Benjamin Rifkin The College of New Jersey

 Background  Development  ACTFL and ILR  Modalities  Levels and sublevels

 List  Create with language / personalize  Ask questions  Communicate through a simple situation  Narrate  Describe  Communicate through a complicated situation  Argue (support opinion)  Hypothesize  Circumlocute through an unfamiliar situation

 Words or phrases (memorized)  Single sentences  Strings of sentences  Paragraph  Groups of paragraphs (extended discourse)

 Text consisting of multiple sentences  Ordered according to the text’s own internal logic (may be chronological) such that the sentences cannot be recombined in a different order without altering the meaning  With beginning, middle, and end  Featuring complex syntax to distinguish foreground from background  Expressing a single key idea

 No grammatical errors for novices?  Many grammatical errors for intermediates  Control of time frame for advanced speakers  No patterned errors for superior speakers

 Immediate  Personal  Family  Other(s)  Current events (concrete)  Abstraction or Theoretical level

Example: Family List Personalize/Create Ask Questions Narrate Describe Argue (abstract) Hypothesize (abstract)

 Informal  Formal

Know what students can do with language Provide opportunities for them to practice tasks at next higher level Proficiency guidelines as framework Moving level to level within reasonable expectations

 Authentic tasks  Communicative purpose  Sympathetic interlocutor at lower levels  Focus on meaning, not only on form  Listening, reading, writing, speaking  Cultural competency

 Development of theoretical framework  Development of language-specific examples  Adoption of criteria by different organizations, states, communities

 Communication  Cultures  Connections  Comparisons  Communities

Кого? Кому? Who? Whom?

Teaching for long-term goals Teaching for short-term goals Topics Functions Text-type Grammatical accuracy Pronunciation and intonation Communicative Performance Attention to all modalities Attention to culture Focus on meaning

 Assess for all the Standards  Build standards into curriculum and assessment

 Poetry  Music  Art  Skits  Dance  Holidays  Visitors  Records of performance

 Model successful performances  Provide students with group tasks (ungraded) and feedback  Explain assessment criteria  Ask groups to use criteria to assess sample work  Provide clear learning objectives and assessment criteria correlated with them

 Communicates successfully  Organizes communication  Communicates logically  Uses syntax appropriately  Conforms to norms of grammar and spelling  Uses specific (non-generic) lexicon  Communicates with originality  Engages properly in the peer-editing process

 Communicates successfully  Can be understood in terms of use of norms of pronunciation and intonation  Uses targeted structures and vocabulary  Uses syntax accurately and can be understood  Speaks quickly enough to be understood by native speaker not used to foreigners  Speaks appropriately (register)

 Gets the gist (top-down processing)  Identifies specified details (bottom-up processing)  Extracts meaning through context or background knowledge  Identifies points of cultural comparison  (Superior Level Only) Reads between the lines or infers

 Identifies cultural patterns and practices  Compares cultural patterns and practices  Explains cultural challenges or predicts cultural errors made by uninformed Americans in a particular situation  Analyzes scenarios with cultural conflict  Demonstrates understanding of the culture from the perspective of the culture

 Open-ended  Information gap vs. display  Why? How?  Listening to students  Engaging students to listen to one another  Role of silence  Place of error correction

 Spiraling up in complexity from year to year  Range of topics to match student interest  Communication, Culture, Connections, Comparisons, Communities

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