Dance is an essential cultural product often overlooked in curriculum and lesson design in favor of sports, literature, visual arts, music, and other products from the target language culture. Given the similarities between the national standards for dance and for learning languages, movement and dance activities merit a greater role in world…

Culture in the teaching and learning of foreign languages tends to be stereotypical and monolithic, marginalizing the diversity of local cultures and practices and resulting in a monocultural and monolingual bias. Expanding on the ACTFL Cultures and Comparisons Standards, the current article presents the MAPS model for Exploring Local Cultures…

This study presents language as a form of social expression through which feelings, ideas and thoughts are signified in a Culture. However, distinct groups belonging to the same society may define those factors in different ways, giving rise to a phenomenon called 'Multiculturality'. Therefore, thinking about this cultural diversity and taking…

Reading and writing translate to centuries of shared knowledge and can be expanded upon with the ability to acquire multiple tongues. In response to today's most widely spoken languages, Chinese/English and Spanish/English dual language immersion programs continue to grow across the United States. Unfortunately, the lack of uniformity in the…

This article describes how to help students connect what they learn in the language classroom to the outside world as they learn to understand, produce, and analyze spoken, written, visual, and cultural information in their second language (L2). As learners make connections between course material and the physical and virtual spaces where the L2…

This updated third edition of "Curriculum Planning and Instructional Design for Gifted Learners": (1) Is a guide to designing curriculum for the gifted at any level of learning and in any subject area; (2) Addresses the need to differentiate at all levels in the design process; (3) Shows how to customize curriculum for advanced learners;…

During a recent visiting professorship at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), it became clear that language faculty--both military and civilians--stated that they included leadership while teaching foreign languages and cultures. However, many of the same educators could not explicitly spell out their approach to doing so. This gap…

In February 2020, the Ministry of Education asked the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) to examine the curriculum-levelling construct that sits at the heart of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). A key goal of the research was to investigate, whether-- and if so, how--the construct helps (or hinders)…

The linguistic diversity in schools is increasing throughout the United States and as state and federal accountability increases in the instruction of English language learners (ELLs), many teachers who never before were asked to work with ELLs are now required to contribute to the education of these students. In some states, all education majors,…

What does it mean to capably communicate across languages? This article introduces two theoretical models and a lesson plan format designed to facilitate the integration of proficiency, literacy, and culture teaching in foreign language teaching. The Second Symbolic Competencies Model configures proficiency and literacy as subordinate clusters of…

The Common Core Standards have defined literacy and outlined the mission for English Language Arts in a way that provides a natural fit with the National Standards for Language Learning. Taking advantage of this connection, language teachers can showcase the importance of learning languages by demonstrating how literacy is learned, practiced, and…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the National Standards for Foreign Language Education have several areas of commonality: (1) both standards have the goal that all students, by the end of 12th grade, will have the skills they need to be successful world citizens; (2) the literacy skills that are found in the Common Core are the same…

The more than five million English language learners (ELLs) in the United States represent over 10% of students enrolled in public schools--and this number is growing rapidly. From 1997 to 2007, growth of ELL enrollment exceeded that of overall enrollment by more than six to one. Regardless of where they teach, science educators will undoubtedly…

Despite research showing the broad impact that the study of foreign languages has on the cognitive development of young people, and despite the importance of language expertise for America's economic and geopolitical interests in the twenty-first century, the teaching of world languages has been marginalized within the American educational system…

The centrality of culture and language learning in foreign language instruction is highlighted in the "Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century" (National Standards, 2006) and the MLA report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, 2007).…