How do past collaborations encourage future opportunities?
The National Standards Collaborative brought together language-specific organizations and ACTFL to define national standards for each language in the past. Teachers at every level K-16 were included in the process. Future steps ideally will allow the individual language associations to refine ACTFL-referenced “can do” statements based on their specific languages. GLP is a college-level initiative that grew out of LinguaFolio (LF). Others are also adapting LF, including the Start Talk group that decided the lower levels of Chinese and Arabic needed more specific Novice and Intermediate level descriptors. The National Standards Collaborative members and others may decide to do more at every level in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish as well Arabic and Chinese. The GLP “can do” descriptors are expandable, with blank items at the end of each level. Since checklists are downloadable in Microsoft Word, an instructor or a professional organization can add new rows of desc
