World Languages (Revised)
The Vision for World Languages Education
New Jersey hosts a growing economy that is oriented toward agriculture, industry, finance, education, and research—an economy that demands contact and interaction with the global marketplace. For New Jersey students, the need to function competently in more than one language has therefore become increasingly important in order to participate fully in the economic, political, and social life of a state with over 100 ethnic groups, and where more than 150 different languages are spoken. In the twenty-first century, students must be able to participate in culturally appropriate ways in face-to-face interaction with members of other cultures in order to be productive members of the diverse communities in which we all live. Only by preparing students with an education comparable to the best that schools around the world offer—one that includes the study of world languages—can the goal of leaving no child behind be achieved.
The New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for World Languages envision all of New Jersey’s students prepared for the demands of an interdependent world by:
- Teaching world languages for communication;
- Heightening students’ linguistic and cultural awareness of their local, state, and world community;
- Encouraging interdisciplinary and workplace readiness connections that may involve business and community members as mentors and models; and
- Preparing students for using a world language(s) in whatever career choices they make.
The spirit and intent for second language education in New Jersey revolves around what takes place in the learning environment. If the goal of communicative-based language instruction is to prepare students for authentic language use in the real world, then the organization of curriculum and instruction should reflect those purposes. As more New Jersey teachers incorporate the goals of the standards and the knowledge of how children best learn languages into their teaching, educators and parents should be able to see:
Students enthusiastically engaged in meaningful, motivating, and cognitively challenging activities. Children are excited about their ability to understand and be understood in a second language and are encouraged to use language in activities embedded in authentic, real-life contexts and connected to content learned in other core areas.
Students actively using language rather than memorizing vocabulary lists and analyzing grammatical concepts. Students are interacting with one another and their teacher, and communicating about things that interest them. Rote exercises have been replaced by tasks that require learners to find ways to communicate meaning beyond classroom walls.
Students being assessed by a variety of assessment strategies. Because effective language learning is meaningful, enjoyable, and interactive, assessment reflects a similar focus. Classroom instructional activities mirror assessment tasks and track student progress through portfolios, journals, performances or multimedia presentations that focus on authentic performance tasks, not just traditional pencil-and-paper tests. This allows students to revisit their work and critique their own progress, and most importantly, to become more involved in their own learning.
The Necessity of the Vision
Despite progress in the last decade toward communicative-based instruction in world languages, grammar continues to be the key organizing principle in most language classrooms in the state. This emphasis on the learning of the language system to the exclusion of meaningful, interactive activities in the classroom has led to frustration and dissatisfaction of students. As a result, many students perceive that they do not have the ability to learn to speak a second language and feel that world languages will never be useful in their lives. Many adults acknowledge that although they took two or more years of a world language and obtained high grades on grammar examinations, they are unable to speak the language at all. In this country, world language study to date has resulted in few people who can engage in meaningful interactions in a variety of settings in the language studied.
The focal point of standards-driven language instruction is communication, and grammar plays a supporting role to communication needs. However, a language curriculum that focuses on grammatical mastery as the primary basis for instructional activities will not serve the needs of students. It merely proliferates the false assumption that only college-bound students can be successful language learners. Most significantly, it promotes disparities of equity and access to language learning for the great majority of our students. All New Jersey students should be given the opportunity to achieve a high level of proficiency in a world language and be able to converse in a language(s) other than English by the time they complete high school.
Time to Meet the Vision
While numerous factors contribute to the acquisition of a second language, two key factors are time and intensity or length and quality of instruction. Because providing a thorough and efficient education remains a priority in New Jersey schools, all students should be given the opportunity to learn a world language in a program that offers appropriate time allocations and quality instruction. A program that does not offer a sufficient amount of contact time and frequency of instruction assumes less student proficiency from the outset and denies district students access to excellence and equity in achieving the standards. Success for all students in world languages depends not only on specifying the appropriate content, but also on establishing learning environments that facilitate student learning of a world language (i.e., classes meet consistently for multiple times per week throughout the school year).
The number of years spent studying a language will impact the degree of proficiency that we can expect learners to attain. In 1998, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) released performance guidelines for K-12 learners. This project outlined what levels of performance can be realistically achieved after certain sequences of study. Levels of performance are defined in terms of novice, intermediate and advanced (terminology originally developed for the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, 1982) with ranges specified within each level. The standards and indicators developed here are based upon and reflect an understanding of the stages of novice, intermediate, and pre-advanced language proficiency.
While the department does not prescribe the number of minutes of instruction per week to achieve these standards, it recognizes that students will not have sufficient opportunities to learn without scheduled instruction.
