"Placing primary importance on learning outcomes has revolutionized my curriculum, my tests and assessments, and my daily lesson plans." - Scott Windham

Context and Background

When people in my profession speak of the “traditional” way of learning languages, they refer to the following method: learn the grammar rules and the vocabulary in a mechanical, decontextualized way, and then, after four semesters of that, take some lit courses. You can learn to speak when you spend junior year abroad.

That method, thankfully, is dead. Derived from structuralist theories of language, the “old” way of teaching languages to beginning students, practiced for decades, was based on the incorrect assumption that careful study of grammar rules and vocabulary lists would best promote language learning. I know, because I bought into that for years, as a graduate student in the 1990s teaching introductory German courses. By the end of the four-semester sequence, most of my students couldn’t really speak or write all that well, and they certainly weren’t ready for a course in German literature.

My transformation as a teacher came from my growing awareness of the “proficiency movement” in foreign language education, which hit the scene in 1986 with a publication by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. That publication, called simply “ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines: Speaking,” was revised in 1999 and accompanied two years later by a set of corresponding guidelines for writing. The guidelines for speaking and writing were formally adopted by Elon’s foreign language department in 2002. Simply put, they provide descriptors for various levels of linguistic proficiency, with a focus on how well students are able to communicate—so that grammatical accuracy is no longer the primary measure of success. Accuracy in grammar and vocabulary selection are seen as important only to the extent that they support effective communication.

The proficiency movement has its own problems, and recent literature makes clear that the vanguard in foreign language education is seeking to move beyond expressive proficiency towards a pedagogy based on negotiating meaning too (not just expressing it), which requires an understanding of cultural and social systems. But even if the proficiency movement has run its course—or, more accurately, even if its greatest value is to have moved us away from a pure structuralist approach towards a pedagogy based on negotiating meaning—the concept behind the movement has had an enormous impact on my teaching. That concept: knowing grammar is necessary but not sufficient; students need to be able to express themselves in a foreign language intelligibly, intelligently, and in a situated context.

For the past four semesters, I have increasingly used student learning outcomes, based on this concept and informed by the ACTFL guidelines, as a way of improving assessment instruments, course objectives, and daily teaching strategies and materials in my beginning German courses .