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Content Type: 3
Title: NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements: Growth, Change, and Looking to the Future
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Ruta Couet is retired from the South Carolina Department of Education, and Jacqueline Van Houten is working for Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. Both serve as NCSSFL-ACTFL Task Force members.
The publication of the 2013 NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements provided a formidable tool to world language learners and their educators to promote self-assessment, autonomous learning, goal setting, and reflection. Learners asked themselves crucial questions in earnest: What am I learning? Why am I learning it? How am I learning it? How can I demonstrate my learning? What am I going to do next? Although they embraced it with great enthusiasm, learners and educators sometimes had difficulty seeing what specific statements could look like at subsequent proficiency sublevels. The features of performance, i.e., context, text type, accuracy and function in each of the modes of communication were not consistently delineated across five levels of Novice through Distinguished proficiency, leaving learners to hypothesize the performance demands of each proficiency sublevel.
While working on a new set of Can-Do Statements for intercultural communicative competence, the NCSSFL-ACTFL Task Force attempted to develop statements that morphed from Novice all the way to Distinguished to give learners a clear road map on how cultural communicative competency grew based on the level of language proficiency. Educators who participated in the field review enthusiastically embraced this approach. As a result, another NCSSFL-ACTFL Task Force took on the job of revising the language can-do statements to follow the pattern of the can-do statements for intercultural communicative competence. The revised language Can-Do Statements will not be a radical departure from the original version; however, they will fill in some of the aforementioned gaps.
- The benchmarks and indicators will include the features found in the Performance Descriptors for Language Learners, i.e., context, text type, accuracy and function
- Each Can-Do Statement will be developed from Novice to Distinguished to clearly show the progress necessary to achieve each sublevel.
- The sample learning tasks will give learners ideas for the types of “real-world tasks” that serve as evidence of achieving their own specific personal goals and guide educators in planning experiences in class and beyond.
For years, the language profession has lauded the benefits of “real world tasks” with varying degrees of success -- partly due to wide interpretation of such tasks. The revised language can-do benchmarks and indicators are intended to elucidate interpretation by offering a clear progression of each performance one sublevel at a time, across all sublevels. Learners and educators alike will be able to see how a given task grows in complexity across all of the proficiency sublevels. Like the original language can-do statements, the revised statements are not a curriculum, but rather serve as examples to be adapted in any K-20 language program or for personal use. The customized can-do statements (I can…) emphasize this option for adaptation and remain a cornerstone of the revised document.
It is the hope of the task force that the revised NCSSFL-ACTFL language Can-Do Statements will empower learners to self-assess their own consistent performance over time rather than serve as a checklist for one-time successful completion of a specific task.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 3
Title: Functional Language
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Alyssa Villarreal is the President of Advance Learning and World Language Coordinator for Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee. In addition to her district duties, she has worked as the Foreign Language methods instructor for the University of Memphis. She is currently serving as President of the National Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Languages (NADSFL) and was named the 2012 NADSFL Supervisor of the Year.
As language educators we can all agree on our mission, we want to develop culturally appropriate communicators in languages other than English. Each day we take steps toward this outcome. We lead students through activities that help develop the modes of communication. In these activities, we ultimately guide student language development with two main concepts. One, we must be focused on learning functional language and second language used has to be perceived as meaningful to the learner.
Functional Language is essential to learning a second language. The brain must perceive new information as important in order for uptake, i.e. storage, to occur. Learning functional chunks of language make retention incrementally more likely to be stored in the brain. Several years ago in Shelby County Schools we decided to repurpose vocabulary lists from individual words to sentence frames. How classes chose to fill in the frame was up to the class to decide. Almost immediately we saw changes in student performances. Students were able to use the language they were learning more quickly and with greater fluency. Functions, like asking and answering questions or stating needs were occurring earlier than we’d ever seen it before. Students trying to create with the language was also occurring earlier. The improved quality of student performances earlier in the year would mean that meeting/exceeding our proficiency targets could also happen earlier. Using functions to guide instruction has bought about many meaningful improvements to the learning process. The biggest of these changes has been in student motivation.
Students are engaging in the language learning process more willingly because the functional chunks of language are meaningful. We still provide the context within which students produce language; the functions however make it easier to convey meaningful information. Meaningfulness is not only important to the students but also to the brain. Each day we learn things that either reinforce or create a new connection in the brain. At night however, the brain goes through a pruning process where it deletes the connections that are not perceived as meaningful. Meaningfulness is critical to learning. If what we teach is not seen as meaningful then we will find ourselves re-teaching the same information over and over again because there was not sufficient context. Context helps build meaningfulness by providing a real world reason for using the language being learned. Involve your students in creating the context that would be meaningful to them. Only when students are engaged in such a manner will they create long lasting connections.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 3
Title: Morphemes, Words, Collocations, or Phrases? Try a Different Question
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By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor
When I was a child, my mother, who is now a retired National Board Certified Spanish teacher, used to drill me on Spanish verb inflections for fun. Inflectional morphemes are word pieces that provide such information as who is doing the action of the verb, and at what time. I would gleefully chant, “Yo -o, tú -as, él/ella/usted -a” (I -1st person present, you informal singular -2nd person present, he/she/you formal singular -3rd person present). Later, in high school Spanish, I excelled at conjugation tasks, noticing that I didn’t even have to know the meaning of the words I was conjugating (or the paragraph they were extracted from) to get an “A” on the task. Clearly, a knowledge of morphemes, the basic building blocks of meaning, isn’t enough to truly negotiate meaning in Spanish.
As a young adult, I decided to learn my heritage language, Potawatomi. I still find stacks of vocabulary flashcards here and there in my office during cleaning sprees. Now, as an intermediate speaker, I wonder what I could have possibly hoped to learn from a card saying that mkezen means ‘shoe’ (the English word moccasin is a borrowing from Algonquian languages like Potawatomi). In Potawatomi, all nouns have one of two genders, either animate or inanimate; to build a sentence one must choose either animate or inanimate verbs to match the nouns they’re describing. Even to make a noun plural, one must know its animacy. Also, certain vowels seem to disappear and appear depending on what inflectional morphemes are attached. My flashcard never prepared me to know that I’d have to say nmekzenen to mean ‘my shoes’ in a sentence like “I can’t find my shoes!” Memorizing stacks of vocabulary didn’t enable me to communicate basic needs in Potawatomi.
I had a lot of Japanese friends in college, and my college boyfriend ended up majoring in Japanese and doing a study abroad in Japan. I had learned all sorts of fun phrases from my friends and in two semesters of Japanese classes, and I love intercultural encounters in general, so I thought nothing of calling him up in his shared housing in Japan to chat. However, the person who picked up the phone at the other end didn’t speak English, and I had never learned any fun phrases for asking if someone was available to talk on the phone. I discovered at that panicked moment that my improvisational communication skills in Japanese were limited to saying, “Nihongo, iie” (Japanese language, no) and my boyfriend’s name. Learning common collocations and fun sentences didn’t prepare me to negotiate real-life situations in Japanese.
The common thread that is missing in my three experiences is a focus on negotiating meaning to truly communicate in a second language. This is not to say that accurate grammatical inflection, a large vocabulary base, and focus on and use of collocations and phrases that native speakers use aren’t important. They are all essential building materials, but the structure that incorporates them is communication with other humans.
- If I am given an information gap task that requires an understanding of the words I’m conjugating, I get a more accurate understanding of my actual proficiency in Spanish, and I actively improve it.
- If my exposure to new vocabulary is embedded in authentic resources meant to communicate meaning to native speakers, I build up a repertoire of usage along with a knowledge of words.
- If my in-class tasks include unanticipated complications to negotiate, I learn communication strategies along with common words and phrases, and I also get a clear idea of the phrases and skills that I need to work on to improve my proficiency.
Authentic resources, communication-based tasks, and genuine negotiation of meaning in a wide range of contexts build true proficiency as we acquire morphemes, words, collocations, and phrases.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 4
Title: Curriculum Examples from Shelby County Schools
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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.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Title: January 2017 Issue of KinoKultura
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The January 2017 issue of KinoKultura, an online journal dedicated to new Russian cinema, is available online at http://www.kinokultura.com/2017/issue55.shtml
In this issue:
Articles
John MacKay: The Truth about Kino-Pravda, or Censorship as a Productive Force
Festival Report
Jeremy Hicks: Marina Razbezhkina: Five Interdictions and the Zone of the Snake (DOK Leipzig 2016)
Reviews
• Serik Abishev: Witness of Case No 6 (KAZ) by Inna Smailova
• Aleksei Andrianov: The Warrior by Anna Nieman
• Aleksandr Barshak: Election Day 2 by Andrei Rogatchevski
• Eduard Bordukov: The Pitch by Mariëlle Wijermars
• Dmitrii Davydov: Bonfire by Gulnara Abikeyeva
• Nikolai Dostal’: The Monk and the Demon by Greg Dolgopolov
• Misha Holod: The Pessimist by Denis Saltykov
• Filipp Korshunov: Total Transformation by Volha Isakava
• Sergei Loznitsa: Austerlitz (doc) by Christine Engel
• Vladimir Mirzoev: Her Name was Mumu by Eve Ivanilova
• Evgenii Mitta: Act and Punishment (doc) by Ian Garner
• Kirill Nenashev: Putin Forever (doc) by Rachel Stauffer
• Aleksei Krasovskii: The Collector by Arlene Forman
• Kirill Serebrennikov: The Student by Otto Boele
• Ol'ga Stolpovskaia: Year of Literature by Joe Andrew
• Sergei Taramaev, Liubov’ Lvova: Metamorphosis by Lars Kristensen
• Ol'ga Veremeeva, Elena Demidova: A Touch of Wind by Vincent Bohlinger
• Adilkhan Yerzhanov: The Plague at the Karatas Village (KAZ) by Inna Smailova
Source: KinoKultura
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Title: Book: Bilingualism and Minority Languages in Europe
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From http://www.cambridgescholars.com/bilingualism-and-minority-languages-in-europe
Bilingualism and Minority Languages in Europe: Current Trends and Developments
Edited by Fraser Lauchlan and Maria del Carmen Parafita Couto
Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing
This collection considers such issues as the cognitive, linguistic and emotional benefits of speaking two languages, the perceptions, attitudes and issues relating to identity in minority language areas, and the number of grammatical aspects amongst those who speak these minority languages. The premise of the book is based on the fact that these minority languages have, in the past, been in danger of becoming obsolete, mainly because of negative attitudes regarding the benefits of speaking languages that are considered irrelevant internationally. However, in recent times, the benefits of speaking two languages, including where one is a minority language, have been recognized in ways that were not previously understood. Perhaps because of this, alongside the introduction of legislation in some areas in Europe that has been designed to support the preservation of some of these languages, there has been a re-emergence of many minority languages throughout the continent. Questions remain whether this has led to the languages becoming more widely spoken and whether there are specific benefits that can be gained from speaking them. Exploring these questions has led to an increasing amount of research being undertaken on various aspects of bilingualism in minority language areas in Europe. The book contributes to this debate and underlines the relevance and significance of bilingualism in the specific context where European minority languages are still spoken.
Visit the publisher’s website at http://www.cambridgescholars.com/bilingualism-and-minority-languages-in-europe
Source: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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Title: Book: Bilingualism and Minority Languages in Europe
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From http://www.cambridgescholars.com/bilingualism-and-minority-languages-in-europe
Bilingualism and Minority Languages in Europe: Current Trends and Developments
Edited by Fraser Lauchlan and Maria del Carmen Parafita Couto
Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing
This collection considers such issues as the cognitive, linguistic and emotional benefits of speaking two languages, the perceptions, attitudes and issues relating to identity in minority language areas, and the number of grammatical aspects amongst those who speak these minority languages. The premise of the book is based on the fact that these minority languages have, in the past, been in danger of becoming obsolete, mainly because of negative attitudes regarding the benefits of speaking languages that are considered irrelevant internationally. However, in recent times, the benefits of speaking two languages, including where one is a minority language, have been recognized in ways that were not previously understood. Perhaps because of this, alongside the introduction of legislation in some areas in Europe that has been designed to support the preservation of some of these languages, there has been a re-emergence of many minority languages throughout the continent. Questions remain whether this has led to the languages becoming more widely spoken and whether there are specific benefits that can be gained from speaking them. Exploring these questions has led to an increasing amount of research being undertaken on various aspects of bilingualism in minority language areas in Europe. The book contributes to this debate and underlines the relevance and significance of bilingualism in the specific context where European minority languages are still spoken.
Visit the publisher’s website at http://www.cambridgescholars.com/bilingualism-and-minority-languages-in-europe
Source: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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Title: Book: Acquisition of Romance Languages
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From https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/206140?format=G
Acquisition of Romance Languages: Old Acquisition Challenges and New Explanations from a Generative Perspective
Edited by Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes., Maria Juan-Garau, and Pilar Larrañaga
Published by De Gruyter Mouton
This volume presents a collection of new articles that investigate the acquisition of Romance languages across different acquisition contexts as well as refine and propose new theoretical constructs such as complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adults’, and bilinguals’ acquisition of syntactical, morphological, and phonological structures.
Visit the publisher’s website at https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/206140?format=G
Source: De Gruyter
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Title: Book: English Language Teaching as a Second Career
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From http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781783096923
English Language Teaching as a Second Career
By Sarah J. Shin
Published by Multilingual Matters
This book explores the experiences of men and women who train to teach ESL as a second career. Drawing from in-depth interviews and observations of 30 students (aged 45 to 73) in a TESOL graduate program, this book provides portraits of these individuals as they develop as teachers. It describes the processes they go through to launch their teaching careers, the successes and challenges they face, and the evolving significance of their work in their overall life goals and achievements. A welcome addition to the growing literature on teacher development, this book will be an important resource for teacher trainers and anyone working in TESOL.
Visit the publisher’s website at http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781783096923
Source: Multilingual Matters
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Title: Call for Papers: 10th Annual SLA Students Symposium
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From https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/2017-sla-student-symposium/
2017 SLA Graduate Student Symposium is titled Second Language Teaching and Learning: Diversity and Advocacy, and will be held on April 21 and 22, 2017, at the University of Minnesota. The organizers seek to give student researchers and educators the opportunity to present new and future studies that address current issues in SLA. This event will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students interested in language teaching and learning, research, education, and their attendant social, psychological, and linguistic implications. All students are welcome to present their work and meet distinguished researchers in their field at this free, student-run symposium.
Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2017
View the full call for papers at https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/2017-sla-student-symposium/
Source: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
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