Language-Specific Guidelines

Senin, 25 Agustus 2008
As indicated above, certain changes were made in the Provisional Guidelines between l982 and l986. These changes were due in part to concerns about the applicability of the Provisional Guidelines to languages other than Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The Provisional Guidelines made reference to the learner's accuracy in using common Western grammatical constructions, such as subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement, tenses, and passives.

These constructions either do not exist or do not pose a problem in the learning of many non-Western languages taught in U.S. schools, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. As a result, specific mention of these constructions was eliminated from the l986 version. At the same time, a series of language-specific guidelines was developed through grants from the U.S. Department of Education. These guidelines include considerable detail regarding learner accuracy in using specific constructions of that language at each level. Initially, committees were formed to work on language-specific guidelines in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic.

A draft of the guidelines in each language was published or circulated, and comments were invited from other teachers of the language. Subsequently, they were revised and republished (ACTFL, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989, 1990). Today, additional language-specific guidelines are under development or exist as circulating drafts for Hebrew, Korean, Hausa, Indonesian, and a number of other languages. These guidelines have exerted considerable influence on the organization of curriculum as well as on the pedagogical approaches employed by instructors in the classroom (Thompson et al., 1988).

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