Once Again, The Curriculum

When students in a foreign language department struggle to understand the actions and motivations of characters in a literary text, they are usually urged to read imaginatively and enter its world. We suggest that this exercise, though perhaps useful for those who think it a moral duty to extend their sympathy to those who are not like themselves, has little place in the foreign language curriculum. Though a language department might well have a humanistic mission when the language in question is the mother tongue for most of its students, in our case—we teach in an English department in northern Palestine—the department’s mission is simply to teach the language. Though we recognize that a language cannot be divorced from the culture of its users, we argue that the focus of instruction should be on the language its, and that the texts traditionally taught should only receive attention to the extent that students can understand why social interaction (and discourse) in English-speaking countries takes the forms it does.