Señora Kahan
¡Bienvenidos!
Contact information:
Victoria Kahan
World Language Teacher
286 West Elm Street
Yarmouth, ME 04096
Phone: 207-846-5535
Fax: 207-846-2326
"To have another language is to have another soul" - Charlemagne
See how learning a language can save your life!
World Readiness Standards
(Text adapted from New Haven Public School World Language site)
Gone are the days of spending language classes conjugating verbs and translating sentences! Over the past twenty-five years, the world language field has changed dramatically. There is now a focus on students' ability to communicate in the real-world and interact with authentic texts and native speakers. There have been national standards in foreign language since 1999. These helped to define high-quality language curricula from PreK-16. The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, first published in 1986, have gone through numerous revisions to become the bar with which colleges, businesses, and public schools define “how well” someone knows a language. Assessment has shifted to a focus on authentic tasks, such as interpreting texts from the target culture, participating in spontaneous conversations, and producing written and spoken presentations meant for an audience. These shifts in thinking have informed the design of our World Languages curricula here at YHS . See a video about the World-Readiness Standards here:
How do we measure proficiency?
In the United States, there are clear definitions of world language proficiency that can be used to assess student progress. These guidelines are established by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). The “ACTFL Proficiency Scale” defines language learning on a continuum from Novice to Distinguished, with each level divided further into low, mid, and high (ex. Novice-Mid). In the graphic to the right, you’ll notice that the breadth of what students are able to do with language in terms of topics and content increases as they move up the proficiency levels. At YHS, we have defined our Proficiency Targets for each level of language study. See the chart and the link below.
