ADFL Projects

The MLA's Articulation Initiative:
High School to College in Foreign Language Programs

Part of a Team
Thomas Keith Cothrun, Las Cruces High School, NM

If we intend to be good educators, we must know our business--our entire business. We need to know how language programs at all levels work and make sure that they work as intended. As members of the language profession, we will have greater success if we see ourselves and everyone who impacts the education of our students as part of an interdependent team and not an independent enterprise. It's the entire team working toward a shared goal of preparing students to know how, when, and why to say what to whom. Each of us plays a role in achieving overall success. We must, however, know and understand everyone's contribution and seek to share and enhance our mutual work in order for our programs to be highly effective.

With the 1995 release of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, our profession defined what students K-12 should know and be able to do--taking a giant step toward solving many articulation issues. Currently, the National Standards in Foreign Language Education Collaborative Project is extending the realm of standards for foreign language as individual task forces from AATF, AATG, AATI, AATSP, ACL, ACTR, ATJ/NCSTJ, and CLASS/CLTA work to define language-specific standards. The decision was made to expand the scope of these standards and include sample progress indicators (benchmarks) for college and university students. One of the more interesting debates that has emerged as a result of the decision to include sample progress indicators for students at this level has been the controversy over the nomenclature to be used: postsecondary versus grade 16.

One side believes that colleagues at colleges and universities will reject any document that refers to instruction at this level as grade 14 or grade 16. The other side points out that the use of the term postsecondary allows for a perceived detachment: it indicates that something has ended and therefore helps people to believe that what follows does not have a connection to what came before it. Use of the term grade 16 might allow foreign language educators to think in terms of students and their progress along a continuum that may or may not have started as early as kindergarten.

Seeing ourselves as part of a team of educators dedicated to the success of students in learning a second language puts us in a better position to understand the whole sequence of foreign language education. It requires that we know the dimension and characteristics of the entire education experience and understand the relations, sequence, and content of the full curriculum. We must know what has come before and what will come after. In doing so, we begin to understand how we relate to and can support our colleagues and their work and how we best view and carry out our own. Keeping our eye on the whole helps us see how our contributions fit in the entire education of our students.

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