In the insightful question below, Dana Miller-Kitch calls out ACTFL. The fact of the matter is that ACTFL’s wording in their web pages, things like the 90% use position statement, much of what they say, is completely inaccurate and unachievable in the real world. We do not prepare our kids for anything in American schools but we sound good in all our endless documentation of what we (don’t) do. A trip to their web pages means a wasted afternoon. The ACTFL bigwigs have shown themselves to be over the years extremely out of touch with the troops, out of touch with the research, living in their heads, with obvious links to corporate textbook interests. American language teachers DO promote division by race, preparing our mainly white moneyed kids with some of the things ACTFL talks about, but, across the board, ACTFL is revealed here by Dana to be very much out of touch with what is actually happening in American school buildings today:
Ben –
Since I’m not American and haven’t taught French in an American school before [ed. note: Dana is Canadian and taking the position I had in New Delhi at the American Embassy School], I wasn’t familiar with ACTFL. I’d heard of it but never done anything with it.
How do they think that kids will be ready for the professional workforce with their language by taking WL courses? There aren’t enough hours of instruction for them to get there. Even in our French immersion program, the students come out as functionally bilingual but there are only a few who could be ready for the professional workforce by the end of Grade 12. Isn’t that putting far too much pressure on the K-12 system? If students want to use another language in their jobs, wouldn’t it make sense to get extra training, just like one would get for the field they would be working in?
Or am I completely missing the point on this?
