Making foreign language a priority.Last year, the Indiana Indiana, state, United States Indiana, midwestern state in the N central United States. It is bordered by Lake Michigan and the state of Michigan (N), Ohio (E), Kentucky, across the Ohio R. (S), and Illinois (W). State Board of Education proposed that every middle school provide foreign-language classes. It did so for a variety of reasons, says Suellen Reed, the state's superintendent of public instruction. "We have found that the time spent in foreign language helps children do better in language arts language arts pl.n. The subjects, including reading, spelling, and composition, aimed at developing reading and writing skills, usually taught in elementary and secondary school. ," says Reed. "It gives them perspective." Due to a lot of push back from superintendents, however, the proposal's wording was changed from require to urge. Reed says she didn't push for the requirement because a lot of districts said it was hard to find and hire foreign-language teachers and that they didn't have the financial resources. One way Reed hopes to encourage superintendents to explore ways to offer more foreign language is through teacher-exchange programs she's developing with Japan, Taiwan, France and Spain. She's trying to get funding to help these teachers find places to live and get acclimated. Marty Abbott, director of education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) is the only national organization dedicated to the improvement and expansion of the teaching and learning of all languages at all levels of instruction. , encourages other states to look for ways to offer more foreign-language instruction. "States need to provide incentives and encouragement to try and promote this idea with school districts," she says. "We're very concerned at the level of push back we're seeing in some areas." Part of the ACTFL's mission is to help classrooms reach the goal of functional communication, or when students leave the program feeling confident about their use of the language instead of just being able to conjugate conjugate /con·ju·gate/ (kon´jdbobr-gat) 1. paired, or equally coupled; working in unison. 2. a conjugate diameter of the pelvic inlet; used alone usually to denote the true conjugate diameter; see irregular verbs In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. What counts as an irregular verb is strongly dependent on the language itself. . "Until we have some sort of national assessment, not much is going to change in the classroom," says Abbott. www.actfl.org FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN INDIANA 5 immersion immersion /im·mer·sion/ (i-mer´zhun) 1. the plunging of a body into a liquid. 2. the use of the microscope with the object and object glass both covered with a liquid. schools in the state During the '05-'06 school year: 44% of 9th-12th graders were enrolled in a foreign-language class. 22,547 7th- and 8th graders took a foreign-language class including Latin, Chinese, Russian Russian associated in some way with Russia. Russian blue a breed of cats with short, dense, silver-tipped blue-colored coat and vivid green eyes. and sign language Nearly 10,000 K-5 students took a foreign language class |
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