AAUSC 2014 Volume - Issues in Language Program Direction: Innovation and Accountability in Language Program Evaluation PDF Download

Author: Nicole Mills
Publisher: Cengage Learning
ISBN: 9781305275096
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Despite rapid globalization within contemporary society and the seemingly obvious need for the study of foreign languages (FL) and cultures; recruitment to undergraduate FL degrees has dwindled, graduate programs have disappeared; and institutions have restructured independent language departments into mega-departments of languages, literatures, and cultures. At the same time, the FL and humanities disciplines have engaged in “soul-searching” exercises in an effort to understand and express a renewed sense of value for the study of foreign language and culture. As a result of these kinds of societal and disciplinary movements, FL programs, along with other educational sectors, are facing the increased need to engage with peripheral forces like accountability and accreditation, to express and ensure their value through outcomes assessment, and to begin to think, innovate, and behave programmatically. Key to enacting these changes systematically and effectively is heightened awareness of the importance of program evaluation, not only as a means to demonstrate how and why FL study is a valuable pursuit in today’s world, but also as a process through which sound improvements can be made, participants can learn, and educational relevance can be sought. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Author: Charlotte Ann Melin
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603293957
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
At a time when environmental humanities and sustainability studies are creating new opportunities for curricular innovation, this volume examines factors key to successful implementation of cross-curricular initiatives in language programs. Contributors discuss theoretical issues pertinent to combining sustainability studies with foreign languages, describe curricular models transferable to a range of instructional contexts, and introduce program structures supportive of teaching cultures and languages across the curriculum. Exploring the intersection of ecocritical theory, second language acquisition research, and disciplinary fields, these essays demonstrate ways in which progressive language departments are being reconceived as relevant and viable programs of cross-disciplinary studies. They provide an introduction to teaching sustainability and environmental humanities topics in language, literature, and culture courses as well as a wide range of resources for teachers and diverse stakeholders in areas related to foreign language education.

Author: Per Urlaub
Publisher: Cengage Learning
ISBN: 9781337276450
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Many foreign language departments have developed innovative curricula with the goal of overcoming two-tiered structures that often separate language instruction at the lower levels from upper division content coursework. However, language departments rarely extend their articulation efforts to include pre-collegiate experiences even though recent educational reforms have significantly altered not only the skill sets, but also needs and expectations of students entering college. In addition to attending to vertical interfaces, successful language curricula integrate horizontally with academic and professional units outside the language department. This volume furthers the existing knowledge base on the collegiate foreign language curriculum by providing a K-20 perspective on the achievement of curricular coherence. It is intended for a broad audience, but in particular language program directors, to help them address the critical transitions that language learners face during their progression from public schools through undergraduate programs and into graduate education. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Author: Fernando Rubio
Publisher: Cengage Learning
ISBN: 9781285174679
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Hybrid language teaching and learning, also referred to as blended learning, has become an increasingly popular model for the delivery of foreign language (FL) courses at the college level in the United States. HYBRID LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING: EXPLORING THEORETICAL, PEDAGOGICAL AND CURRICULAR ISSUES addresses a number of theoretical and applied topics related to hybrid/blended contexts. The volume is useful for readers unfamiliar with hybrid approaches, as several chapters highlight practical concerns and contain suggestions from authors who have experience implementing and maintaining college-level hybrid FL courses. In addition, the volume serves to disseminate empirical work that focuses on the linguistic outcomes of learners in hybrid FL learning contexts. Finally, the issue of open educational resources/open access is discussed in the context of hybrid FL courses. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Author: Cristina Sanz
Publisher: Cengage Learning
ISBN: 9781285760582
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The democratization of schooling and greater access to higher education, together with the implementation of language requirements in colleges and universities across the United States, has led to a higher degree of diversity in language classrooms. One usually thinks of gender, ethnic, racial, or social diversity, but individual differences, including learning disabilities and special needs, also contribute to diversity and have an impact on assessment, placement, and curriculum. In their role as administrators and teacher educators, Language Program Directors (LPDs) seek to integrate current practices and research in applied linguistics into program design and administration, including assessment. To make individual differences a theoretically grounded integral component of their decision-making processes, LPDs need resources that provide cutting-edge primary and secondary research on the conceptualization, measurement, and consequences of individual differences on language development in the classroom. This volume provides LPDs with the means to transmit information to their instructors in effective ways so that the instructors develop a sophisticated understanding of individual differences, including learning disabilities, special needs, and strategies for dealing with diverse student populations. In addition, this volume creates a forum for reflections about and solutions to challenges related to diversity as it relates to individual differences. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Author: Johanna Watzinger-Tharp
Publisher: Heinle
ISBN: 9780357106686
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Endorsed by the AAUSC and published by Cengage Learning, the Issues in Language Program Direction series strives to further AAUSC goals-- improving second language instruction by developing language training programs, promoting research in second language acquisition, and establishing a forum for exchanging ideas, experiences, and materials among language programs.

Author: Peggy L. Maki
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000979024
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
While there is consensus that institutions need to represent their educational effectiveness through documentation of student learning, the higher education community is divided between those who support national standardized tests to compare institutions’ educational effectiveness, and those who believe that valid assessment of student achievement is based on assessing the work that students produce along and at the end of their educational journeys. This book espouses the latter philosophy—what Peggy Maki sees as an integrated and authentic approach to providing evidence of student learning based on the work that students produce along the chronology of their learning. She believes that assessment needs to be humanized, as opposed to standardized, to take into account the demographics of institutions, as students do not all start at the same place in their learning. Students also need the tools to assess their own progress. In addition to updating and expanding the contents of her first edition to reflect changes in assessment practices and developments over the last seven years, such as the development of technology-enabled assessment methods and the national need for institutions to demonstrate that they are using results to improve student learning, Maki focuses on ways to deepen program and institution-level assessment within the context of collective inquiry about student learning. Recognizing that assessment is not initially a linear start-up process or even necessarily sequential, and recognizing that institutions develop processes appropriate for their mission and culture, this book does not take a prescriptive or formulaic approach to building this commitment. What it does present is a framework, with examples of processes and strategies, to assist faculty, staff, administrators, and campus leaders to develop a sustainable and shared core institutional process that deepens inquiry into what and how students learn to identify and improve patterns of weakness that inhibit learning. This book is designed to assist colleges and universities build a sustainable commitment to assessing student learning at both the institution and program levels. It provides the tools for collective inquiry among faculty, staff, administrators and students to develop evidence of students’ abilities to integrate, apply and transfer learning, as well as to construct their own meaning. Each chapter also concludes with (1) an Additional Resources section that includes references to meta-sites with further resources, so users can pursue particular issues in greater depth and detail and (2) worksheets, guides, and exercises designed to build collaborative ownership of assessment.The second edition now covers: * Strategies to connect students to an institution’s or a program’s assessment commitment* Description of the components of a comprehensive institutional commitment that engages the institution, educators, and students--all as learners* Expanded coverage of direct and indirect assessment methods, including technology-enabled methods that engage students in the process* New case studies and campus examples covering undergraduate, graduate education, and the co-curriculum* New chapter with case studies that presents a framework for a backward designed problem-based assessment process, anchored in answering open-ended research or study questions that lead to improving pedagogy and educational practices* Integration of developments across professional, scholarly, and accrediting bodies, and disciplinary organizations* Descriptions and illustrations of assessment management systems* Additional examples, exercises, guides and worksheets that align with new content

Author: Linda Suskie
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470936800
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The first edition of Assessing Student Learning has become the standard reference for college faculty and administrators who are charged with the task of assessing student learning within their institutions. The second edition of this landmark book offers the same practical guidance and is designed to meet ever-increasing demands for improvement and accountability. This edition includes expanded coverage of vital assessment topics such as promoting an assessment culture, characteristics of good assessment, audiences for assessment, organizing and coordinating assessment, assessing attitudes and values, setting benchmarks and standards, and using results to inform and improve teaching, learning, planning, and decision making.

Author: Sally Sieloff Magnan
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9781118870969
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This monograph presents a national study about how the language learning goals of college students are reflected in the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, 1996, 1999, 2006). With a mixed method design, the study includes responses from 16,529 students at 11 postsecondary institutions across the United States, with interviews from 200 students at two of these institutions. The first research to examine learner perspectives with regard to the Standards, this study considers (a) whether college students have goals consistent with the Standards, (b) whether they expect to reach these goals during their formal language study, (c) whether these goals and expectations differ for first-year and second-year language students, (d) whether they differ for students of more and less commonly taught languages, (e) whether students understand the Standards and see the five goal areas as interrelated or in terms of hierarchies of priorities, and (f) how the Standards might encourage student reflection, especially regarding the relationships among language, culture, and thought. With the aim of promoting critical thinking about the Standards and their possible application at the college level, the monograph details the history of the framework, with discussion of its limited acceptance and use in postsecondary instruction, and considers what student perceptions tell us about how the Standards might fit with assumptions and characteristics of communicative language teaching and literacy-based approaches to language learning. In this discussion, the monograph examines shortcomings in the Standards framework, as seen through the lens of student perceptions.

Author: Mark Warschauer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135673489
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Electronic Literacies is an insightful study of the challenges and contradictions that arise as culturally and linguistically diverse learners engage in new language and literacy practices in online environments. The role of the Internet in changing literacy and education has been a topic of much speculation, but very little concrete research. This book is one of the first attempts to document the role of the Internet and other new digital technologies in the development of language and literacy. Warschauer looks at how the nature of reading and writing is changing, and how those changes are being addressed in the classroom. His focus is on the experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse learners who are at special risk of being marginalized from the information society. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of the uses of the Internet in four language and writing classrooms in the state of Hawai'i--a Hawaiian language class of Native Hawaiian students seeking to revitalize their language and culture; an ESL class of students from Pacific Island and Latin American countries; an ESL class of students from Asian countries; and an English composition class of working-class students from diverse ethnic backgrounds--the book includes data from interviews with students and teachers, classroom observations, and analysis of student texts. This rich ethnographic data is combined with theories from a broad range of disciplines to develop conclusions about the relationship of technology to language, literacy, education, and culture. Central to Warschauer's discussion and conclusions is how contradictions of language, culture, and class affect the impact of Internet-based education. While Hawai'i is a special place, the issues confronted here are similar in many ways to those that exist throughout the United States and many other countries: How to provide culturally and linguistically diverse students traditionally on the educational and technological margins with the literacies they need to fully participate in public, community, and economic life in the 21st century.