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In this week's Topic of the Week, Alyssa Villarreal, World Languages Coordinator for Shelby County Schools in Tennessee, writes about the use of lexical chunks or sentences frames in curriculum rather than lists of single vocabulary words. To see what this looks like, we recommend the following links:

The Shelby County Schools World Languages program has its own website, available at http://scsworldlanguages.weebly.com/. You can get an overview of the programs approach to language learning here.

As an example of a course, you can access Level One documents relevant to any language here: http://scsworldlanguages.weebly.com/level-one.html. The curriculum framwork is summarized in this document, and the course expectations are summarized here.

For a specific example of a unit, here is a link to the Unit Two plan. Note that the second column on each page is labeled "Language Chunks & Vocabulary." In this column you will see examples of sentence frames such "I go to ... with ..." and class-specified guides such as "actions" and "places" to fill in the frames.

Examples of additional materials, such as separate Latin materials and elementary and middle school curricula, are available at http://www.scsk12.org/ci/world?PID=244.