ABSTRACT

The challenge that we have set for ourselves in this volume is to try to offer a start for understanding why this situation continues to exist in our society. We take as a given that foreign language education in American public schools is largely unsuccessful at producing individuals competent in second languages. We also take as a given that this lack of success is not due to any particular methodological or pedagogical failure on the part of foreign language teachers. To be sure, some foreign language teachers are better than others, some are more competent in the languages that they teach than others, and some foreign language programs are better designed and implemented than others. These factors alone do not, and cannot, explain the overwhelming nature of our failure to achieve our articulated goals. Rather, to explain why foreign language education is relatively unsuccessful in contemporary American society, we need to look more critically at the social, political, cultural, historical, and economic context in which foreign language education takes place. Only by contextualizing the experience of the foreign language learner, we believe, can one begin to understand both what is taking place in foreign language education and why it is taking place.