2010 CRITICAL AND INTERCULTURAL THEORY AND LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY

Article Framing ideas from classical language teaching, past and future

Author
Parker, Jan
Volume
2010 CRITICAL AND INTERCULTURAL THEORY AND LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY
Date Issued
2010-01-01
Keywords
Publisher
Heinle Cengage Learning
URI/DOI
10125/69684
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Citation
Parker, J. (2010). Framing ideas from classical language teaching, past and future. The American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators and Directors of Foreign Languages Programs (AAUSC), 112-124. http://hdl.handle.net/102015/69684
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Abstract
The Modern Language Association (MLA) Ad Hoc Committee report (MLA, 2007) raises large questions about the teaching not only of modern languages but of all cultural studies. What was striking were the many challenges that resonate with classical language teaching. In the study and teaching of classical languages, we have access only to vestigial and overtly alien and often alienating texts; the impossibility of mother-tongue competence or total immersion in the other’s culture actually provides a relevantly comparative model of the effect on identity of various kinds of intercultural study and the claims that can be made for such study in a global, complex, and destabilizing world. This chapter thus endorses the call to rethink and disseminate the values of our two related disciplines; it is throughout argued that “theory” should bring all of us into “the MLA project”: to reflect on models, lenses, and paradigms that enable real innovation.