Few would disagree with the philosophy behind the National Standards for Foreign Language Education (Standards 2006: 7): ‘The United States must educate students who are equipped linguistically and culturally to communicate successfully in a pluralistic American society and abroad’. Eleven years after their creation, the National Standards have had a major impact on K-12Footnote ¹ foreign language curriculum in the United States, in the form of state standards and curricular guides modeled on them (see Lewelling & Rennie Reference Lewelling and Rennie1998, for an early count of states influenced by the National Standards). The impact is arguably less at the postsecondary level (Long Reference Long2005; Swaffar Reference Swaffar2006) even though the standards are purported to pertain to teaching K-16 (see forums in ADFL Bulletin 31, 1, 1999 and 31, 2, 2000, for postsecondary impact).Footnote ²

Although broadly used, the Standards are not without criticism. Osborn & Reagan (Reference Osborn and Reagan1998: 3) warned that the Standards are framed against a backdrop of ‘social expectation of failure’ because ‘[i]t is clear that most students, parents, teachers, and policy-makers do not seriously expect [foreign language education] to succeed’. From the perspective of the Standards, however, an expectation of success or failure is not associated with social class or educational background, for, as Tucker (Reference Tucker2000: 54) explained. the Standards ‘are based on the pluralistic idea that all students should be able to engage in meaningful foreign language study’. We might ask: Are our National Standards likely to produce Americans who are linguistically and culturally equipped to use other languages and to enter other discourse communities? Can we go from the National Standards to language use in a pluralistic American society and in diverse communities abroad? Will the National Standards take us there?

In this paper, I question how well the Standards represent our current thinking of what language is and how it is learned. I also consider whether the Standards offer the most viable route to how languages are currently taught with communicative approaches to language instruction, in particular the presumed acceptance of Communication as the most fundamental of the five standards.

1. The National Standards

Now over a decade old, the National Standards grew out of a task force of foreign language educators in 1996 that examined ‘what foreign language education should prepare students to do’ (Standards, p. 13).

Summarized by five concepts, each of which begins with the letter C (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, Communities), the Standards offer goals for foreign language learning K-16. The goals center on the notion ‘What students should know and be able to do with the foreign language’. By offering goals for student learning, the Standards were designed to have a strong influence on foreign language teaching. Sarroub & Moeller (Reference Sarroub, Moeller and Nerenz1999: 69) attested to the influence, claiming that there had been a ‘gradual shift from viewing a teaching method as the organizing principle of instruction to defining and measuring what a learner is able to do’.

The reference to ‘organizing principle’ here recalls, of course, the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. In the introduction to the Standards, the relationship between the Standards and the Proficiency Guidelines is made explicit: the Standards are highly influenced by the Proficiency Guidelines, particularly in the area of communication, but they go beyond the proficiency scale's measurement of ‘how well’ students perform in each of the four skills to set learning, and thus teaching, goals of integrating skills and explicitly including elements of foreign language learning that historically have been seen as outside of communication proper. These elements are typified in the Standards for Culture, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities.

A graphic logo of five interlocking circles, one for each C or Standard, serves to represent the ‘weave of curricular elements’ (Standards, p. 33) necessary for teaching learners to meet these multiple goals. Although the logo suggests well that instruction needs to present ‘an interconnected whole’ (Standards, p. 99) of the elements of foreign language study, it is not clear how any one C relates to any other. In the logo each concept does not interlink with each other one; for example, Communities does not interlink with Culture although we would readily acknowledge that a community exists within a culture or perhaps that a culture comes from a community. There is also a suggested hierarchy through the position of the Communication Standard at the top of the logo. In fact, in the Standards document and references to it each Standard is numbered: Communication 1, Cultures 2, Connections 3, Comparisons 4, and Communities 5. Does this numbering system simply offer a way to refer to each Standard? Or does it reflect an intended primacy of certain goals over others? Even if a hierarchy of Standards is not intended, does use of a numbering system and a logo with Communication on top and Communities and Cultures not interlinked, lead us to base curricula change on a limited, or uninformed set of assumptions?

A closer look at the Standards shows that each Standard is accompanied by what is termed ‘content areas’; for example, Communication is divided into three modes: interpersonal, interpretative, and presentational. The Standards also offer learning scenarios that suggest how teachers can weave the five standards and their content areas throughout the curriculum. The message is clear: it is not productive to divide learning into the four skills. Rather, language teaching needs to focus on language use (talking with and understanding others; presenting information orally and through texts). A highly communicative classroom, in which the Standards are anchored (Schulz Reference Schulz2006), thus features role plays, imagination scenarios (cf. Valette Reference Valette1997), activities helping students enter into the personalities of protagonists in films and stories, research tasks on the internet, presentations stimulating reflection and comparison of languages and cultures, and forays into communities through efforts such as service learning.

When we think of these communicatively-oriented activities, we readily ask: Are these Standards new? Will they truly change the way foreign languages are taught and learned? In fact, Christine Brown, chair of the Standards task force, acknowledged that these language learning goals were built from a consensus of practitioners well anchored in the history of the field.

Brown's statement highlights the collective thinking behind the Standards and their general acceptance by the teaching profession. In fact, the term consensus is often used in the professional literature in relation to the Standards (K. Phillips Reference Phillips1998; Lally Reference Lally2000), which would suggest an alignment among teachers in terms of the goals set for students and the teaching practices developed to help learners achieve them.

It is commonly believed that the Standards reinforced and helped advance approaches to communicative language teaching as the dominant pedagogical framework of the mid-1990s. In fact, the influence of the Standards can be seen as a continuation of the influence in the 1980s of the Proficiency Guidelines, which gave way to proficiency-oriented instruction, one of many orientations in the multiple approaches considered congruent with communicative language teaching today. Sarroub & Moeller (Reference Sarroub, Moeller and Nerenz1999: 69) put it well: ‘The change toward communicative classrooms can perhaps be the most important step in the process of implementing the five Cs.’ But Abrate (Reference Abrate, Alley and Heusinkveld1998: 24) looked at consensus in another way: rather than consensus toward a new direction, she suggested that the consensus behind the Standards was a reflection of the current practice. She said that ‘the National Standards . . . represent an attempt to codify what is actually occurring in many classrooms across the country and to encourage others to emulate these models’. The lingering question then is: Do the Standards simply reinforce, and spread, the status quo or do they advance teaching in terms of current understanding of learning?

2. Influence of the Standards on teaching

From the professional literature it is clear that the Standards are perceived as influencing how language instruction is framed. In the Standards document itself the five Cs are situated ‘as a starting point for more clearly defining what students should know and be able to do as a result of language study, reinforced by the metaphor that they will ‘act as beacons, as guidelines, for state and local districts in both short- and long-range planning’ (Standards, p. 69). Indeed, a variety of terms for organizational starting points have been associated with the Standards: ‘blueprint for . . . developing a curriculum’ (Overfield Reference Overfield2002: 32); ‘road map’ and ‘cornerstone’ of curriculum (Sarroub & Moeller Reference Sarroub, Moeller and Nerenz1999: 61); ‘reference point for groups developing documents’ (Abrate1998: 19); ‘catalyst . . .to look at teaching with a critical eye’ (Sarroub & Moeller Reference Sarroub, Moeller and Nerenz1999: 68), and in the title of ACTFL Standards volume (Lafayette Reference Lafayette1996) ‘a catalyst for reform.’

Reporting on a survey conducted by Solomon and the Center for Applied Linguistics, Wood (Reference Wood1999) showed that 37% of elementary and 62% of secondary teachers were aware of the Standards and that their awareness prompted curriculum revision in 57% of the elementary schools and 56% of the secondary schools. Cheatham (Reference Cheatham, Cherry and Bradley2004: 15) reported using the Standards as ‘rubrics for the organization of the French curriculum’ in her department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Many educators have called for professional development, both to provide teachers with knowledge of the Standards and also to stimulate related change in pedagogical practice. For example, in a study done in 1999 and 2000, Allen (Reference Allen, Oukada and Garfinkel2001) demonstrated how professional development helped teachers to align their thinking with tenets of the Standards reflected in three statements related to the Cultures standard, two statements related to the Communication standard, and one statement loosely related to the Connections standard. Although it is difficult to compare across the Standards, because the study did not divide the statements strictly according to the five Cs and did not have an equal number of statements representing each C standard, Allen noted a change in teachers' beliefs about ‘culture’ and ‘the four skills approach’, which she interpreted as a change in practice toward orienting instruction around the three modes in the Communications standard. Similarly, Sarroub (Reference Sarroub2001) followed six K-12 teachers to find that, for them, the Communication standard was the easiest to implement and that the Communities standard was the most challenging.

We must, then, recognize two effects of the Standards on the field of foreign language education in the United States:

1. 1. They are based on well-accepted notions of what is important in teaching. We need to include Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparison, and Communities in foreign language lessons.

2. 2. The content standard of ‘knowing how, when, and why to say what to whom’ relates well with communicative language teaching, the approach advocated by a large number of language educators today.

3. The perspective of communicative competence

Despite the apparently positive influence of the Standards on teaching practice, research in second language learning anchored in social notions would question that practice by calling our attention to relationships between language learning, meaning-making, and community membership. Examining these relationships should lead us to recognize the limits of the Standards as a language learning framework. Because we believe we are working in a pedagogical framework of communication, it is appropriate to look at the tenets behind the sociolinguistic notion of communicative competence, which is generally seen to underlie communicative language teaching.

‘Knowing how, when and why to say what to whom’ is not a simple charge. It entails all the linguistic and social knowledge required for effective human-to-human interaction. The notion of communicative competence was put forth by Dell Hymes (Reference Hymes1971, Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972, Reference Hymes1974) to examine this complexity. In developing the notion, he departed from the Chomskyan focus on the ideal speaker-listener underlining linguistic competence to focus more broadly on sociolinguistic competence or on how meaning is made in social interactions within speech communities. For Hymes, an individual's competence to use language effectively is intimately linked to his or her knowledge of social considerations. Social considerations include the setting of the interaction, the participants in it with their roles and individual identities, and the goals for the communicative activity. In other words, Hymes (Reference Hymes1974: 75) defined communicative competence as the ability ‘to participate in [the child's] society as not only a speaking, but also a communicating member’. Membership in the community in which the interaction occurs and on which meaning is dependent is critical to this theory within which, as Hymes (Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972: 271) explained, ‘socio-cultural factors have an explicit and constitutive role’. Given an educational objective of having students interact with members of other cultures, the notion of interaction in social communities is highly pertinent to our instructional mission and should be fundamental to the National Standards.

Canale & Swain (Reference Canale and Swain1980) continued to broaden and refine the notion of communicative competence to include grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence, followed by Van Eck (Reference Van Eck1986), who, in his model of communicative ability, added discourse, sociocultural, and social competence. These additions reveal an increasing acknowledgement of social factors with an assumed dependency of the social and the cultural for communication. Bachman's (Reference Bachman1990) model of communicative language ability included a tri-partite expansion of language competence, strategic competence, and psychophysiological mechanisms. Particularly in the first area, he expanded the notion of language competence to include organizational competence (grammatical and textual competence) and pragmatic competence (illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence). In 1995, s"refCelce-Murcia, Dörnyei & Thurrell offered the most comprehensive typology of communicative competence to date, with five interrelated areas of knowledge and skills: discourse competence interacting with linguistic, actional, and sociolinguistic competencies, all within the sphere of strategic competence.

These expanded frameworks emphasize how interdependent competencies each rely, individually and jointly, on an individual's ability to interact with and manipulate culturally-based notions. In other words, we find in these portrayals of communicative competence a reliance on the social before the linguistic because language is bound by the society that creates it. We also find an iterative system: competencies reflect what language users do in society, and they also create what is done, a creation that becomes the basis of future reflections. The notion of communicative competence lies in the interactive framing of thought that occurs at the intersection of cultures, as members of one society interact with members of another, creating a new discourse about new content and new meaning which they construct together through their interactions. As we consider these expanding definitions of communicative competence in terms of the National Standards, we are led to focus on the interrelationship of the different Cs in the Standards. Communication is given a primary position by its number-1 in the referential numbering system and by its top position of the logo. In relation to it, Cultures is identified as the number-2 Standard. But is Communication really primary, more fundamental to human interaction than Cultures? If cultural notions are seen as intimately related to communicative ability, how can the Communication standard stand alone in the primary position?

More recently, Littlemore & Low (Reference Littlemore and Low2006: 268) drew heavily on Bachman's (Reference Bachman1990) model to argue that metaphorical competence is an important part of communicative language ability and that ‘metaphor is therefore highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning’. Considering that conceptual metaphors come from cultural models of how society is organized and the world view it holds, they go beyond linguistic or other behavioral patterns (Lantolf Reference Lantolf and Byrnes2006). When learners acquire conceptual metaphors as well as linguistic metaphors stemming from them, their voices echo the cultures from which the words come. In this view, culture clearly underscores communication. So, we might ask: Is the Cultures standard perhaps more primary than the Communication standard?

4. The Communication standard

In addition to the suggested hierarchical primacy for Communication over the other C Standards, the rhetoric of the Standards document emphasizes the fundamental nature of Communication: ‘A communicatively competent individual combines knowledge of the language system with knowledge of cultural conventions, norms of politeness, discourse conventions, and the like, in order to transmit and receive meaningful messages successfully’ (Standards, p. 40). Directionality is implied in this statement: first an individual has knowledge of both the language system and cultural conventions and then combines them in order to make and interpret meaning. This ordering also appears in other statements, as conveyed by the verbs develop and apply.

The professional literature disseminates the notion that Communication comes before the other standards. For example, Overfield (Reference Overfield2002: 32) said explicitly that ‘the standards begin with a framework of communication modes’. A teacher in the Sarroub & Moeller (Reference Sarroub, Moeller and Nerenz1999: 65) study put it another way: ‘All five Cs have equal importance, but communication spans all of the others because we use it to communicate the connections, comparisons, cultures, and communities we are studying.’

Recalling that the Standards supposedly convey consensus in the profession, it is useful to note the findings of Bartz & Singer's (Reference Bartz, Singer and Lafayette1996) study of administrators and teachers who ranked the five standards in terms of their relative importance. In this study, administrators considered Cultures to be the most important standard, whereas language teachers rated Communication and Cultures as equally important. Reinforcing the notion of dual importance for Communication and Cultures, Wood (Reference Wood1999) examined three pilot projects associated with state standards to find evidence that these two standards received the primary emphasis in most classrooms. Looking to Blaz Reference Blaz2002, Darhower (Reference Darhower2006: 84) similarly reminded us that ‘most FL teaching materials still center primarily on the Communication and Cultures standards’. Although it does not seem that Communication is easily displaced by Cultures as the primary standard, it does appear that, in practice, Communication is not viewed as solely important. In fact, Phillips (Reference Phillips1998: 30) reported that ‘many readers of the Standards document have commented on the extent to which culture permeates all the goal areas’.

The ambiguity between the roles of Communication and Cultures might be clarified somewhat by looking separately at the different modes within the Communication standard. The Standards articulate a different primacy for different modes stating that a more profound knowledge of culture is needed for the interpretative than for the interpersonal mode because, in the interpretative mode, learners do not have access to other persons to negotiate their understanding like they do in the interpersonal mode (Standards, p. 37). According to Phillips (Reference Phillips1998: 29), the interpersonal mode deals with how learners make meaning, including how they compensate for evolving accuracy in two-way, face-to-face, or computer-to-computer interaction. Of course, we can argue that interpretation involves meaning-making as well as interpersonal interaction does, which would bring us back to the permeating notion of culture or even its potential primacy.

In fact, the Wisconsin Standards, based on the National Standards, have a different logo, in which culture forms the back drop, or the foundation, of the other four Cs. In this conception, Communication, with its three modes, is anchored within Cultures and permeates into that standard in different ways. Through the modes, the Standards maintain an interrelated distinctness between Communication and Cultures, while recognizing the importance of both. But are these two standards of an equally fundamental nature? Might Cultures actually be more fundamental?

5. The Cultures standard

Distinctness between communication and culture would imply an ability to separate these two constructs. In contrast to this separability, Agar (Reference Agar1994) introduced the concept of languaculture. As the fusion of the terms language and culture suggests, languaculture relies on an understanding that language and culture cannot be treated dichotomously. As Lantolf & Johnson (Reference Lantolf and Johnson2007: 879) explain, ‘[l]anguacultures reflect our consciousness; our ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and acting in circumscribed domains; and shape how we construct reality’. Language choice is sensitive to its situational, culturally based environment, such as knowing to say ‘fill it up’ rather than ‘I would like to fill the tank with gasoline please’ at a filling station (Lantolf & Johnson Reference Lantolf and Johnson2007) or knowing to write short, segmented entries so as not to delay posting in an online instant messenger (IM) chat (Thorne Reference Thorne2007). Lantolf & Johnson argued for the relevance of Agar's (Reference Agar1994) notion of languaculture for language instruction by problematizing how we teach figurative language, based on conceptual metaphors. In our language classrooms, figurative language is typically treated as idioms and taught for memorization, perhaps coupled with an English expression to describe a similar concept. The teaching of these metaphors as idioms, instead of through the conceptual worldview they represent, suggests that current teaching practice does not recognize the inability to separate language and culture, which is called forth by the notion of languaculture.

The intrinsic relationship between language and culture was also explained by Kramsch through her notion of linguaculture (Kramsch Reference Kramsch1993). Because of the intimate and inseparable relationship between language and culture, the foreign language classroom, according to Kramsch (Reference Kramsch1993: 30), must become ‘the privileged site of cross-cultural fieldwork, in which the participants are both informants and ethnographers’. It would be incompatible with either Agar's languaculture or Kramsch's linguaculture frameworks to treat the Communication and Cultures standards as separate entities.

A claim that language and culture are not adequately fused in our teaching runs counter to Allen's (Reference Allen, Oukada and Garfinkel2001) observation that we have been searching to integrate culture into language teaching for more than 30 years. Allen (Reference Allen, Oukada and Garfinkel2001: 14) views the contribution of the Standards as ‘an important agreement on what culture to teach, that is, products, perspectives, practices’, a contribution echoed by McAlpine (Reference McAlpine2000: 76), who attributed the Standards with causing the profession, even at the postsecondary level, ‘to rethink the separation of big-C and little c-cultures and to focus on the inextricable weave of the products and practices of the people whose language we teach’. But does an instructional focus on products, perspectives, and practices constitute the mutually dependency of language and culture?

Jernigan & Moore (Reference Jernigan and Moore1997) studied Portuguese classes to see how teachers taught the products, practices, and perspectives of the Cultures standard. They made five key observations, which led them to recommend teacher education for improved teaching of culture:

1. 1. Much of what was taught as culture came from unplanned, casual comments especially on products and practices.

2. 2. Films helped students glean information on practices and products.

3. 3. There was little evidence of instruction on perspectives.

4. 4. Cultural concepts were not evaluated.

5. 5. Different instructors handled culture differently, that is, non-native instructors were more structured in how they taught culture than native speaker instructors; and information seemed to pass through instructors' own cultural paradigm.

If we believe that this Portuguese example is not unique, their observations would lead us to question the fusion between language and culture in our conceptions of what and how we teach. As Byrnes (Reference Byrnes2006) suggested, the Cultures standard for teaching today is more a promise than a reality. Jernigan & Moore's study also questions the nature of that promise, in terms of the appropriateness of balance in type of cultural knowledge conveyed. Should we be teaching more about products and practices than perspectives? Might the Standards position Communication as the primary standard and Cultures as secondary only because of how Culture is conceived in the Standards? Would a different conception of culture lead to primacy of culture over communication?

In 1993 Kramsch introduced the now well-known concept of a third place, where learners come to possess a reflective critical awareness of, and an “engagement with”, communities beyond their own (Kramsch Reference Kramsch1993: 233–259). Such awareness relates clearly to an analytical stance toward perspectives across cultures, extending beyond products and practices. To gain a reflective critical awareness, language learners would need to achieve a multilingual, multicultural identity to complement their national one.

In 2005, Kramsch distinguished between interculturality, multiculturalism, and communicative competence. Interculturality is typically seen as the ability to mediate between different cultural groups who do not share the same history and worldviews; whereas multiculturalism relates to having multiple cultural notions possessed by the same group which is culturally diverse in nature. In both cases, issues of identity and power are at play, with the impetus to propose language learning as beneficial to multiculturalism as well as to interculturality. Both concepts, however, are often construed as distinct, and more inclusive, than communicative competence which ‘has to do with a linguistic and sociopragmatic ability characteristic of native speakers and must be taught as such’ (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2005: 553). If we broaden our instructional goals beyond communicative competence to include also, and equally, intercultural competence or multiculturalism, we would need to prioritize the Cultures standard in its fundamental contribution to interaction.

A shift from Communication to Cultures or the implication of Communication in Cultures is not easily conceived, especially in foreign language departments with a long tradition of teaching language skills before having students use them in cultural and literary studies. According to Swaffar & Arens (Reference Swaffar and Arens2005: 20), such departments face a critical challenge in learning ‘to deal with culture and its communicative forms as mutually informing systems’. The languaculture concept would lend itself well to furthering the perspective recommended by Swaffar & Arens (Reference Swaffar and Arens2005: 20) that ‘language is performance engaged with various sites and identifies within a culture’. Considering the sites of cultures in relation to teaching, Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2005) pointed out that culture has been deterritorialized and that cultural notions tend to be related more to imagined communities than to real ones. Because emotions and identities of individuals reside in their roles in actual communities, not in imagined extractions of them, the languaculture of language learning is essentially community based. Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2005: 552) explained: ‘Precisely because culture has become, for many speakers, a deterritorialized imagined community, the emotions and affective identifications of multilingual individuals play an important role in the way they learn other languages’. Community, then, is a critical factor embedded in culture. In fact, in Kramsch's (Reference Kramsch1993) notion of third place, engagement with communities accompanies reflective critical awareness; it is perhaps even the engagement that allows this awareness to develop. Key questions then are: What does engagement in communities mean? What is the place of the Communities standard in language learning?

6. The Communities standard

To examine how learners acquire language through use in communities, we might naturally turn to sociocultural theory as framed by Vygotsky's (Reference Vygotsky1978) essence of mind, and to a notion often associated with it, Lave & Wenger's (Reference Lave and Wenger1991) community of practice. Three tenets are particularly relevant: (i) language begins in the material and social world; (ii) by participating in communicative activities with more capable members of a community, learners acquire communicative competence; and (iii) in acquiring language, learners transform linguistic symbols into individual knowledge, as they acquire the world view embedded in it. This internalization constitutes psychological growth.

Gifford & Mullaney (Reference Gifford and Mullaney1999) examined the Standards in terms of their fit with the theoretical framework provided by the sociocultural model. They found many compatible notions. First, Vygotsky finds that human development cannot be separated from social context and that language acquisition ‘occurs as a result of meaningful verbal interaction . . . between novices and experts in the environment’ (Schinke-Llano Reference Schinke-Llano, Eckman, Highland, Lee, Mileham and Weber1995: 22, quoted in Gifford & Mullaney Reference Gifford and Mullaney1999: 14). To these notions, Gifford & Mullaney (Reference Gifford and Mullaney1999: 7, 11) equate two statements in the Standards: ‘language and communication are at the heart of the human enterprise’; ‘[t]o relate in a meaningful way to another human being, one must be able to communicate’. Second, Vygotsky sees learning as the result of mediation in joint problem-solving. The Standards also highlight learning as doing: ‘Active use of language is central to the learning process; therefore, learners must be involved in generating utterances for themselves. They learn by doing, by trying out language, and by modifying it to serve communicative needs’ (Standards, p. 37). Lantolf (Reference Lantolf and Byrnes2006) elucidated this potential relationship between Vygotsky's concept of language and thought: meaning-making resides beyond the individual; it resides in the dialectic formed between communities and individuals. Extending these notions from Vygotskian theory through the lens of the Standards into pedagogical implemention, Gifford & Mullaney (Reference Gifford and Mullaney1999: 18) concluded that ‘teachers must learn to view the classroom as the social organization that it is and look for new ways to provide a supportive instructional environment that focuses on social interaction’. The notion of learning by doing, in joint or co-construction of meaning, evokes Vygotsky's concept of mediation whereby knowledge is co-constructed using tools including language. Lave & Wenger's concept of communities of practice is compatible with Vygotsky's notion: in this co-construction of knowledge, more competent users of a language assist less competent users. As meaning is made jointly, it carries with it the sociocultural practices and knowledge of those who create it, that is, of the interlocutors in the community of practice.

Community membership is, in fact, part of Hymes's (Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972) conception of communicative competence. Hymes (Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972: 282) pointed out that a ‘normal member of a community has knowledge with respect to all [the] aspects of communicative systems available to him. He will interpret or assess the conduct of others and himself in ways that reflect [that] knowledge’. Ushakova (Reference Ushakova, Lantolf and Appel1998: 154) put it figuratively: ‘second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language’. For language teaching, such determination of worldview by community suggests the learning must take place not only toward the target community but also through it. Illustrating this point, Klee (Reference Klee1998) cites Saville-Troike (Reference Saville-Troike, Lange, Paige, Klee and Yershova1998) to explain that some sociolinguistic dimensions of communicative competence, such as who holds the floor and registers of language, can be learned only in their social context and necessitate understanding the social structure of the community.

Does our community of classroom learners, by its very composition, restrict how much language learning can occur, at least in terms of learning that relates language, culture, and thought as conceptualized by the notion of languaculture? If meaning-making through semiotic systems resides in culture (Byrnes Reference Byrnes2006), attaining the Communication standard (or the goal of communicative competence as put forth by Hymes) may not be possible within the boundaries of the typical U.S. classroom when Cultures and Communities are not present. In other words, when American students in U.S. classrooms talk with each other, they lack the cultural environment provided through the target community. This environment, with its community members, is needed to mediate the learners' meaning-making and thought, and bring about learning in the new language.

The Communities standard thus assumes a critical importance: communities of practice, or of learning, exist within cultures; they are founded in and exert continued influence on cultural norms. If the interacting group determines what conceptual learning occurs, then the learning community is the basis of learning. Returning to the question of which standard is primary, we are led to confront the Communities standard, which is identified as that last C, number 5, of the five Cs in the Standards document. It is also the only standard to which a specific chapter is not dedicated in the ACTFL annual volume, Foreign language standards: Linking research, theories, and practices (Phillips & Terry Reference Phillips and Terry1999).

Is the Communities standard really viewed as less important than the others? According to Phillips (Reference Phillips1998: 32), the Standards advisory board, which consisted largely of individuals outside the language teaching profession, believed that ‘participation in multilingual/multicultural communities, was the raison d'être for foreign language study’. Osborn & Reagan (Reference Osborn and Reagan1998) suggested, however, that the general public may view the goals of the Standards differently from foreign language teachers and administrators. In fact, in Bartz & Singer's (Reference Bartz, Singer and Lafayette1996: 16) study, both K-12 administrators and language teachers made the weakest association for the five standards between the Communities standard and obtaining a ‘desired and attainable vision’ for foreign language learning. On the postsecondary level, Long (Reference Long2005) referred to a 2004 AATSPFootnote ³ presidential address by Emily Spinelli to suggest that the Communities standard (and the Connections standard) were harder to put into practice than the other standards.

The Communities standard specifies: ‘Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting’ and ‘Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment’ (Standards, p. 9). Bartz & Singer (Reference Bartz, Singer and Lafayette1996: 160) suggested that ‘it may be the perception that attainment of this goal is beyond the capability of many students, given the limited resources and relatively short sequences of study in Indiana schools’. From teacher comments, it appeared that teachers in this study saw interaction in communities as possible only after a certain degree of language mastery was achieved in the classroom.

Indeed, many educators appear to view the Communities standard as ‘practical applications’ using the phrase of Valette (Reference Valette1997: 23) which she put in all upper case letters: ‘Goal five [communities] looks beyond the classroom and focuses on the practical applications of what has been learned in the second-language curriculum’. A similar notion is expressed by Sarroub & Moeller (Reference Sarroub, Moeller and Nerenz1999: 63), who described a middle school teacher who felt that the ‘communities goal was sometimes hard to apply at the middle school level’). In fact, the Standards themselves use this discourse, in wording such as ‘careful application of the components of language and culture are vital’ (Standards, p. 63). The sample progress indicators of the Communities standard specify this application through presentations in speech or writing to communities of target speakers or other interested groups. They also apply language ability to playing games, to planning real or imaginary travel, and to interpreting authentic material from target cultures, often in online environments.

At times, the professional literature portrays implementation of the Communities standard as an extra-curricular experience, like a field trip. Phillips (Reference Phillips, Phillips and Terry1999: 3) goes so far to suggest that the Communities standard ‘legitimizes the occasional forays’ beyond the foreign language classroom into extra-curricular areas. For example, Lally (Reference Lally2000) offered a FLEX summer camp as a model for implementing the Communities standard. Especially at the postsecondary level (McAlpine Reference McAlpine2000), there is also study abroad where learners are assumed to have opportunities to interact in target culture communities of practice (but see Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson1998; Collentine & Freed Reference Collentine and Freed2004; Schmidt-Rinehart & Knight Reference Schmidt-Rinehart and Knight2004; Magnan & Back Reference Magnan and Back2007). Most often, however, the profession turns to service learning (e.g., Overfield Reference Overfield1997; McAlpine Reference McAlpine2000; Weldon & Trautmann Reference Weldon and Trautmann2003) or to technology to address the Communities standard through virtual communities (e.g., Haas & Reardon Reference Haas, Reardon and Phillips1997; Crystal Reference Crystal2001; Torii-Williams Reference Torii-Williams2004; Darhower Reference Darhower2006). Darhower stressed how internet access to other cultures fits the ‘social turn’ (Block Reference Block2003: 31) in second language learning theory because it creates a new realism for the Communities standard by engaging learners in ‘multilingual communities at home and around the world in a variety of contexts and in culturally appropriate ways’. Technology is already fulfilling its promise to take language learning out of the classroom. Thorne (Reference Thorne2007) described MMOGs (multimodal multiplayer online video games) such as World of Warcraft that has over eight million players globally, and situated these games as virtual communities of practice offering opportunities for language learning.

7. Repositioning the Communities standard

But, in the classroom, the site for which the National Standards were created, what would it take to implement the Communities standard in terms of language use in communities of practice? First, the nature of the community would need to be defined.

Potowski & Carreira (Reference Potowski and Carreira2004: 433) argued that the Standards's concept of community does not fit well with all current U.S. educational situations; it must be expanded, for example, to accommodate ‘the complex set of circumstances that characterize Spanish in the United States’ and recognize ‘the impact of poverty, ethnic and cultural discrimination, family illiteracy and sociopolitical disenfranchisement on learning’. For Potowski & Carreira, community stems from what learners bring to the classroom, and for U.S. Spanish, community also supplies the cultural practices, products, and perspectives that students of Spanish wish to learn. This perspective is an emic one: identity comes from the inside; membership means moving from outside to inside.

According to Thorne (Reference Thorne2007), core elements across traditional definitions of community include: membership, a shared location, shared cultural practices and values, interpersonally meaningful relationships, collective goods and resources, commitment and reciprocity, a sense of identity, and the notion of sustained duration. Hymes (Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972) interpreted membership in terms of communal understanding of sociolinguistic systems: members of a community have knowledge of many aspects of communicative systems, knowledge that is identical across individuals despite identity of manifestation and apparent system so that all community members interpret or assess the conduct of others and themselves in ways that reflect that knowledge. Consistent with these notions, Wenger (Reference Wenger1998: 5) envisioned a community of practice as ‘a way of talking about the social configurations in which our enterprises are defined as worth pursuing and our participation is recognized as competence’. For Wenger, communities of practice consisted of social groups that exist everywhere in society and shape identity through the ways they exercise power over members to conform with or change expected social patterns of interaction. The idea of membership is central to the notion of conformity, as is the role of the expert who instructs the outsider on how to conform to the norms that will allow him or her to become a full fledged member of the community. Meaning is negotiated and made through participation in these communities. This interactive negotiation is the fundamental process of learning. Frequently used examples of these communities of practice are the master–apprentice relationship in the workplace, the alcoholic who learns the AA refrain, ‘Hi, my name is Tom, I am an alcoholic’ as a necessary entry for inclusion to the group, or the biker's routine of answering a cell phone with ‘Where are ya?’(Thorne Reference Thorne2007). As suggested by these examples, the notion of community of practice typically takes learning out of classrooms into the variety of other groups and locations in which learning takes place (Barton & Tusting Reference Barton, Tusting, Barton and Tusting2005: 3).

In comparison to these definitions, the two content standards of the Communities standard are strikingly different. They are:

1. 1. Standard 5.1 Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting.

2. 2. Standard 5.2 Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.

In both content standards, the concept of membership and the notion of normalization of the other are missing. The closest the content standards come to membership appears in the sample progress indicators for grade 12 for Communities content standard 5.1: ‘Students establish and/or maintain interpersonal relations with speakers of the language.’ (Standards, p. 67). It is not clear, however, whether this participation necessarily involves the learners in making meaning through interpersonal relationships. Making meaning in a collaborative fashion fits well with membership or at least the desire and intent to move from an outsider perspective to an insider member. The concept of communities of practice allows for meaning to happen, to be made collaboratively, in communities. In contrast, the Standards suggest, by their neglect of the notion of community membership throughout instruction, that meaning occurs first in classroom settings and is then applied to use in communities. The tenets of sociocultural theory blend well with those of communities of practice, but they stand in contrast with the applied language of the Standards.

This Communities standard places the learner within the target speech community only indirectly. As Darhower (Reference Darhower2006: 96) pointed out, the Communities content standards call for learners only ‘to make use of the L2 outside of the classroom, without implying that learners should create and integrate themselves into a community of speakers of the target language’. Drawing on bilingual chat interaction between Puerto Rican and U.S. students in which students successfully created and integrated themselves into a bilingual virtual community, he demonstrated how ‘“community” can provide the means by which Communication and the other three Cs of the Standards can be carried out’ (Darhower Reference Darhower2006: 86). He proposed adding a third content standard for Communities: ‘Standard 5.3: Students engage in intercultural communication in the target language by becoming active participants in a community of speakers of the language’ (Darhower Reference Darhower2006: 96, italics in original). This suggested addition to the Communities standard is promising in its inclusion of membership and active participation in the meaning-making enterprise of interpersonal relationships. But, unfortunately, Darhower (Reference Darhower2006: 96) still missed the point in his final remarks: ‘with careful planning of chat topics, teachers can promote co-construction of meaning centered upon the Cultures, Comparison and Connections standards, as a byproduct of participation and socialization in the community of language learners’. It is the term byproduct that is troubling here. According to Vygotskian theory (which is evoked in the co-construction of meaning) and Wenger's concept of community of practice (which appears through the socialization in the community), making meaning is the origin of thought and learning. Thus, entry into a community is the sina quo non of language learning, not its byproduct.

If we want to position the Communities standard in line with notions of communities of practice, we need to consider carefully the type of communities in which foreign language learners engage. In addition to the digital communities and face-to-face communities described by many scholars, we might also consider imagined communities brought forth through interactions with protagonists in the imagined spaces of novels and other writings or performance. It should be clear that the notion of community applied to language learning must far exceed the classroom.

In fact, some educators are not convinced that classroom learners can belong to a community of practice, because the notion of community of practice does not apply well to an instructional situation. As another option to community of practice, Gee (Reference Gee, Barton and Tusting2005) offered the concept of affinity spaces. Gee's affinity space shares essential features with a community of practice, as conceived by Lave & Wenger (Reference Lave and Wenger1991), without including the key requirement of membership. Like a community of practice, an affinity space is an entry portal allowing for intensive and extensive knowledge that ‘creates people who share lots of knowledge, but each has something special to offer’ (Gee Reference Gee, Barton and Tusting2005: 226). An affinity space can be more fluid than a community of practice because participants in affinity spaces can come and go; they do not need to earn and retain membership. Affinity spaces are common in today's global high-tech world with corporate work teams in offices and online, social activities and projects, online gaming, and learning communities. Perhaps the Standards could be made to adhere more readily to Gee's concept of affinity spaces than to Lave & Wenger's notion of community of practice. It would appear that both concepts represent real configurations of individuals where languages are used to negotiate social interaction and to make meaning collaboratively. In either case, community is the site in which learning occurs, the site that makes learning possible. Such sites are, of course, highly culturally dependent, in the micro-culture of the community itself and in the larger culture in which that community resides.

In fact, Gee (Reference Gee, Barton and Tusting2005) suggested, however, that classrooms are not really affinity spaces for several reasons. Students rarely share interests and extensive knowledge. They are encouraged to gain the same extensive knowledge; only some are enabled to gain intensive knowledge; others are not. If students gain intensive knowledge, they are rarely allowed to teach it to the teacher and other students. Classrooms reward individual knowledge stored in the head, not knowledge distributed across individuals, and allow little networking. They rarely have multiple routes to participation and leadership is rarely porous. These traits stand in sharp contrast to the way communities of practice function, with distributed knowledge that is varied in nature and where networking is rewarded with increased benefits of community membership.

Given that the Standards offer goals for classroom instruction, is there a need to situate the Communities standard as fundamental to the other standards, particularly Communication? In fact, of the five standards, it is the Communities standard that responds most directly to the primary goal that the Standards set for language learning: to ‘prepare an educated member of society to function effectively with members of other cultures’ (Glisan Reference Glisan1999: 77). This question of recognizing the fundamental nature of the Communities standard takes us back to the issue of whether interaction in community frames learning or is a byproduct of it. Built on existing teaching practice, the creators of the Standards document opted for the latter. Socially oriented second language research would suggest instead the former. With that suggestion comes the need to reconceptualize how foreign language teaching occurs, most specifically the roles of teachers and students, and also entailing the entry of other expert community members into the instructional process.