Genres and the Standards: Teaching the 5 C's Through Texts (Communication, Culture, Connections, Comparisons, Communities) (Essay‪)‬

This essay presents a heuristic designed to challenge both the language-teaching and the literature-teaching sides of a typical language-and-literature department by offering a reconceptualization of what it means to teach language and literature as texts in different genres, anchored in their cultures. This challenge is based on a document spear-headed by a joint committee of college and high-school teachers of foreign languages, under the leadership of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), working together with its peer organizations under the aegis of the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages. That document is the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning, (1) originally published in 1996, and funded by grants by the US Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and now expanded to include not only European languages, but also Arabic. That document has also largely been overlooked by teachers in post-secondary education; its principal use has been to local school districts, as a framework of principles against which they can develop their own.