As a student of foreign language and foreign language instruction, it was imparted to me, whether by example or suggestion, that language and culture are inextricably linked. Never the two shall be separated. As an instructor, I would have to find a way to make the two mesh for the students. For the most part, my own teachers were successful in helping me make the connections between culture and language despite their limited resources.

 
Usually this attempt was accomplished with "food days" or "foreign language week." But this way of doing was disjunctive as we could not have food or music every day in the classroom. And as the literature became more complicated it became more difficult to achieve cultural infusion. "food days" just are not as effective when you are studying 1’engagement during the time of World War 11 in modem France. Often, I would read a piece of literature four or five times before I had an idea about what was going on. Each time I read was a quest for something different. I was successful; however, I sometimes found it laborious and frustrating. I often felt like I was missing much concerning connections with politics, cultural affairs, history, and artistic movements in other genres.

These frustrations and feelings are not uncommon to most upper-level foreign language students. I was definitely not unique. So, I just accepted this way of learning high French literature or studying the Middle Ages as the way it was done. I got through it and somehow the love of the language still survived. Not until my first quarter as a graduate student in the Professional Writing program at Kennesaw State University did I start to think that there may be a better way to delve into French literature. The class was Computers and Communication and I was introduced to the concept of hypertext. In learning about hypertext and its unique ways, I began to wonder how this incredible tool could be used for literature instruction in foreign language courses.

An Explanation of Hypertext

First of all, the concept of hypertext has been around for quite some time. "Originally, the basic idea of what we now call hypertext, which came into being before electronic computing, did not depend upon computers. It depended on something we are all familiar with - the concept of footnotes" (Landow 175). Hypertext is a non-linear, associative type of text that is linked with nodes - words or images - to other texts, images, passages or entire books that suggests an association or connection to the information in the present text. Hypertext allows an individual to have many different points of entry, points of departure and to multiply pathways in between (Slatin 87 1). In seeing the dynamic nature of this mode of writing, I soon started to link its capabilities to the frustrations that I had with forging through reading literature in my non-native language. I began to wonder what, if any, impact it could have on reading comprehension in a foreign language class.

Computers & Foreign Language

Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has been around for a while. However, its progress has been slow. I believe the line that an instructor walks between effective foreign language instruction and ineffective instruction is a fine one, given some of the reasons I mentioned earlier. This is why the progress has been slow. Why mess with something that works? Also, the bodies of knowledge and research concerning second language acquisition and new software applications have to converge somewhere. Given the many present controversies on how language is learned, it is not surpassing that the desire to apply something experimental to something else experimental is not strong (Pederson 100- 101). But the accessibility of computers and the knowledge base of many instructors now has grown and the information has increased.

Several years ago, it was widely accepted that computers made little if no difference in second language acquisition (Pederson 100). This assumption had to do with the types of programs that were available to the students in the eighties. Most of these programs were drill-oriented. Therefore, not much stock was put into the computer's ability to serve the foreign language community. But I think this perception actually had little to do with computers and more to do with the lack of real research into how this type of instruction should compliment a classroom experience. CALL basically falls into three types of approaches (Wyatt 89-90). They are as follows:
 

Approach	Characteristics
Instructional ex. tutorial, drill & practice, holistic practice, "games"	Students are responders, not initiators despite their high level of activity. Detailed set of high and low level learning objectives. Predetermined learning path(s). The computer instructs the students; the students learn from the computer.
Collaborative ex. modeling, discovery, simulation, adventure reading, hypertexted reading, some "games"	Students are initiators, take more responsibility for their learning. May only be possible to specify learning objectives in high level terms. No predetermined learning paths. Elements of discovery learning; students learn with the computer.
Facilitative ex. word and idea processing, spell check, on-line thesaurus, text analysis	Students are initiators, entirely responsible for their learning. Learning objectives and paths not specified or embodied in computer program. Students use the computer as a tool to reduce "inauthentic labor."

-- Relational Classification of CALL Approaches (Wyatt 90).

I see hypertexted literature falling into the "collaborative" approach with slight uses of the "facilitative" approach. It is obvious that there is a need for this type of CALL device. Since the eighties, much attention has been given to CALL within the first approach. But, no substantial research, to my knowledge, has been done concerning reading comprehension and foreign language acquisition. Regarding reading comprehension in our native language, English, some research has been done and it can give us insight into how hypertext might affect a upper-level foreign language literature course.

Two Studies

The two studies done by George P. Landow and Mark Gillingham contrast with each other. Both examine and research the effect that hypertext has on the reader; however, their ultimate goals are radically different and thus they find conflicting results. As I set up my research into hypertext in a foreign language document, I must keep in mind what my ultimate goal is for the students. I also believe that this is what others need to keep in mind when they are doing research with hypertext. The results of the two studies highlight how we must keep our focus and the unique qualities of hypertext in mind.

Mr. Landow is well known for his research and writings on hypertext. One study that I found interesting was done in the late eighties for his English 32 class at Brown University (Landow 175). This class was an English literature survey course. Context32 was created with Intermedia (hypermedia) to coincide with his lectures. Context32 included hypertexted versions of all of the literature that was to be read in that class. My goals were simple enough in creating this type of program for his students. He was very aware of the amount of information that college students must absorb in order to initiate critical thinking in class discussions and papers. If a student knows about many different subjects and can make connections between those areas, then the real task of critical evaluation begins. Therefore, he wanted a program that would enable his students to have access to a host of other information in order to make connections to the present document (Landow 175). But he also realized that because of the nature of hypertext, the reader would not necessarily end with the same information as the reader next to him or her. "Intermedia tries to make the student map out pathways for him or herself. Intermedia is designed, in other words, to free students rather than confine them ... Intellectual freedom derives from an ability to make choices" (Landow 176). The results were positive and convinced the instructor that hypertext had indeed achieved the goal it set out to do: to allow students the opportunity to become better critical thinkers. He saw the change in class discussions and in his students' papers. Students were insightful and excited about what they were learning.

This result did not echo the result of Mark Gillingham's research. But the goal of Mr. Gillingham focused on an end-product. And when one is dealing with something as expansive and free as hypertext, I do not believe one can reduce it to a product-driven end result.

Essentially, Mark Gillingham took thirty students from a state university in the Northwestern United States and had them read a hypertexted document that was created for them. The class was a psychology class and the text was a five-paragraph story about Steven Hawking and his disease. The students were given questions to answer based on the hypertext document that they read. The questions had intentional, varying degrees of difficulty. The results were not positive. The students found it difficult to answer the more complex questions. Mr. Gillingham has some important points to make about the rhetorical strategies of hypertext, i.e. structure, choice of links (Gillingham 8). But I feel he misses the point about hypertext by giving these students a product-driven test. Because of the structure, or lack of structure, that hypertext has, exit points and entrance points to information are different for each person, and thus each person's experience in a hypertexted document will be different. As Landow points out, "Relevance is in the mind of the beholder and that the investigator's function is to inquire what connections might exist among various kinds of data and how their relative value might be evaluated" (181). Therefore, an activity using a hypertext document where there are specific right and wrong answers seems to be inappropriate to the nature of hypertext and gives in accurate account of its effectiveness.

The Method

Given the results from these two studies, the limited research on Computer-Assisted Language Leaming and my own experience as a foreign language student, it seems to me that research involving a hypertexted version of a piece of foreign literature is sorely needed. It occurs to me that as I am writing this there may be someone out there constructing a similar proposal who experienced the same frustrations I had as an upper-level foreign language student and who also understands the dynamics of hypertext. All I have to say to that is let the research begin.

The two things we have looked at so far are CALL and reading comprehension with hypertext. What I would like to do is marry the two by creating hypertexted pieces of French literature to coincide with a college course. I think French medieval literature would provide a fertile ground to embed links concerning art, history and culture of the Middle Ages. I would create a web of knowledge around the literature. This is not an uncommon way of teaching a foreign language. In Curtain and Pesola's book, Language and Children - Making the Match, they discuss "thematic webbing."

The question then is how to evaluate the type of learning that hypertext documents offer? This is the most important part of the proposal because it must mirror the nature of the subject being studied, hypertext. Originally, before I had done any research in this area, I thought it would be interesting to take the hypertexted literature and the conventional method, i.e. books and dictionary, and compare the results of comprehension by testing the students with a short answer test. I now know that this type of evaluation does not fit well with the dynamic nature of hypertext. Therefore, as in the Gillingham case, the results could be true and factual, yet not give much insight into how this technology works for reading comprehension. And as Christina Haas stresses with her concept of the Technology Question, "What is the nature of computer technologies, and what is their impact on writing?"(Haas 3). As an addition to that, I would argue as to what the impact on reading comprehension is.

In Closing

Therefore, the evaluation of the teaching materials would take place over the course of a quarter. This would include interviews with the instructor and the students on how they are functioning in this new technology. I would also observe class discussions. As a contrast to this evaluation, I would conduct interviews with other professors teaching literature courses at the same time but not using hypertext, and I would observe their classroom discussions. Although I could not make any conclusive generalizations from observing these two, different classroom experiences, it would provide me with some tentative insights as to how the hypertext has affected the discourse for each class, if at all. My results would be qualitative and conversational in nature. I think the observation of the classroom discussions and the interviews with the students would be very beneficial to instructors of foreign language. Hypertext is a dynamic tool that, I believe if used properly, will help to change our concept of literacy in a foreign language and our native language.

Concerning the paradigm shift of the convergence of literary theory and computer hypertext, Landow offers the following. "Almost all parties to this paradigm shift, which marks a revolution in human thought, see electronic writing as a direct response to the strength and weaknesses of the printed book" (Landow 3). My wish is that we would start to look at the foreign language classroom and see how this powerful tool can effect and change literacy in that arena. Thus, I agree with him that "The profession must undertake research that provides an empirical base for assumptions, strategies, and applications of the computer in language teaching, lest another powerful tool for language learning not realize its potential" (Pederson 101).

Curtain, Helena Anderson and Pesola, Carol Ann. Languages and Children - Making the

Match. Reading, Massachusettes: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1988.

Haas, Christina. Writing Technology: Studies in the Materiality of Literacy. Mahwah,

New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1996.

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and

Technology. Balitmore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

---. "Hypertext in Literary Education, Criticism, and Scholarship."