New Nebraska Foreign Language Standards
October 15, 2019
New Foreign Language Standards
In September of this year, Nebraska finally adopted its own Foreign Language Standards! To view them, use this link: https://www.education.ne.gov/worldlanguage/standards-proficiency/
Overview: The 5 Cs
Communication: Students communicate effectively in Spanish in a variety of situations for multiple purposes.
Culture: Students work with the language in a way that shows familiarity with and value for the cultures of the speakers of the language.
Connections: Students use the language studied to reinforce and expand their knowledge, connecting language and cultural experiences to all content areas.
Communities: Students can apply their world language skills to personal, community, and/or career experiences.
Cognition: Students explain what they know and are able to monitor their own learning journey with support from their teachers.
What’s New?
As these standards are very similarly aligned with the national standards (which we have been following, and will continue to follow) there is very little that will change. To view the national standards, use this link: https://www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readiness-standards-learning-languages/standards-summary
However, Nebraska has added a “cognition” component to their standards that requires students to be involved in their personal learning experience by self-assessing their growth, setting language learning goals, and organizing their learning priorities. To help facilitate this, each student is creating their own individual language learning portfolio in which they will document both their performance (academic) and their proficiency (ability to use Spanish) growth. At the beginning of each unit students will write goals for themselves stating what it is that they hope to accomplish. They will then revisit those goals at the end of the unit and reflect on what they have accomplished and how they can improve.