and genres, the practices of reading and interpretation, and the critical theory that undergirds such reading and interpretation, along with the expected upper-level grammar and conversation courses. Indeed, actually “learning the language” (think: memorizing nouns, verb conjugations, and sentence structure) occurs in classes intended largely for underclassmen. To graduate with an undergraduate degree in German, or Spanish, or French, then, certifies not only the ability to speak another language well but also, ideally, the ability to engage intelligently with the cultural practices and products of one or more non-English-speaking communities. In other words, an undergraduate degree in a world language is not a credential by another name.

Paradoxically, typical curricula in language departments exacerbate the misconceptions about the work of language professors while simultaneously presenting evidence as to their diverse research and teaching interests in the form of upper-level course offerings. The divide between language courses and literature courses (often referred to as “culture courses,” following the general trend towards “sexy” course titles that distract from intellectual content) and who teaches them indexes other discussions in the field about teaching versus research, contingent versus tenure-track faculty, and entertainment versus rigor. As it references the field’s current thoughts on teaching and learning, this same divide is reflected in the teaching philosophies and methodologies used in different types of courses. Despite the fact that the skills and knowledge acquired in language courses are essential to successful literary criticism, a discontinuity exists that finds language and literature in near constant disjuncture. From this disjuncture extends a series of consequences with regards to undergraduate and graduate education, hiring and promotion, institutional resource distribution, and, most pointedly, professional identity. Thus when Ham and Schueller (2012) highlight a crisis of identity in language departments, they are in in fact referencing a set of binaries that are commonly understood but rarely discussed. Because these binary understandings manifest themselves in teaching and learning practices, they further complicate any definition of a signature pedagogy in world language departments.

Briefly, signature pedagogy is a term that defines the teaching and learning practices inherent to a discipline of study. These practices manifest the discipline’s underlying assumptions about how “knowledge is analyzed, criticized, accepted, or discarded” (Shulman, 2005: 57). A famous example offered by Lee Shulman in “Signature Pedagogies in the Professions” is that of the Socratic method used in first-year law school classes. The instructor asks students questions in quick succession, often sticking with one student and one line of questioning for an extended period before moving on. Such questioning resembles the professional activities of the lawyer in the courtroom. Professors ask students “to read aloud the precise wording of a contract or legal ruling,” in order to prepare them for a life of close reading in the legal profession (Shulman, 2005: 53). Even the typical arrangement of the classroom space in these classes, a semi-circle of seats that allows students to look at one another while speaking embodies the goal of the professional school curriculum to train future lawyers. The point here is that the Socratic method is more than tradition. It is a pedagogical practice that makes tangible the epistemological and ethical perspectives of legal education.

“Pervasive” as they are, signature pedagogies often go unnoticed (Shulman, 2005: 54). Yet, every discipline maintains a set of commonly accepted teaching and learning practices that train students to think like disciplinary experts. In the world languages, this has evolved, as I show in the section on Pedagogical narratives. While rote memorization may have been the gold standard of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Skype interviews with native speakers are much more common in the twenty-first century. However, a signature pedagogy is more than just classroom practices. When law professors demand students cite statutes verbatim, they are doing more than training their students in the soft skill of reading aloud with confidence: they convey the central role of textual analysis in the discipline. To be precise, Shulman (2005) identifies three layers to any signature pedagogy. Concrete teaching and learning practices—for example, the Socratic method, rote memorization—form the surface structure. Beneath this, a deep structure and an implicit structure—that is, the assumptions about how best to teach disciplinary content and moral reasoning about what the discipline values, respectively—inform the visible surface structure.

At the heart of signature pedagogy in the world language department, I locate a belief in the power of language to shape reality, whether through perception or production. This is the implicit structure of the world languages’ signature pedagogy. At all levels, we seek to transform students into engaged cultural actors, conscious of their positions in the world and capable of reaching beyond them. Despite this coherent foundation, world language departments present a diversity of signature pedagogical practices at the deep and surface levels—that is, the levels seen by students, administrators, and outsiders. Following historic divisions between language and literature courses in world language departments, the ways we interpret our disciplinary desire to educate students in the capacities and pitfalls of language have bifurcated along Borgesian lines. What may be signature pedagogy in a language course—form-focused repetition, for instance—would be out of place in a literature course. This is also true in the inverse. Yet, between language and literature courses lies a shared implicit structure that maintains the centrality of language to the human experience.

In this essay, I will argue that critique, a practice common to humanities disciplines, responds to this implicit structure, thereby offering the possibility to cleave—together, rather than apart—the two sides of the world languages department. Unifying the pedagogies of languages and literature courses provides students with a more continuous experience as they travel through the world language curriculum, making the utility of content and skills learned in one class more transparently transferrable to other classes. At the same time, this unity can provide a similar continuity of experience for instructors who often teach courses on both sides of the divide, allowing them to hone pedagogical skills that support their effective teaching and learning in all of their courses. Furthermore, operationalizing critique as a signature pedagogy in world language departments may help correct traditional assumptions about the utilitarian and, according to the same skewed thinking, less intellectual, ends of the language department. In a time when the perpetual crisis of the humanities is being felt so acutely in funding cuts and tenure-line reductions, solidarity among humanities departments offers a united front to policy makers and budget writers. This solidarity in the humanities, manifested through critique, is the subject of the second section of this essay. Following that, I explain the discourse of division and crisis that plagues the history of teaching and learning in world language departments. In the fourth and final section of this essay, I elucidate the possible forms assumed by a unifying critique in the world language department, which I call “bilingual critique,” as well as its potential benefits to students and instructors alike.

Critique and corrective feedback

The term critique often functions as a catachresis of sorts, to borrow from Spivak (1990), condensing under one sign a multitude of practices in the humanities. For our purposes, critique represents a practice of collaborative textual evaluation that is at once pedagogically- and professionally-minded. In the world language department, this is easily imagined in the practice of reading and writing literary criticism. Criticism itself, to be clear, is not the critique I am referencing: that is, the process by which students as a group evaluate a classmate’s or an outside scholar’s writing in order to shape its content and style to match disciplinary standards. Yet in language courses, students receive what is called corrective feedback on their own language production. Corrective feedback replicates, in means and ends, the critique associated with textual production in literature courses.

Imagine this situation familiar to anyone who has taken a language course in the United States. One morning early in the semester of an intermediate language course, the instructor asks her class at large what they did over the weekend. As students offer examples of activities—“I went to a party” or “I studied in the library”—the instructor listens for errors of conjugation and noun-adjective concordance. When a student says, for example, “Yesterday, I go out to eat,” she may say, “Ah, yesterday you went to eat. Where did you eat?” This subtle correction of the student’s verb tense, from present to past, reminds students who are listening in on the exchange as part of this warm-up about the rules for past-tense verb conjugation. This form of corrective feedback is called recasting, one of many forms of corrective feedback. These may be undertaken by students in peer groups or with the instructor, as in this example. Similar to the critique of a piece of writing in the literature course, such exercises collaboratively evaluate a product—in this case, language—with an eye towards improving usage according to disciplinary norms—in this case, standard grammatical usage of the target language.

Corrective feedback is the dominant method in many language classrooms, despite recent scrutiny (Ellis, 2009). It is a signature pedagogy in the language class, just as critique is a signature pedagogy in the literature class. Both educate students in the skills and thinking of experts in the discipline. Moreover, they are signature to the discipline in their mimicking of real-life situations that students with a world language degree may face. Correction of language use through subtle feedback, like the instructor’s in the example above, is a common experience for non-native speakers abroad. It is much more common, surely, than an interaction in which the native speaker stops a conversation about weekend happenings to explain the rules for conjugating in the past tense in her language.

Critique recruits a number of critical skills and key disciplinary knowledge. To effectively evaluate or assess an object of study like an expert, students must be comfortable deploying disciplinary epistemology in an exercise that is at once personal and dialogic. In the language classroom of world language departments, critique often takes the form of the careful deconstruction and parsing of a student-generated or published text. Critique provides instructors another point of contact with students, potentially improving the classroom community, and can be useful as a formative assessment. Listening to a student critique the work of a peer, for instance, offers insight into how students approach their own processes of creation, whether aesthetic, scholarly, or somewhere in between. Critique in a non-native language may be challenging given that the content knowledge required to critique another’s work generatively may be matched in difficulty by the specialized vocabularies associated with the object of critique and the cultural competencies one needs to interact respectfully in another language. Surely, the thinking goes, these skills can be mastered only after several years of intensive language study, courses about similar content in a cognate discipline in the student’s native language, and, perhaps, time abroad in a native-speaking country or region. Why shouldn’t critique remain the purview of upper-division literature classes?

Corrective feedback can take many forms depending on the perception of the instructor. Examples include rephrasing a student’s question to correct for errors in verb conjugation or feigning misunderstanding and asking a student to repeat herself if she has made a grammatical mistake when speaking. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA, 1998) defines six types of corrective feedback for classroom use: (1) correction, (2) recast, (3) clarification request, (4) metalinguistic clues, (5) elicitation, and (6) repetition (1998: 1). Like critique, corrective feedback is dialogic and reflexive. It activates background knowledge while testing the limits of students’ knowledge. In that way, it can be useful as a formative assessment as well and provides the groundwork for critique.

Corrective feedback is not critique in that it lacks the essential transparency of critique, the explicitly shared goal among students and professors to improve a product. Corrective feedback, moreover, often places an emphasis on perfection in language use, an impossibility, first of all, that runs counter to the idea inherent to critique that all participants have valuable perspectives to offer. Additionally, Hall (2000) notes that corrective feedback, unlike critique, may better serve individual learners instead of communities of learners. Corrective feedback departs from the implicit structure of signature pedagogy in world language departments in that at the root of the discipline lies an attention to communities. Culture belongs to the collective rather than the individual, and language is a tool for communication. Without an interlocutor, there would be no reason to learn another tongue. Language departments make this thinking tangible in their advertisements: learn this language, they say, because this many millions of people speak it; or learn this language to read this or that famous text. These forms of communication render the dialogic essential to thinking about teaching and learning in world languages.

I argue that the divide between literature and language classes, a divide primarily in content, has engendered a divide in the pedagogical practices of the discipline. As I show in the next section, historical ghettoization of the language classroom as a less-intellectual space than the literature classroom has meant that critique, in the generative sense meant here, is read as proper only to the literature class. In language courses where learning language takes center stage, faculty mobilize a range of tools for evaluating student performance. Critique is not one of these tools, which means that students arriving in literature courses fail to see the connections between the content and skills of their language and literature courses. As a result, many fail to enroll in upper-level courses, which they view as unrelated to the endeavor of learning a second language and culture. I propose that this uneven distribution of critique heightens the sense for many that world language classes are less rigorous (here, rigorous serves as a euphemism for intellectual) and, ironically, useful not as an object of study in their own right but in the study of other forms of knowledge. It is an inequality, I argue, that has been engendered by the narratives of language departments—as told at individual, departmental, institutional, and national levels—over the course of their existence. Where does critique, a teaching and learning practice thought to lie at the heart of the humanities, fall in this divide? Having already established that pedagogy is informed by and informs the disciplinary divide between languages and literatures, how might the recuperation of critique, a technique associated with the humanities “proper,” engender a new sort of communication, an intra-disciplinarity of sorts?

Pedagogical narratives

The uncomfortable tension between language and literature courses means that language departments have long been home to multiple pedagogies in parallel and often simultaneous practice. Indeed, in the introduction to Exploring Signature Pedagogies, Ciccone (2009: xv) asserts as much: “Is there a signature pedagogy that unifies these learning experiences?”, he asks of the world language classroom. While Ciccone does not venture a definite answer, he circumspectly hints at a set of shared principles in language departments. Instruction in world language departments focuses on the expression and interpretation of human experience through communication. Separating the practice of teaching languages and literatures has not stifled the generative atmosphere that allows for, even encourages, innovation and experimentation, and a close reading of the narrative of teaching and learning in world languages departments sheds light on the discipline’s current signature pedagogy. What is more, it illustrates the complex web of stakeholders invested in the teaching of non-English languages and literatures, and ultimately guides increased pedagogical overlap between language and literature departmental “factions.” I propose that any future must include critique at all levels of the curriculum if we are to best serve our students and provide for our continued disciplinary existence.

It should not be difficult to fold critique into language courses or to re-energise it where it already exists, given that constant evolution has been the defining characteristic of language pedagogy since the creation of modern language departments around the turn of the twentieth century when, in a time of growing international commerce and conflict, universities began to organize departments around the language and literary production of European nation-states (Kramsch and Kramsch, 2000: 557). Then, modern language departments operated without the aura of erudition afforded to scholars of antiquity. Modern language departments were intended instead to shore up national identity and validate the nation-state through the creation of national canons, to develop dictionaries and standards, and to translate non-English texts for Americans (Kramsch and Kramsch, 2000: 557). Research and teaching in these departments relied upon the grammar-translation model of Classics departments to teach languages and a hermeneutic method of textual exegesis to teach literature (the infamous explication de texte), in which texts hold “hidden” meanings available to readers who have been properly trained to uncover them. Professors suss out these meanings in class with their students, and students, in turn, are expected to learn to read like their professors. Not only does this model focus on the course instructor as opposed to her learners, but also it places content ahead of process. ² Explication de texte relies upon positivist ideas about textual meaning to instill a sense of the canon and to cultivate literary appreciation, which is a vague and highly classed euphemism for reading according to standard practice.

Successful mastery of a modern language, as opposed to a classical one, does not necessarily hinge upon the skills of reading and writing. New arenas of competency—namely, listening and speaking—open up in the world languages classroom. Innovation and evolution of audio and audiovisual technology allows instructors to drift from the center of classroom exercises and to cede some authority. While in literature classrooms explication de texte reigns supreme, instructors maintain ultimate authority over the “correct” interpretation of a text, in language classrooms, instructors often act as proxies for native speakers, a process that indeed resembles critique, and all participants may be stakeholders in the process. Much as in critique, instructors in such classrooms can become facilitators as opposed to encyclopedic icons. Critique clearly has a basis in the history of both language and literature courses and, consequently, should not be considered the sole practice of literature courses.

Critiques, or practices resembling critique, worked their way out of language courses following the professionalization of language teaching at mid-twentieth century. As became clear during post-Second World War and Cold War pushes for Americans to learn other languages, the language classroom, perhaps even more than others, is a contested political space. In modern language classes, fluency is the endgame of many policy makers and students alike. Unlike critique, which views products as inherently processual (never is a piece of writing truly finished, we often tell our students), language pedagogy became about perfection. But language is an imperfect endeavor; even native speakers make mistakes in their mother tongue. Language constantly evolves, which dovetails with the goals of critique to view the object as process rather than product. In a 1982 article whose title is the inspiration for this one, “Whither Language Departments? An Answer?,” Jory (1982: 365) proposes a recontextualization of literature as “just one code of many,” thus symbolically dethroning the upper-level literature course as a culminating experience and elevating language from a skill to an object of study located along a disciplinary spectrum of objects of study.

Today, we observe a retrenching of the language–literature split and growing differences in pedagogy (Byrnes, 2002). The “divided house” of the language department, to use Byrnes’ term, became even more divided as the growing fields of Second Language Acquisitions (SLA) and applied linguistics found disciplinary homes in language departments. ³ Scholars in SLA and applied linguistics research questions of language learning and use. Because much of this research is social science in nature and methods, yet it resides in world language departments, the disciplinary assumptions brought to bear on teaching are highly diverse. Accordingly, what is signature pedagogy in world language departments must also be expanded.

According to two recent studies by Wurst (2008) and Pratt et al. (2008), a succinct status report on world language departments might read something like this: Not enough funding. Too many contingent faculty. Wurst (2008: 5) isolates the recent funding and attention for critical language study as an ambiguous force in language departments that benefits some and disadvantages others. A new focus on accountability and assessment in language instruction mandates quantitative data. From enrollment numbers to the results of standardized summative assessments, numerical data are often used to undermine more humanistic approaches to evaluation when it is understood as more authoritative than the latter. As a result, qualitative methods of assessment, such as critique, have been (un)officially discouraged. In a study commissioned by the Modern Language Association (MLA), Pratt et al. (2008: 290–291) find that a combination of scarce resources and institutional priorities has contributed to a less favorable ratio of contingent to tenure track instructors in world language departments. ⁴ As a result of increased hiring of contingent faculty to teach only language courses, the MLA Report imagines a bleak future where “language education will migrate to training facilities where narrowly focused teaching supplants intellectually informed education” (Pratt et al., 2008: 291). The consequences of teaching in the discipline are still little understood. Regardless, this system, which places lecturers teaching language on the bottom and professors teaching literature on top, deprives graduate students of relevant experience for the job market, thereby delaying or even hobbling a new generation of instructors. The professors of literature with whom graduate students interact and from whom they receive their primary training cannot prepare them for the realities of the available future positions, which further abets the ongoing transformation of world languages departments. Although teaching is often discarded as less valuable to the institution than research, it still forms a part of this discursive network of prestige. As a result, what is taught and learned, how so, and by whom become important variables when thinking through disciplinary pedagogies. Practicing critique in the language classroom will help revalue the work of language instructors, in teaching and in research, as scholarly in its own right.

Bilingual critique: a new intradisciplinarity

I have focused intently on the historical and ideological contexts that generate, nurture, and support a two-tiered system wherein prestige and the perception of value concentrate in upper-division world language courses, whose content skews heavily towards literature and culture and whose learning is guided by tenure-track faculty. I have illustrated how this binary model of language versus literature in world language departments extends pervasively to encompass the distribution of institutional resources and conceptions of professional identity. Pedagogically, the symptoms of the separation between language and literature seem to resist diagnosis somewhat. Parsing out the consequences of a divide that is equal parts cognitive, historical, and utilitarian without sufficient data is a task made even more difficult as a result of the sheer number of different programs, departmental structures, and institutions charged with modern language education. Harper (2008: 299) cites this “kaleidoscope of settings […] an infinite number of variations and possibilities for language learning” as the main obstacle to distilling any sort of discipline-wide recommendations from even the MLA’s detailed data. Despite the dearth of data and the diversity of settings, the implications of this divide are clear. A chasm exists in the world language department. Communication across this chasm—or, even better yet, the cross-pollination of ideas—remains a challenge (Pratt et al., 2008: 289). This challenge, I assert in the final section of this essay, is worthy of our efforts. For, at the bottom of this chasm lies a common history and, significantly, a shared set of beliefs about what we do in world languages instruction. This implicit structure supports the repurposing of critique as a signature pedagogy in our classrooms. Yet, such a critique must account for the specificities of teaching both language and literature courses.

I call this new critique “bilingual critique” because it speaks fluently in the two codes—language and literature—of the world language department. Bilingual critique combines essential elements of critique in literature courses with signature practices of teaching and learning in language courses. It incorporates a sense of equal consideration among all contributors to the critique process, a focus on process over product, and a transparency of disciplinary expertise. From language courses, bilingual critique takes close attention to syntax and word choice, a respect for differences engendered by distinct cultural practices, and the desire to become fluent in the cultural codes of other peoples. Implemented in a literature classroom, bilingual critique involves drawing more attention during the process of critique as already practiced to the specific uses of language in literary analysis, to the socio-cultural underpinnings of register and tone, and to the desire of an object to communicate. In a language classroom, bilingual critique demystifies the iconic status of the native speaker, imagining students and professors alike as speakers of their target language. The target language itself becomes the text for critique, which empowers students to imagine themselves as members of a community of language speakers by virtue of their presence in the classroom. In this way, bilingual critique in the language classroom respects disciplinary beliefs in that it puts communication at the heart of the learning experience.

Bilingual critique is just the pedagogical practice to unify the concerns and agendas of the different stakeholders in world languages. Indeed, I believe it will be necessary for the continued survival of a recognizable world language department, one in which students can learn to make meaning of the signs and symbols of other cultures. Earlier in this essay, I commented on the valuable skills and knowledge students hone in the process of critique. The higher-order skills—generative criticism, interpretive clarity, and balancing claims to truth—and the content knowledge students gain are founded upon even more foundational skills and knowledge, namely, the ability to produce and interpret meaning. To return to Ciccone (2009) in the foreword to Exploring Signature Pedagogies, the meaning-making process is the stuff of both language and literature:

Is there a signature pedagogy that unifies these learning experiences [in world language departments]? Perhaps not yet, but one thread seems common: Language instruction throughout the curriculum must lead learners to understand how meaning is made and expressed in different cultures and how making sense of experience, and expressing that sense, lies at the core of the human experience. (xv)

Language professors may object on the grounds that it would be impossible for them to become as fluent in another field as its “native speakers,” given their training and practice. Scott (2009), a professor of both applied linguistics and French literature, takes to task this limited vision of bilingualism in Double Talk. She suggests that bilingualism need not be defined as near-native competency in two languages. Indeed, to define it thusly hinders students in the classroom by devaluing student language use as merely imitative or incipient. Scott asserts that if we are taught to consider ourselves bilingual at the start of the process, we feel more empowered. As a result, we may participate more and even shift our self-identities. Likewise, in learning bilingual critique, professors must become bilingual in this looser sense, in the sense that empowers them to speak out, connect with something slightly foreign, and be ready to ask for clarification. If bilingual critique became the standard signature pedagogy of world language departments, students would also feel themselves similarly empowered as cultural agents in their own right, responsible for finding the answers to their questions, and comfortable with not knowing.

I argue that this sort of bilingualism manifests itself in bilingual critique by amalgamating elements of critique as it has historically been imagined in the literature classroom and of corrective feedback as developed in the language classroom. Bilingual critique recruits students to serve as mediators and producers of culturally informed knowledge. Instructors work with students to examine texts, broadly defined to include cultural artifacts of all kinds, and to guide them, as co-creators of knowledge, in the process making meaning from them. In my Elementary Spanish classroom, I use weekly discussions on a sentence or passage we read that week in the department’s required textbook. In this discussion, which takes place first in small groups and later as a whole class, students closely analyze the text. As a group, we pick apart the underlying assumptions the text makes, the effect of different parts versus the effect of the composite, and the cultural biases underlying our own reading practices. For instance, looking at the vocabulary list of our first chapter, several students led a lively discussion on pronouns that included questions as to subject formation in English versus Spanish and denigrations of the textbook’s stereotypical drawings of stereotypically feminine women and overtly masculine men used to speak about grammatical gender. This exercise of bilingual critique facilitates students’ self-awareness as producers of knowledge in more than one cultural context. It develops class community by committing students to formulate and defend ideas with peers. As an instructor, it allows me to impart transparent critical skills for negotiating the real world. It is satisfying to know that students leave the first week of class with both a list of phrases and words and a new vocabulary in both languages for discussing gender inequities, in this instance.

Leaving critique to the literature side in world language departments dilutes their very disciplinarity, that is, their shared experience and possibilities for solidarity. By limiting a key element of expert practice in literary criticism—and of “doing” the humanities generally—to the final year or years of study, students have less time to practice as experts in the discipline. What is more, the ghettoization of critique reinscribes a dissonance within language departments wherein cognate disciplines may offer more affinity than one’s own: language classrooms that fail to incorporate humanities pedagogies into their practice deny themselves. At a time when the defensive call to circle the wagons is as loud as ever, language classrooms could benefit from and contribute to promoting the humanities in the academy and in civil society. When professional identities of language teachers are left to languish, unequal professional treatment arises, and unequal treatment across the profession, and particularly in training and hiring, weakens the stability and coherence of the department and the discipline.

Prior examples of pedagogical innovation, while positive gestures towards reconciliation in the discipline, lack the essential component of critical reflection. Brookfield (1995) firmly maintains that reflection on the paradigmatic and structural assumptions underlying teaching choices leads to more democratic and trusting classrooms. Like a bilingual traveling through a borderland, a skilled instructor is receptive to distinct voices in the classroom, voices that may not, at first, be mutually intelligible. Yet, she is capable of translating for herself and others. She finds significance in more than one way of being. What is more, the bilingual instructor not only interprets meaning but produces it as well. In their report on the field, Pratt et al. (2008) propose the institution of transcultural and translingual competencies as the guiding principle of education in language classrooms. Transcultural and translingual competencies emphasize training students in cultural inquiry and correct language use “at all levels,” that is in both language and literature courses (Pratt et al., 2008: 290). Several examples of this call to bilingual pedagogies have arisen in recent years. Among the most exciting come from language professors refocusing courses on the text, broadly defined, responding to Jory’s (1982: 365) call to consider literature “just one code of many”. Bartholomae (2002) imagines teaching foreign texts in translation to enhance departmental reach and bring language students to literature earlier in the curriculum. Magnan (2004: 104) demands a similar attention be paid to texts as the common thread running through the diverse epistemologies of language and literature courses. Postmodernists Kramsch and Kramsch (2000) identify a strategy that resembles Jory’s: literature and its signature pedagogical practices can be reinvigorated when conceptualized as the “poetic function of language” (569). Scholar-teachers who adopt these strategies can develop a “student-centered pedagogy” that teaches grammar and syntax in the process of interpreting texts and situating them within global and local contexts (Kramsch and Kramsch, 2000: 569).

Taken together, these voices from across the many fields of world language departments endeavor to achieve what I have termed bilingualism in the discipline. Undoubtedly, these thoughtful meditations on the state of the discipline and pioneering ideas for the future suggest a larger attitude-shift underway that benefits student learning. By focusing attention on the schismatic nature of world language departments, by devoting resources to research on evidenced-based high-impact practices in language teaching, and by forcing the field to examine its teaching practices, the current groundswell in favor of reflection and reconciliation in the discipline offers exciting opportunities for innovation. While the future seems less dim from my perspective than the constant crisis discourse of the humanities would have it, it is in no way guaranteed. Intradisciplinary bilingualism provides a cooperative framework for enacting a unified praxis of teaching.

Within world language departments, bilingualism is already the privileged model for mediating dual systems of meaning and is the unspoken goal of many undergraduate students who decide to major in a world language. Almost uniformly, language professors are already forced to use more than one language to communicate. In bilingualism, then, world language departments now have a framework for managing simultaneous and parallel systems of meaning. I propose that we stop imagining language and literature as two fields coincidentally sharing office space. Rather, I propose that we treat them as two related languages that professors on both sides of the disciplinary divide must learn and use.

Despite deeply held beliefs about the importance of communication in world language departments, a dialogue is missing in our own teaching and research. The divide in our discipline—a divide in research, in pedagogy, and in privilege—is detrimental not only to our future survival but also to our students’ success. No one puts it as succinctly as Swaffar (1999: 159) in “The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline,” in which she asserts that “the professional disjuncture between language and literary studies is not only capricious but counterproductive”. Bilingual critique offers a signature pedagogical solution to this “capricious and counterproductive” disjuncture. Isolating meaning-making as the common thread of inquiry in all of the subfields brought together under the umbrella of the world language department, bilingual critique is the pedagogical praxis that connects advances in language teaching and the humanistic practice of critique. One last question, which may sound familiar to cautious readers of the narrative of our discipline: whither critique in the world language department?