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National Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Languages
Proficiency Levels?
This coming fall I will begin the process of reviewing/revising our existing curriculum documents for our foreign language classes. My district has us on a seven year cycle where we review and revise as necessary, then we adopt textbooks. As a part of this process, we first have to revise our course scope and goals document.
One of the requirements of this document is that we must include what is called an achievement statement that gives some overarching benchmark that we want our students to achieve by the end of the year. Our current statements are weak and nebulous. For example, in Spanish I it says: "By the end of this course students will learn the basic skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in Spanish." Huh? The second year goal simply states that "students will continue to learn" those skills. What exactly are the students achieving??
My plan is to rewrite these and correlate our courses to the ACTFL proficiency levels so that my teachers and their students are actually working towards a concrete goal by the end of the year. (Begin with the end in mind...what a concept!) Here's my question...have any of you done this? And if so, what levels are your students working towards? The majority of our students take first year in 8th or 9th grade, so we're talking about your typical four or five-year HS sequence. I've done some reading around and have found some research (mostly using the STAMP test) that shows that students are reaching Novice-High by the end of the first year. My initial thought was this:
- First Year = Novice-Mid
- Second Year = Novice-High
- Third Year = Intermediate-Low
- Fourth Year/AP = Intermediate-Mid
I'm wondering if we should set the bar a little higher and go this route:
- First Year = Novice-High
- Second Year = Intermediate-Low
- Third Year = Intermediate-Mid
- Fourth Year/AP = Intermediate-High
One other wrench to throw in here, we do not have any common assessments district-wide for our classes. I'm not allowed to mandate tests. (Only ELA, Math, and Science can do that.) I don't have any data that tells me what levels are students are currently reaching.
Any thoughts or ideas out there?
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lynn Fulton-Archer on -
I'm sure you're already into this process, but take a look at the new North Carolina Essential Standards. They have re-written their state standards according to proficiency levels and have a nice summary at the beginning of the document with proficiency expectations for a wide variety of programs. You can access the standards themselves and all of their support documents here:
http://wlnces.ncdpi.wikispaces.net/
Keep me posted on how it goes!
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Permalink Reply by Leslie Baldwin on -
James,
I'd be happ to talk wih you next week about what we've done with our state standards in NC (re Lynn's reply). Also I think there is a NCSSFL session at ACTFL about what we've done that might be helpful to you.
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Permalink Reply by William Chang on -
Hello, James! Greetings. It appears that I am in the same pickle as you, except that I have to add the layer of using the Language Learning Continuum stages per California's Foreign Language Framework. Would be happy to work with you on this to figure out some common ground and share/pool resources. Let me know at your convenience.
--William
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Permalink Reply by Nancy Girald on -
Hi James,
I completed a survey of Connecticut world language coordinators on a similar topic this past fall. In 2010, our legislators in Connecticut had agreed that a two-year high school graduation requirement would be on the books by 2018. As a result, I conducted a survey, polling my colleagues on what ACTFL proficiency level a typical second year student should achieve in their districts. The results showed that, although very mixed, 45% of those polled said that second year students fell into the Novice-High level in listening, speaking, and writing performances and into the Intermediate-Low for reading performances.
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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Aldrich on
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We are working on adopting the ACTFL proficiency guidelines and are setting targets as followed:
Level One - Novice High
Level Two - Intermediate Low
Level Three - Intermediate Mid in interpersonal and interpretive modes
Level Four - Intermediate Mid in all modes (including presentational)
Level Five (AP) - Intermediate High
Although this is ambitious, it is the result of backward design from the AP course. Evidence indicates students need to be Intermediate High or above to pass the AP test with a score of 3, 4, or 5. It is not reasonable to expect them to pass that AP test if, during the previous year in Level 4, their target had been Intermediate Low.
Another advantage of honing in on proficiency levels this way is describing the prerequisites for each course level by what language skills students need to have at a minimum, i.e. "In order to be successful in French 3 students should already be able to do the following tasks: understand the main idea and some details about familiar topics when listening and reading; speak and write using a series of sentences with some details; and begin and carry on a conversation on a number of topics." We are hoping this will make our system of targets and prerequisites very transparent for students and parents.
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Permalink Reply by Leslie Baldwin on
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Those are higher than the exit proficiency expectations we have set in NC. We also differentiated expectations by mode of communication and language type. You can see what we did by looking at the tables in the intro part of the unpacking documents. You can find those at this link - look at the one for Modern Langauge Programs: High School Credit Courses.
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Leslie Baldwin replied to James R. Yoder's discussion Proficiency Levels?"Those are higher than the exit proficiency expectations we have set in NC. We also differentiated expectations by mode of communication and language type. You can see what we did by looking at the tables in the intro part of the…"
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