by Jean W. LeLoup & Robert Ponterio, SUNY Cortland
Please cite as: LeLoup, J. W., & Ponterio, R. (1996). "Choosing and using materials for a 'net' gain in FL learning and instruction." In V. B. Levine, Ed. _Reaching Out to the Communities We Serve_. NYSAFLT Annual Meeting Series 13; 23-32.
Much hype surrounds the new communications technologies (e.g., the Internet and the World Wide Web [WWW]), and many foreign language (FL) teachers are anxious to incorporate these new technologies into their classrooms. Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon us as educators to ensure that the use of communications technology in the FL classroom parallels and enhances the curriculum rather than drives it. We need to know how to incorporate technology resources into our lessons so that they compliment our objectives and goals and facilitate their achievement. In sum, the resources obtained through communications technologies should be selected only with the express purpose of improving FL teaching and learning. This article will explore the rationale for choosing materials from the WWW, will give a brief introductory explanation of the technology involved in accessing the resources of the Internet, and will then discuss how teachers might integrate these resources into the FL curriculum.
Foreign language teachers who have done any Internet "surfing" (i.e., random exploration of the net) at all can attest to the vast quantities of sites, resources, information, and materials available electronically, some of it fascinating, much of it useless. Indeed, one can spend hours and even days searching the WWW for suitable and useful materials for the classroom. Educators, however, do not have much disposable time to dedicate to scouring the net and so must be focused and directed in their Internet forays. Having a clear idea of the purpose of one’s search is an initial and beneficial step in making efficient and effective use of time when trying to locate materials.
The key concept that should drive any search is curriculum support and enhancement. Selection of materials from the Internet must be based on the goals and objectives of the FL curriculum in place for each course. With this main idea in mind, a three-pronged approach can be taken to an Internet search. First, teachers can search for materials to support a specific lesson that has been planned. In other words, a teacher can look for resources on the WWW that reinforce or expand a key concept or idea that is treated in an upcoming lesson. If, for example, weather vocabulary is included in the lesson activities, the teacher can search for sites with weather reports for target language (TL) countries and, of course, in the TL itself.
Another approach to net searches is that motivated by expanding one's personal collection of sites and resources for future use. Again, the curriculum here is the driving force: teachers with a firm knowledge of their course curriculum will constantly be on the lookout for materials that will be useful throughout the year in a particular course. A teacher may find a site at the beginning of the school year that provides a wealth of materials for units to be taught during the second semester; this site is added to his/her personal collection and is readily accessible when the time comes. Useful sites can also be recycled in this way, as illustrated by the above example of weather information. Generally such weather reports also include numbers and even days of the week as part of the information. This vocabulary may not be taught in contiguous lessons, but it will most assuredly arise in many fashions throughout the year. Thus, teachers can recycle information about TL countries as well as authentic materials discovered through their searches.
A third approach is to investigate others' collections first. Instead of spending much valuable time reinventing the wheel, teachers can explore collections compiled by other FL educators and professionals who have taken great time and pains to locate authentic materials, identify useful TL sites, and even categorize this information. Because, as previously noted, searching the net can be a very time-consuming activity, taking advantage of the work others have done and generously made available is a sensible way to begin. The homepage of the Foreign Language Teaching Forum (FLTEACH) has a list of several collections of sites that dedicated FL educators have garnered from their net searches. This list is not meant to be exhaustive nor comprehensive, but it is extensive in that links to other collections lead, in turn, to links to still other collections, and the webbing effect yields exponentially greater results. http://web.cortland.edu/flteach is the address (also known as a Uniform Reference Locator or URL) of the FLTEACH homepage.
E-mail: The most common method of using the Internet is e-mail or an "electronic post." To use e-mail, you must have an access to the Internet and software to enable your computer to talk to the host computer. General e-mail functions include: sending and receiving new mail, saving mail to a file system, replying to a message received, including parts of previously received messages in responses, and forwarding mail. Mailing Lists: Mailing lists are discussion groups on the Internet established for people with common interests. These lists are frequently referred to as LISTSERV lists, although LISTSERV refers to a particular type of server. Other mail servers do exist, such as Listproc and Majordomo. Lists are perhaps the most basic electronic communications resource accessed through e-mail, and many exist that have a FL focus. FLTEACH, for example, is a list that was founded expressly for professional communication, articulation, and professional development of FL educators. LLTI is a list with a focus of technology issues for language teachers, and hundreds of language -specific lists abound (e.g., ESPAN-L, CGF, TESL-L).
Telnet: This is the Internet's remote login application and allows you to sit at your computer and login to any number of computers across the room, the campus, the country, or around the world. Telnet can give you access to libraries, newspapers, public programs, and many services that other computers offer to Internet surfers. It can also give you access to your home account when you are out of town if you can log into a local provider where you happen to be.
Gopher: Gopher is a menu-driven application that allows you to browse all kinds of Internet resources. The analogy of a library card catalog has been used frequently to describe this tool (Crispen; Krohl). Essentially you go exploring "library" sites around the world and, when you find something interesting, you ask the Gopher to "go fer" it and bring it to your computer screen. One nice feature of Gopher is the ability to make bookmarks, enabling you to return in the future to a site you have found.
FTP: FTP (File Transfer Protocol) allows you to move files between accounts on different computers, wherever they might be, at home and at the office or even in different cities, as long as both computers have Internet addresses. It is rather like getting access to two disks between which you can copy files, only the disks are not on the same machine nor even necessarily in the same country. The two major ways to use FTP are moving files between computers on which you have accounts or getting files from software archives on an anonymous FTP server.
USENET: USENET newsgroups are a way of participating in on-line discussions without having the messages fill the user’s computer. Access to USENET is managed by a news reader, which allows the user to select a number of groups and to routinely read new messages that have been posted to those groups. It does this by keeping track of the what the user has already read. The news reader can present messages in a particular group by topic, allowing the reader to easily follow the thread of a particular conversation or to delete the entire thread by margroups tend to be less focused than serious academic discussion lists because less effort is involved in participating. This sometimes leads to less commitment to the group as a community, resulting in a less collegial, less supportive conversational tone.
World Wide Web: The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, the Web) is an exciting Internet application that brings hundreds of thousands of sites around the world within your grasp in an instant. The ability to present multiple media, text, images, sounds, moving pictures simultaneously gives a Web page a power beyond other single medium applications. A "page" is the visual representation of the content of many different types of files: text, graphics, sound, etc. Helper applications and plug-ins (discussed below) exist to facilitate retrieval and display of these files. Retrieving a WWW page requires a browser and an Internet connection. If you can use applications like Telnet and Gopher or if you are connected to a network via an ethernet connection, a PPP, or a SLIP connection, then you most likely have an Internet connection and can probably run a WWW. Speed is also a concern because image and sound files can take a long time to arrive below 14400 baud. It is possible to run a text-only browser like LYNX if your Internet connection does not permit graphical access to the WWW.
Many WWW client programs, also called browsers, are available both commercially and freely (e.g., Internet Explorer is one example, and another, Netscape, is free to educators). In addition, many Internet service providers furnish a browser as a part of the service. The Web is based on a client-server application wherein the server is a computer program connected to the Internet with the ability to send files from its hard drive to other computers on the network. Your computer communicates with the server via a client program, the browser, that can send requests for data and then display what it receives.
WWW pages are sent using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is standard for the Web. Hypertext is not linear but rather contains pointers that link one location to another. The links are highlighted so the user can recognize them as links and, when selected, the browser sends a request for a new document to the server in the URL contained in the link. When the new page arrives, it replaces the old one. Browsers have many features that facilitate "net surfing," a key one being the ability to create bookmarks. With millions of possible links on the network, it is essential to keep track of interesting discoveries. Bookmarks allow a user to save the URLs for interesting sites so that they can be easily found again when needed. This flattens out the Web by producing a personal hotlist of sites that you might wish to find again.
Recent browsers have been attempting to function as complete operating systems for the Internet. They can handle HTTP-hypertext, gopher, FTP-file transport, E-Mail, News Groups, and soon perhaps even voice communications. Helper applications are available to go beyond the basic abilities of the browser to provide additional functionality and to handle even more file types. A helper application is a program that is automatically called by the browser when needed to display a file from the Internet. A plug-in is a special kind of helper application that is so well integrated into the browser that the file is actually displayed within the browser page itself, as if it were part of the page. Many different applications exist to facilitate the display of text, graphics, and audio files. The latter, of particular interest to FL teachers, come in many various formats (au, wav, voc, snd, aif) that are downloaded and then played. NAPlayer is an example of a helper application that is used for audio files of this type. RealAudio and TrueSpeach are examples of applications that will play streaming audio--i.e., playing the sound as it arrives at the computer, avoiding the delay waiting for the file to arrive.
Acrobat Reader is an example of a helper application for postscript files in which graphics and formatting are maintained as in the original document. Many newspapers, documents, and forms are transmitted in postscript format. This guarantees that the page will appear exactly as intended. Acrobat allows the viewer to print the page or move around the page on screen, zooming in on areas of interest on screen.
Video formats, with or without audio, are becoming more common as compression gets better. Some examples of video helper applications are Quicktime, MPEG, or VDOLive for streaming video: this plays the video as it arrives so the complete file does not need to be stored on your machine. The French TV news, FR3, is available in this way. As all of these files (audio and video) are rather large, storage can be a problem as can time needed for transfer. Due to this drawback of file size, compression is an essential component of video and audio file formats.
The above is merely a rudimentary explanation of helper applications and plug-ins with a very small number of examples. It is not meant to be exhaustive nor all-inclusive. Many of these applications are shareware or even freeware and can be found on the net at anonymous FTP sites or other public locations for downloading. To find sites for helper applications, try doing a keyword search for "helper applications" using a search engine (discussed below).
Finding useful resources on the Internet can be a daunting task for a busy teacher simply because of the sheer amount of information that is out there. Tools are available in the Internet itself that can help track down materials related to specific topics by performing keyword searches. Different tools exist for different Internet applications. Following are a few of the most common and effective ways to search for useful and specific information on the net.
Veronica: Veronica is a tool that can help dig through the Gopher maze to find specific items. A Veronica search will hunt through all of the Gophers in the world to find any menu items that contain the words requested. It just looks at the Gopher menu titles, not the content of those files, and yields a list of items containing the keywords. If browsing through the items in this list turns up a useful resource, a bookmark will save it for future reference. To use Veronica, you must first be connected to Gopher; it can be found as a menu item on many gophers.
Archie: If you are looking for a specific file, have some idea of the name, but do not know where to find it, Archie can come to the rescue. Just as Veronica searches Gophers to provide an index of keywords, an Archie server searches anonymous FTP sites the world over in order to prepare an index of all files that can be found. To use Archie, you must first select one of these servers. Archie is probably not a program that you need to use too often unless you are frequently updating software on a computer system. It is most useful for tracking down publicly available shareware programs that are stored on the network. When you do need it, however, nothing else will do the job.
Searching the WWW: Utilities called search engines exist to facilitate exploring the web for specific information. These programs dig through URL links to create indexes of all the words they find in the pages they locate on the Web. They then use these keyword indexes to find the pages that are related to the words you entered and provide a listing of those pages or "hits". Most search engines even calculate a probability of the degree of relationship so they can present the listing in order from most to least likely to be what you are looking for. Search engines operate with a variety of parameters so it is best to experiment and find the one you feel works best for your purposes. In search results, more is not necessarily better. A search is most effective when it yields much of what you want but not much else.
Any Web search tool that you use will have specific directions and a description of what it does available right from its own page. Keywords must be carefully selected to target the search objective. Common words such as "school" will be found in so many documents that the search results will be useless. On the other hand, too many specific keywords could limit the search results to zero. Of course, a search that produces no results might also indicate a spelling error in typing the keywords, a possibility not to be too quickly discounted. Often, several searches are needed to get the desired results. A few of the better known WWW search engines are:
Lycos
WebCrawler
WWW Worm
Alta Vista: The largest Web index
Yahoo Search Engine
Centre Universitaire d'Informatique World Wide Web
catalog
Why: Searching the Internet for useful and pertinent materials for the FL classroom can be tedious, time-consuming, and even frustrating. Why in the world would FL teachers want to do this? While some aspects of navigating the net appear to have initial drawbacks such as the time involved in learning one’s way around the computer and the net, many good reasons exist for making the commitment and investment in this activity. First of all, the Web is a veritable treasure trove of authentic materials for the FL teacher. All sorts of documents, graphics, and sound files exist on the Internet that can bring TL cultures right to the classroom on a daily basis. Tourist information on countries and specific cities abounds: e.g., maps of just about any country in the world; photos of daily life in Rome; museums such as the Louvre, cathedrals and convents such as Santa Catalina in Arequipa, Peru, and monuments of all kinds; subway guides to the Paris metro, restaurant listings complete with daily prices for Hamburg, movie offerings in Madrid. Current newspapers and magazines in a myriad of languages can be read on a daily basis. Students can listen to authentic radio broadcasts in the TL or can try to catch the lyrics from a traditional ballad or a popular rock song. Often, teachers do not have an endless supply of realia, and many teachers have neither the time nor the money to make regular trips abroad to collect same. Still other teachers are working in regions that are totally isolated from any kind of TL contact: e.g., a teacher in the middle of Nebraska might be hard-pressed to come up with many authentic French materials in the area. An internet connection and some web investigation will bring French culture, news, cities, politics, etc. to life right in the classroom.
A second reason for using materials from the web is that this information will be up to date. Frequently the realia that teachers do have was collected during previous trips some years past. Very few FL teachers can manage to make yearly trips abroad to refresh their TL and realia supply. Many sites on the web are fluid rather than static; i.e., they are updated periodically and new information is added. A typical web site is not like a book that, once written, does not change until another edition comes out. Most web sites have "webmasters" or people in charge of maintaining the page, keeping the information up-to-date and germane to the site’s topics, and taking suggestions on how to improve the page. New pages spring up constantly with new information and links to related pages. Thus, the well of materials will not run dry.
Third, whether we like it or not, our student population is more and more visually oriented. Students who have been weaned on Nintendo, Sega, and a myriad of video and electronic games are simply not very excited by mere textbooks, no matter how colorful they have become. Many students also are quite computer-literate and they enjoy and prefer the challenge of finding TL information on the web to filling out worksheets, writing in workbooks, and reading from textbooks. Still others might not feel at ease using the technology but recognize it as an important component of their education, perhaps even more so than their FL experience. Motivation for language study can benefit from the association with new technological tools, showing the students that language is also a tool for the future. Technology pundits have also begun noticing that children who surf the web are reading. This alone can be a benefit in our less literate society. The basic information might be the same and the knowledge gained in the end identical, but students would arguably opt for gleaning the facts from an interactive session on the web over simply reading them on the printed page.
Lastly, the technologies existent today make it possible for language learners to engage in truly interactive language experiences via the Internet. Programs such as "Talk" and "Internet Relay Chat" or IRC enable real-time conversation with people all over the world. Using these applications, it is quite conceivable for FL students to have actual dialogues with native speakers about any topic that occurs to them at the moment. The interchange is spontaneous, the feedback immediate, and the situation completely real and not simulated. While use of such programs is probably not feasible in the classroom on a regular basis (due to a number of concerns such as time zones, bandwidth, sufficient available hardware for all students, and appropriateness of conversation topics), exposure to these language possibilities may encourage students to become life-long learners of language and other cultures.
How: The key concept underlying the use of materials from the Internet is that the lessons and activities must be curriculum-driven. Foreign language teachers need to examine the curricula particular to their own language courses, select certain primary concepts and foci, and then decide how best to enhance these with authentic materials from the web. Hence, the idea is to facilitate the achievement of FL classroom goals and objectives by using materials from the Internet. These materials can also be used to reinforce the topics of the New York State Syllabus, e.g., physical environment, meal-taking, leisure, shopping, travel, and current events to name several (New York State Syllabus, n.d.).
Following are several examples demonstrating the use of authentic materials from the Internet as adjuncts that support curricular objectives. These examples are not meant to be definitive in nature; rather, they are illustrative of what some activities might resemble. The language level for these examples ranges from rudimentary to complex or advanced. The first example uses the information taken from a weather page in Uruguay. By accessing the URL (http://lsa.lsa.com.uy/uruguay/servicios/infclima.html), temperatures and forecasts can be obtained for this TL country. Several activities can be devised using this information that also are excellent exemplars of the goals of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning (see discussion below). Possible topics (and their parallel objectives for FL Standards) for activities using this material include working with numbers, the Celsius system, weather terms (Standard 3.1); past, present, and future tense; and cultural information regarding the differences in seasons. Student activities could range from giving rudimentary weather reports on a daily basis to providing tourist information in a travel agency promoting a trip to the region in question (Standards 1.3, 2.1, 2.2). Later during the year, a parallel activity might recycle this information by asking students to recall different weather patterns in other parts of the world and then to discuss or write about how those differences might change perspectives on, for example, holidays (Standard 4.2). Here in New York state, Christmas is associated with snow, cold weather, caroling, hot chocolate and the like, but in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the temperature on Christmas day is typically in the nineties and it is quite sunny. For many families there, Christmas day involves going to the beach, an idea that may seem strange to our students unless they are knowledgeable about the geographic influences that engender cultural differences.
The second example is an intermediate level French scanning activity. Travel projects are very popular uses of the tourist information that is readily found on the web. Planning a trip gives students a meaningful focus for their scanning activities because they need to use the information found to complete a more complex task. Such planning activities provide support for Standard 1.2 "Students will use the TL to obtain, process, and provide information in spoken and written form on a variety of topics of academic, personal, cultural, and historic interest." But the process of obtaining information from TL sources to plan activities within the TL culture also supports Standard 2.1" Students will demonstrate knowledge of the components of the target culture," and Standard 3.1 "Students will use the TL to gain access to information and perspectives that are only available through the TL or within the target community." By using specific questions to direct attention towards areas of particular cultural interest, the different perspective of the TL culture rather than the mere collection of facts can become the ultimate goal of the activity.
In this activity, students plan a visit to
two museums in Paris, le
Louvre and le Centre Pompidou. They are given the dates of the trip, the
number of participants and their ages. A number of WWW sites are provided
because all information cannot be found on a single web page. The questions
include:
· Where is the museum? Near what subway station?
·At what date and time should we go?
· How much will it cost for
the group?
· Where can we get additional information?
· One
chaperone is visually impaired, and one student is in a wheel chair. Can
any special arrangements be made?
· How long will it take by subway
to travel from one museum to the other? Plan an alternative means to get
there.
· How should we dress?
· Given your schedule for the
day, where should the group eat?
· What are the "must see"
exhibits? What might we outside see near the museums?
Available sources of information include the official sites of the museums:
http.//www.cnam-gp.fr/ and http.//mistral.culture.fr/louvre/The third example is an advanced level activity on the French political system for a Distance Learning (DL) course on Internet Resources for French Civilization. In this activity, the student, working for an import/export firm, must do research on the web to prepare the boss for a trip to France during the election campaign. A series of questions relating to information disseminated on the web by the France 3 television station during the May 95 French presidential elections helps the student prepare. This web site provided up to the minute news about the elections during the race, but it now also serves as an interesting historical document akin to a newspaper. As the students search through articles about the candidates programs and biographies and examine the polling trends during the campaign, they must interpret the news as it was presented to the French audience. Photos of the candidates, graphs of the polling data, and even images of the presidential palace contribute to the realism of the activity. To provide additional background information about the French state, the students are directed to "Adminet,"
http://www.argia.fr/adminet/index_fr.html
a large data base of information
about French institutions. Finally, an analytical problem requires the
student to explain a political cartoon related to the election from "Charlie
Hebdo,"
http://didecs1-e.epfl.ch:80/~pcondeva/Charlie/Affiche/index.html
to the boss, who does not know much about French politicians.
The final example is for intermediate to advanced level Spanish. In a language course where conversation is a major focus, research has shown that debates are a good way to foster discussion and increase target language production (Duff, 1986, cited in Chaudron, 1988). In a conversation and culture course taught at the United States Air Force Academy, students were asked to research information about the border war between Peru and Ecuador in order to have a debate (Standards 1.1, 1.3, 2.1). Using a search engine (in this case, http://altavista.digital.com) and entering "Ecuador" + "Peru" + "border", several sites were found that contained articles about and commentary on the war from both countries’ perspectives (Standard 3.2). In addition, both teams used Internet resources to locate a map of Ecuador representative of its side: the outline and territory incorporated by Ecuador is radically different (and covers a much larger area) on a map made in Ecuador (http://www.quito.gov.ec/municipio/images/ecuador.gif ) from a map made in most other parts of the world (http://www.lonelyplanet.com.au/dest/sam/graphics/map-ecu.htm). Nowhere but in Ecuador or on the Internet was it possible to obtain such a dramatic representation of one of the main points of the debate (LeLoup & Ponterio, 1996)!
A brief glance at the newly formed national Standards for Foreign Language Learning clearly shows that their major points lend themselves readily to use of the Internet and its many and varied resources (see Appendix A--for a summary of the national standards). All five subsuming goals of the Standards (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities) include directives that call on students to seek, find, discuss, and synthesize TL language, information, and cultural knowledge in order to function more effectively in our global society. In particular, the goals of Connections and Comparisons speak to using the Internet in order to shrink the world and bring TL experiences well within the grasp of our students. Several sample learning scenarios suggest activities that incorporate Internet resources, e.g., searches for cultural information and correspondence with TL keypals. Certainly the standards encompassed by the goal of Communities (students using the language within and beyond the school boundaries (5.1) and students becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enrichment and enjoyment (5.2) are greatly facilitated by the extensive resources on the web and the technological advancements made to date and anticipated in the future. Long after these students are gone from our classes, they will still have the capability to read authentic and current materials and listen to TL music, radio broadcasts, and even participate in real-time TL conversations via the Internet. We need to demonstrate this capability while we have them in class, in the hope that they will continue their language learning later in life.
This article has suggested several ways and aids to navigate the web and also numerous ways to incorporate the nuggets found there into a FL lesson. Communications technologies are improving and expanding daily, literally bringing the TL world directly into FL classrooms. The possibilities for obtaining and using authentic materials and information on a myriad of TL topics are multiplying exponentially with an increasing number of web sites, interest in other cultures, and FL educator technological acumen. Use of these technologies is supported by the national Standards for Foreign Language Learning, a resounding endorsement of incorporating WWW activities in the classroom. Much work has already been done by FL teachers at the forefront of this technology to make the ‘net’ less daunting and the TL materials therein more accessible. The main task of FL professionals is how to fit this explosion of information and technology into the curriculum in order to enhance language teaching and learning. Improved FL instruction by efficient and effective use of web materials should be the primary goal of teachers who venture out into the Internet.
Crispen, P. (1994). E-mail. MAP04. ROADMAP-Online Course on Using the Internet. Gopher.oswego.edu; path=computing_resources/roadmap
Duff, P. (1986). Another look at interlanguage talk: Taking task to task. In R. R. Day, (Ed.), _Talking to learn: Conversation in second language acquisition_. Rowley, MS: Newbury House; 147-181.
Chaudron, C. (1988). _Second language classrooms: Research on teaching and learning_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krohl, E. (1993). _The whole internet: User's guide & catalog_. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
LeLoup, J. W., & Ponterio, R. (1996, April). Choosing and Using from the 'Net': Foreign Language Resources and Materials on the Internet. Paper presented at the 43rd Annual Conference of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, New York, NY.
_Modern Languages for Communication_. n.d. New York State Syllabus. Albany, NY: State Education Department.
National Standards in Foreign Language Learning Project. (1996). _Standards for foreign language learning: Preparing the 21st century_. Lawrence, KS: Allen Press, Inc.
COMMUNICATION
Communicate in Languages Other Than English
Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions.
Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics.
Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.
CULTURES
Gain Knowledge and Understanding of Other Cultures
Standard 2.1: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied.
Standard 2.2: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the products and perspectives of the culture studied.
CONNECTIONS
Connect with Other Disciplines and Acquire Information
Standard 3.1: Students reinforce and further their knowledge of other disciplines through the foreign language.
Standard 3.2: Students acquire information and recognize the distinctive viewpoints that are only available through the foreign language and its cultures.
COMPARISONS
Develop Insight into the Nature of Language and Culture
Standard 4.1: Students demonstrate understanding of the nature of language through comparisons of the language studied and their own.
Standard 4.2: Students demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own.
COMMUNITIES
Participate in Multilingual Communities at Home and Around the World
Standard 5.1: Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting.
Standard 5.2: Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.
Standards for Foreign Language Learning