indigenous

Designing (Indigenous) Language Classes Rooted in ACTFL Standards to Promote Spoken Proficiency

Unlike commonly taught languages, most Indigenous ones share a particular characteristic: The lack of material for language instruction and the challenge of identifying abundant sources of input for their classes. In many cases, it is necessary to adapt existing materials from other languages to achieve language learning goals, but in doing so, we usually find materials lacking the cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. In addition, many major languages have established proficiency standards (e.g., CEFR and ACTFL). Are these standards applicable to Indigenous languages? While Indigenous language courses may be similarly designed to those of major languages in their application of ...