Editor's Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The idea for this Special Issue on History and Memory in Foreign Language Study grew out of a colloquium organized by the Berkeley Language Center on Sept.10, 2011, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. This unexpected attack on the icon of capitalism in the heart of New York City had made it critically clear that Americans did not understand how they were seen in the rest of the world, nor how their worldview differed from that of other people around the world. America’s glaring lack of foreign language capabilities was subsequently singled out by the U.S. government as one of the root causes of the attack on the World Trade Center. In March 2003 the federal government funded at the tune of $56 million a university affiliated research Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the U. of Maryland. It was charged with helping to improve US intelligence capabilities, defend national security, and serve U.S. political and economic interests abroad. The main mission of this Center was to improve knowledge of less commonly taught languages; enhance acquisition and maintenance of foreign language capability by government professionals, especially at the advanced levels; advance the U.S. capacity to use foreign language skills in a wide variety of professions and situations; and improve the quality of human language technology. It was also to serve as a catalyst for nationwide efforts to tailor foreign language education in schools to the needs of national foreign policy (Kramsch, 2005). It was not the first time that the U.S. lack of foreign language capabilities was decried. In its 1979 report, A Nation at Risk , the President’s Commission on foreign languages and international studies had already sounded the alarm (Perkins, 1980). The response to this report by the foreign language educational community in the ‘80s and ‘90s had been to move from a focus on learning linguistic forms and doing patterns drills to a focus on acquiring usable skills and on developing communicative proficiency, to at least enable Americans to communicate with people from other parts of the world and to understand their ways of thinking. In the eighties and nineties, communicative competence as defined by