Kentucky Department of Education

Thanks to a U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language Assistance Program grant, the Kentucky Department of Education has created a beginning frameworks for foreign language learning in Kentucky schools.  This initiative began in 2000, with the selection of a group of K-16 educators and administrators from around the commonwealth who reviewed the status of foreign language learning in Kentucky.  It then became their charge to developing curricular tools to guide program development and assist foreign language instruction. An initial meeting of the Frameworks Committee was held with Mimi Met of the National Foreign Language Think Tank, followed by several work sessions over the next two years.

     
As with most educational endeavors dependent upon research, the committee's product is a work in progress.  The demographics, needs, and priorities of our students are ever-changing. Recognizing this fact, the Frameworks committee's vision and work for work language education are to be considered ever-evolving, but enveloped by shared concepts.  For that reason, the current work will be referred to as the Kentucky World Language CoreText: Vision 1.0.

    

Vision 1.0 views language learning as student-centered.  In accordance with the whole of Kentucky education, it places utmost importance on what students know and can do. It sees integrating core content as vital to providing a meaningful context for learning and to ensuring that all students reach proficiency in 2014. It recognizes the need for educators to be informed and thus empowered, so that they may make appropriate decisions based on research when designing programs and delivering instruction. It considers vertical and horizontal articulation crucial to successful programs and differentiated instruction, cultural responsiveness, and authentic assessment crucial to students' individual success.

Foreign Language Frameworks Committee

 

Dr. Jacque Bott-Van Houten

Tom Welch

Gregory Fulkerson

Ruth Styles

Joan Jahnige

Sharon Mattingly

Randy Barrett

Barbara Bunch

Julie Maddox

John Kruger

Dr. Linda Worley

Dr. Meg Brown