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1. The Current State of Language Teaching in the United States

Language teachers who have been active in the profession for the past several decades have rejoiced that the teaching of second languages has developed a modern, effective pedagogy; that it is served by a set of clear learning standards and credible assessment instruments; and that professional language teaching has indeed become a professional specialization, rather than a pleasurable (or unpleasurable) sideline for those whose inclinations (or at least education) has not sytematically prepared them to teach languages.

On the other hand, professional language teachers remain perturbed that this modern pedagogy has not fully taken hold in the classroom, that key sectors of the post-secondary system that still controls the undergraduate and graduate curricula are still ignorant or dismissive of modern language pedagogy, and that American society, in a time of globalization, internationalization and efforts to improve education, continues to downplay the teaching and learning of second languages.

The negative aspects of the situation described here can be summarized as a concern for the survival of language teaching as an occupation and an impatience that the society will fail to benefit from what we have to offer. The positive aspects are that professional language teachers have at their command pedagogy, standards, and assessment tools that might be the envy of other subject areas, and that second language teaching has long since begun exploring how to relate its subject to the other subject areas.

2. The Move toward "Proficiency" since ca. 1980

The key word in language pedagoghy is "proficiency", any years of experience, research and discussion have given it a clear meaning: the ability to communicate in another language, in real time, for real-world purposes. For most learners this means practical completence: getting a meal, arranging accommocations, using publica transportation, handling money transactions, talking about oneself and family and study or work (though at higher levels proficiency means handling the intricacies of business, culture, politics, etc.). Proficiency does NOT mean analytic understanding of rules of grammar and knowledge of the academic terminology, though proficiency is impossible without the ability to give structure to language, and for some learners a formal knowledge of grammar can promote proficiency (but cannot substitute for practice, risk-taking, and learning by trial-and-error).

The point about grammar is important because many people, whether from sitting in poorly taught classrooms, talking with peers, or even watching popular movies and TV shows, have absorbed the misunderstanding that language teaching and learning are largely a matter of enduring grammar "chalk talks", acquiring arcane terms, and filling in verb charts on tests. Another misunderstanding is that language learning involves memorization not only of grammar forms, but also of vocabulary lists, along with mindless repetition of phrases heard on some sort of audio device. (It is unfortunate that technology lends itself to such activities far more easily than to genuinely communicative learning.)

Here are several indicators of appropriate teaching and learning in a proficiency-oriented language program: student-centered learning; presentation of grammar and vocabulary in realistic contexts, with clear modeling of communicative function and human para-linguistic behaviors (intonation, gesture); much attention to speaking and listening; encouragement of inferencing and risk-taking; emphasis on function over form; restrained, indirect correction of errors rather than obsessive, immediate correction; rich use of authentic cultural materials, especially those which show genuine language in its contexts; writing for communicative purposes rather than just reinforcement of formal grammar; assessment that measures communicative competence rather than only formal precision; encouragement of partner and small-group communicative actibity; personalization of language to encourage appreciation of the new language as part of the learner's own identity and world; use of the langauge to communicate about the learner's entire world, including other vocational and avocational interests – and, especially in a school setting, other subject areas.

As with almost any educational reform, there is the danger that representatives of the "old school" will respond with accusations of vagueness, dumbing down, and "it worked for me". Here there are two effective counterarguments: 1) When defenders of the "old school" experience are asked whether they are still (or ever were) proficient in the language they studied, the answer is almost always No (or it will turn out that the proficiency came from another source, such as travel). 2) The field of second languages has well-developed standards to define many gradations of language proficiency, and the assessment tools to elicit, analyze, and document it. In the early years of the move toward the proficiency orientation, quanitative assessment showed that learners taught by the then-conventional methods (grammar-translation and audio-lingual) were not very proficient in their languages.

3. The ACTFL "Proficiency Guidelines" and the Newer European Union Standards

For several decades the "Proficiency Guidelines" developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, in cooperation with several other educational institutions and government agencies, have been the dominant - in effect, the sole - standards for defining language proficiency in North America. During the past decade or so, the •• developed by the ••, have come into use not only in Europe but also in North America (though only for the languages of the countries of the EU, ••and Russian as well, not for languages of the rest of the world, such as Japanes, Chinese and Arabic). Fortunately, there are no conflicts of concepts or rankings between the two sets of standards. Both describe performance levels in speaking, writing, reading, and listening, though the EU standards distinguish between interactive speaking (real-time conversation) and presentational speaking (extended one-person discourse).

The ACTFL Guidelines distinguish these major levels of proficiency: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior. Those terms have precise meanings, as in often not the case when they are used by various parties to refer to course like "Intermediate German" which usually means second-year German but which may correlate to several levels of ACTFL proficiency. In, the major levels of proficiency each subdivide into more precise levels: Novice-Low, Novice-Mid, and Novice-High, and similarly for Intermediate, Advanced ••and••. The standards are formulated in terms of, first, lingustic function: what communicative tasks can or cannot be carried out satisfactorily at the given level (example: ••); subordinate to that dimension is context/ content: the specific realm of communication (••example); only then is it possible to judge accuracy: how efficienctly and effectively the communicative task is performed. The primacy of function and context/ content over accuracy sends a powerful message about a key and often contentious topic in language teaching and learning: grammar, and how competence in it is judged. The ACTFL Guidelines take a "bottom line" stance: accuracy means how well the communication is comprehended by native speakers of varying levels of experience with non-native speakers of their language. That is, errors which do not greatly impede comprehension, though they may involve some grammatical structures much loved by traditional teachers, are less important than errors which truly obscure meaning.

4. Examples of Proficiency Standards at Major Milestones (K-12 and Post-secondary)

Below are condensed versions of several key levels of language proficiency, in the sense of likely outcomes at important milestones in K-12 and college/university language study. The levels are calibrated to German, but similar outcomes occur with French and Spanish (and other closely related languages). Equivalent proficiencies for languages less closely related to English take significantly longer to attain. Russian, for example is a major step beyond difficulty than is German, and Chinese, Japanese and Arabic are yet another level of difficulty beyond Russian.

Novice-High /••

Int-Low

Int High

Adv-mid

Childhood in L1

SW vs LR

•• Proficiency Assessment Instruments, above All the "Oral Proficiency Interview" (OPI)

In a time when education is troubled my a multiplicity of assessment tools and discussion of them is plagued by controversy over "standardized tests" (with the term often quite misunderstood), the field of second languages is fortunate to have assessment tools which are largely uncontroversial, at least among professional language teachers. For several decades the "Oral Proficiency Interview" (OPI), developed by ACTFL and its predecessors, has stood essentially unchallenged as the "gold standard" of assessing speaking skills.

••description of OPI

Many language teachers have been trained in

•• Assessment of Other Language Skills

official ACTFL tests

creating own tests compatible with ACTFL

•• Development of ACTFL-compatible standards and tests at the state and local levels

•• good teaching / learning practices

•• curricula

•• instructional materials

••Related Language Teaching Methods and Techniques

LAC. CLAC, CBI; team/project/ etc. based learning

•• Why - Briefly - This Is Important (and Also Good News) for Integrating STEM + Languages