Mapping and Cognitive Development in the Teaching of Foreign Language Writing

Abstract

MANY UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENTS throughout the country are beginning to examine their curricula critically in order to analyze the apparent difficulties students experience in moving from intermediate to advanced courses, and to help smooth the transition from the study of language to literary or cultural studies. Despite the fact that college programs vary in their class time, size, and approaches to language teaching, one message seems to come through: faculty and students alike express a retrospective dissatisfaction with students' levels of foreign language preparation when they arrive in advanced literature and civilization classes. Most often this dissatisfaction takes the form of perceived student disorientation in advanced courses where expectations suddenly seem to them to have changed. Lower-division programs tend to concern themselves with the acquisition of the basics of language: students work on grammar; read texts of various types; write short pieces describing, narrating, or giving an opinion; and practice speaking, most often discussing personal subjects or giving summaries of the reading material. By contrast, students in upper-division programs are frequently expected to analyze authentic, often literary, texts: to discuss them critically, and to write about them as they might in an English course. As can be seen from this brief description, the difference between the two levels centers on the type of tasks they require. Intermediate-level courses are oriented toward the acquisition of fundamental skills, with students engaging in expressive activities mainly to buttress language skills. In upper-division classes, however, the orientation may be much more analytical, with an emphasis on original, interpretive thinking. To put this another way, lower-division language programs tend to emphasize skills acquisition rather than to focus on developing higher-level thinking, whereas upper-division courses look for analytical thinking and assume that mechanical skills are in place. Much of the difficulty students experience during the transition from intermediate to advanced classes can ultimately be traced to this difference in the types of communicative tasks expected of them. An assumption commonly made by instructors at both the lower- and upper-division levels is that higher-level thinking is not

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