standards- world languages

For foreign language instruction, reform began in the early 1980s, and since that time, views of language teaching and learning have been evolving. Today's approaches to foreign language curriculum and instruction are remarkably consistent with evolving views of curriculum and instruction across the disciplines. These approaches are also consistent with the belief that all students can and should be proficient in at least one language in addition to English.

Developing Proficiency

In the early 1980s, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), in collaboration with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), embarked on an ambitious effort to develop a common yardstick to assess the language proficiency of learners. This yardstick was based on the U.S. government's Foreign Service Institute rating scales and calibrated against the norm of the educated native speaker. ACTFL also collaborated with ETS to develop more fully detailed descriptors for the lower end of the performance continuum, where most school learners would place. The resulting rating scales, the ACTFL/ETS Proficiency Guidelines, provide a performance-based measure of the range of tasks or functions that learners might perform, the contexts and topical areas in which they might perform, and the degree to which their performance is grammatically and socioculturally accurate. The rating scales were originally developed to describe the skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture, although most attention has been paid to the rating scales and their accompanying measure of oral proficiency, the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI).

Because proficiency-based instruction is performance oriented, decisions about curriculum and instruction should be strongly linked to the ways in which the learner may be expected to perform in real-life situations. Thus, the content of the curriculum derives, in large part, from the authentic communicative needs of the learner. Many of these needs are fairly universal and predictable for U.S. students in grades K-12, for if the purpose of language learning is to interact with native speakers (whether in the U.S. or abroad), it follows that there are some kinds of interactions that may be identified and addressed in curriculum. This notion of authentic, real-life uses of language also finds its way into other aspects of instruction: the tasks students are asked to perform in class should be consistent with (or simulate) real-life language tasks; the language students are taught should be authentic (not "school talk") and authentic materials, drawn directly from the culture, should be a primary medium through which students access new language and culture.

While the proficiency guidelines have had a clear and positive effect on language curriculum and instruction, they have also
sometimes been misused in secondary schools. The guidelines and accompanying rating scales are global descriptions of what
learners can and cannot do at progressive stages of development relative to the proficiency of an adult-educated native speaker. It was never intended that the proficiency guidelines drive curriculum.

Scope of the Language Curriculum

The proficiency-based curriculum reflects a multifaceted view of the purposes of language learning. This view is quite distinct from that of the past, when language learning was primarily an intellectual endeavor designed to provide access to great works of literature. The content of past curriculums reflected this perspective by focusing on grammar and translation. Today, most foreign language educators would agree on a dual agenda: first, that language learning is inherently valuable both as a field of intellectual pursuit and as part of a well-rounded education; second, that language learning can prepare students to meet real-life needs for language use, whether in the U.S. or abroad. The focus on authentic language used for authentic purposes means that curriculum must be far broader than simply knowledge of grammar plus some vocabulary to flesh out that grammatical skeleton. Research from the various fields of linguistics has led to an understanding that language proficiency is far more complex than knowledge of grammar rules. Rather, it is an interaction of at least four competencies:

Excerpted from Canale 1983, Canale and Swain 1980.

In U.S. schools today, most students take only two to three years of a foreign language, just long enough to attain rudimentary,
survival skills in that language. As a result, decisions about what to teach are relatively uncomplicated: students generally learn
fundamental language that allows for basic communication and survival. A cursory review of state curriculum frameworks and of language textbooks--whether used at the secondary or post secondary level--reveals remarkable consensus about the content of a core, proficiency-based language curriculum.

Integrating Language and Culture

Cultural knowledge and skills underlie effective communication because culture provides the anchoring context for language and
determines what speakers really mean by what they say. Culture, then, cannot be relegated to a fifth skill or be taught only on
Friday afternoons. Rather, culture must be integrated into all aspects of language teaching. This is particularly true for those aspects of culture that affect how the language encodes meaning.

Thus, for the English speaker learning another language, simply knowing how to translate from English to another language without understanding the cultural meanings speakers assign to words can lead to miscommunication or even interpersonal dysfunctions. Because effective communication with native speakers depends on cultural knowledge, culture must be an integral component of the foreign language curriculum.

Excerpted from A. Glatthorn's Content of the Curriculum, 1995 (pp. 69-74).

Examine the Standards

National Standards as reported by McREL: This is an attempt to synthesize all of the professional organizations, state agencies and national organizations who have proposed standards in content areas for all the nation's children, with benchmarks at early and upper elementary grades and the middle and high school levels. You will need to select "Browse Standards" and then your content areas.

Michigan Department of Education: Select your content area from the list on the middle, right side of page of the front page, under K-12 Curriculum. The World Languages page will include a good deal of information about World Languages Education in Michigan. Look for the link to the Michigan Curriculum Framework, and for World Languages. It is a long document, so don't get impatient with its loading.