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People learn languages for all sorts of reasons?not always to talk with other people. They may learn Assyrian or Old Persian to interpret stone carvings, Italian to sing Rossini, Chinese to do calligraphy, Turkish to ex plore psycholinguistics, other languages to decipher intelligence intercepts. There is even an academic specialty called English for special uses, most prominent in places like Hong Kong where certain professions (e.g., the law) rely on the making of fine distinctions in a variety of English that no body in Hong Kong really speaks. These special uses are not the ones that colleges have in mind when they set out language requirements. Most of us, I think quite reasonably, expect that the goal of language study in college is to be able to talk with native speakers more or less readily and naturally and to read the sorts of texts that a native speaker encounters in the course of daily life (newspapers, novels, letters, reports). And when we express that goal as the attainment of advanced competency instead of mandating two years of study or a certain score on a placement test, we mean a kind of all around ability, which is the most plausible way of justifying the existence of language requirements as well as the fairest way of allowing for the many reasons people choose to study this or that language.1 Competence or competency is a feature of learners, not of the thing learned, so when we test for competency or elaborate standards for assess ing it, we are really doing diagnosis: not measuring a thing or property as much as gauging a potential, scrutinizing behavior for the signs that we |
