Building a Strong Curriculum Around ACTFL and the AAPPL

Chris Lemon, Northmont High School, World Languages Department Chair

How do you juggle the many aspects of your courses? We all want the best for our students, making them feel and be successful. We all deal with the challenges and opportunities that come along with our students’ emotions, our school community, resources, technology, etc., not to mention the many desired outcomes in the world language classroom: multicultural skills and knowledge, proficiency, grammar, vocabulary, teamwork, and on and on! 

While each of our particular situations is very different, I would like to highlight how focusing on integrating the ACTFL Language Proficiency Guidelines and the ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL) into the curriculum can boost your students’ performance toward proficiency and the value that they place on their learning, while also serving as a way to unite and promote your language program. I recently presented on this topic at OWLA, and you can find the whole presentation here: docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MtRGErYw5MTANLxGDxJexpBMAA1uzslLrDfZPhY31bE/edit?usp=sharing 

Early on in my teaching career, in 2012 or 2013, Ryan Wertz and Kathy Shelton of ODEW went on a tour around Ohio explaining how to combine the 2012 ACTFL Standards with percentage grades in the classroom, something that immediately clicked with me as I was searching for a way to give more structure to my classes as well as to collect data. These informal proficiency ratings that I gave my students using student-friendly summaries of the levels became the backbone of how my students self-reflect, as well as the heart of every assessment that I give. Here is my grade conversion chart.

Then in 2019, we gave the AAPPL for the first time, and now we give it for free to every Seal of Biliteracy-eligible student at our high school through Title IV-A funding (look that up and talk to your curriculum director if that’s a new term for you! Ryan Wertz again facilitated that huge piece of information.) On a large scale, we have successfully used this data to refine our scope and sequence; for instance, we made our CCP track start with a regular year of Spanish 1, followed by a year each of Spanish 1101 and 1102, then one semester each of 2201 and 2202. This better reflects the proficiency level of the course content and is more appropriate for our students than fitting all of those courses in 3 years. With similar arguments, we successfully advocated for a middle school program.

What do I mean by “more appropriate?” With Novice High as the 100% goal for our first-year students and Intermediate Mid as the 100% goal for our advanced second-year students, we know that these students need a heavy focus on communicating about themselves in almost exclusively the present tense, in a variety of predictable settings. The content of the 1101-1102 series, however, was asking our students in their second year of classes to speak and write with accuracy not only in the past tense, but in every tense and mood in Spanish. 

Taking into account realistic proficiency goals allows us to refocus our curriculum on what is truly essential for our Novice students to get to Intermediate, and our Intermediate students to get to Advanced and beyond. Having completed the OPI Rater training myself (which is highly worth it!), I know, for instance, that to earn Intermediate High you need to be very strong with the present tense, and at least 50% of the time with other tenses. You could theoretically earn the Seal of Biliteracy without ever knowing how to conjugate the present subjunctive! 

So, while I still introduce the grammar topics present in our textbooks and readers, I have shifted to focusing mainly on spiraling from the simpler grammar and vocabulary that is essential for my kids to get to the next level. We still consume and participate in authentic interactions. We still do verb charts every now and again. I have all the essential conjugations on my whiteboard, and reference them often. BUT I also give my students informal proficiency grades on every written or spoken assignment (which I promise takes me less, rather than more time. I use the same rubric every time.), and train them to use the rubrics, too. They use these concepts constructively to write a short written reflection at the end of every quarter.

Now is the time of the year that we are administering the AAPPL at our school, and as we get the results back, I am continually amazed by how connected the kids feel to their proficiency goals. The results that we get are so much cooler than just a percentage grade, because my students are so proud of their improvement, no matter where they started! And the ones who know that they could have worked harder tend to agree with the results, whether on my informal feedback of their assignments throughout the year, or on the AAPPL.

How do you incorporate proficiency into your classroom? How do your students reflect on their growth? Do they feel that they have some measure of control over their progress? I can say with confidence that if you and your school community buy into the concept, you will find yourself having more of the conversations in and about world languages that you want to have, and less hair pulling about how they still can’t conjugate “decir” correctly in the imperfect subjunctive no matter how many verb drills they’ve done!