Curriculum Organizers

• Communicating - to communicate with other people
• Acquiring Information - to acquire information for a purpose
• Experiencing Creative Works - to experience creative works for linguistic and cultural exposure
• Understanding Cultural Influences - to interact with and appreciate another culture

These curriculum organizers are practical and purposeful. They allow language program developers to address such matters as cross-curricular integration and diverse learning rates, styles, and needs. They focus attention on the most important purposes for studying an additional language. In the classroom, they should not be treated separately but should be integrated into most activities.

Whenever possible, teachers should use and encourage the use of French. There are times, however, when English will be necessary to complete a task or provide supporting detail for a learning activity, particularly in the organizer, Understanding Cultural Influences.

Communicating

Learning outcomes listed under this organizer provide opportunities for students to use French to establish and maintain relationships, share ideas and opinions, and get things done. This organizer embraces a variety of communication skills—listening, reading, speaking, writing, viewing, and representing—in order to reach students with a wide range of abilities, language traditions, and backgrounds. It emphasizes authentic language-learning experiences and the application of a range of language-learning strategies. Teachers and students are encouraged to use an ever-increasing amount of French in all activities and student/student and student/teacher interactions.

Acquiring Information

In this age of rapidly expanding information, it is important for students to develop the ability to understand and acquire information from original sources in French (such as French-language television or radio programs, magazines, business and job advertisements, recipes, restaurant menus, schedules, or Internet sites) to complete authentic tasks. An authentic task is one that engages students in thoughtful learning and is meaningful and relevant to their lives.

In the process of acquiring information from sources that are appropriate to their interests and age levels, students are encouraged to take risks.

Experiencing Creative Works

Students learn a language most effectively when they experience music, film, art, poetry, and other forms of creative expression, such as storytelling. Students will be motivated to continue their language studies when they have frequent opportunities to listen, view, and eventually read creative works in French and respond to them in various ways. Students should be exposed to a wide range of creative works representative of the Francophone world, beginning with visual and aural works and progressing to written works as students' language skills develop. Over time, students should be able to produce a variety of written, oral, and visual responses.

Understanding Cultural Influences

When students communicate with others in French and participate in cultural experiences, they gain insight into the role of culture. Through exploring French and the Francophone world, they develop an understanding of Francophone perspectives and can better appreciate the role of other cultures, as well as their own.