Lesley Chapman

Beginning Teachers Committee Chair

French Teacher, Sycamore City Schools

If you are like the new World Language teacher in my department, you are inundated with acronyms: SLO, RESA, IPA, OFLA, ACTFL, the list goes on. How do you make sense of it all, and where do you go to find what you need? So often Beginning Teachers (and veterans!) don’t know where to begin, and spend a lot of time looking for what is already prepared for us online.

There is so much information out there that it can be difficult to navigate if you do not completely know what you are looking for. To help get you started, I would like to recommend two awesome sites that are full of great resources for beginning language teachers: the OFLA weebly and the ODE Model Curriculum.

The OFLA weebly (http://oflaslo.weebly.com/) is in fact a one-stop shop for all your assessment needs. There, you will find a treasure trove of information regarding SLOs, IPAs, and their corresponding proficiency and performance rubrics. These will take a lot of the confusion out of creating your assessments. If you need help pinpointing a student’s oral proficiency, there are some great examples of various oral proficiency levels on this site as well. The site includes a link to the NCSSFL/ACTFL Can-Do statements, which are a tool for evaluating a student’s current proficiency level.

Next up: The ODE Model Curriculum (http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Ohios-Learning-Standards/Foreign-Language/World-Languages-Model-Curriculum). The Model Curriculum includes the above information and more. Here, you can find useful resources on unit design by theme, interculturality Can-Do statements, proficiency samples, and tons of authentic resources. What I personally love about the authentic resources is that they are organized by theme and by language, so you can easily find what you are looking for. Need help writing your SLO? You can find it here. Interested in ideas for activities? That is available as well. There is so much information available to you on this site, it really answers any question you may have regarding World Language pedagogy.

Needless to say, I have them both of these sites bookmarked on my computer for easy access. I visit each at least weekly, and my level of comfort has grown exponentially thanks to everything available there. We are so lucky to be working in a state with so many free resources, it is well worth your time to take advantage of it all!