Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Perspectives On Curriculum Construction At The Postsecondary Level: Contexts, Approaches, Principles, Heidi Byrnes

Russian Language Journal

A curriculum is an attempt, wrote Stenhouse three decades ago (1975, 4), to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that it is open to critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation into practice.

If one applies that notion of curriculum to the foreign language field in general, and to second- or foreign-language learning in U.S. colleges and universities in particular, one is immediately confronted with a dilemma: how can we speak of a foreign-language curriculum at the college level when a principled approach that is open to scrutiny and that builds on …