Introduction

The Language Flagship program's ambitious goal of enabling students to attain a minimum oral proficiency level of Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) 2 (Appendix A), to prepare them for extended study abroad (usually 9–12 months) and attainment of ILR 3 proficiency, presents major challenges to US universities (Murphy et al., this volume). In a typical non-immersion US foreign language (FL) program, learners typically stall below the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Advanced (ILR 2) level of proficiency (the phenomenon referred to as the 'ceiling effect', Rifkin, 2005). These findings seem to hold not only for undergraduate language majors in a four-year language program but even for pre-service language teacher candidates (Moeller, 2013).

The findings regarding the typical FL proficiency attainments of US learners reflect common curricular challenges faced by universities hosting Language Flagship programs. A limited number of contact hours (three to four hours of classroom instruction per week), limited active participation (i.e. speaking) time per student and scarce opportunities for individualized feedback in a typical North American FL university classroom are widely documented (Eaton, 2012; Maxwell & Garrett, 2002). The additional requirement of preparing students for year-long overseas cultural immersion in academic and professional settings requires sophisticated understanding of and comfort with pragmatic, discursive, cultural and strategic competencies underlying various functional roles that the students are to fulfill abroad (see Davidson et al., this volume). These high expectations present a formidable task, given that US FL classes are often isolated from authentic second language (L2) use outside of the classroom, and US language programs often present ‘limited opportunities for committed and consequential communicative engagement’ (Thorne, 2010: 139) with communities of L2 practice.

Given the numerous common curricular and instructional limitations, the challenge of meeting the ambitious goals of the Language Flagship (Nugent & Slater, this volume) requires thoughtful, systematic and committed instructional solutions and experimentation with new models of language learning that transcend the traditional boundaries of FL classrooms.