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WORLD LANGUAGE CURRICULUM

The Epping School District World Language Program seeks to encourage and support the maximum number of students as they engage in the magnificent adventure of discovering a new language, culture and world vision.  During this voyage, students connect their newfound knowledge to other disciplines leading to enriched experiences in their school and community.

 

• We encourage as many students as possible to pursue and master a second language.
• We expect our students to become proficient in communicating in their target language.
• We expect our students to develop a deep appreciation of the cultures where the target language is spoken.
• We encourage our students to share their learning with their classmates, with other students in the school as well as with the wider community.

 

Communication – Students will demonstrate the ability to communicate in meaningful and appropriate ways with users of other languages.

Cultures –Students will gain knowledge and understanding of other cultures by mastering the cultural contexts in which the language occurs.

Connections – Students will demonstrate the ability to connect with other disciplines and acquire information that may be unavailable to the monolingual English speaker.

Comparisons –Students will develop insight into the nature of language and the concept of culture and realize that there are multiple ways of viewing the world.

Communities – Students will demonstrate the ability to participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world in a variety of contexts and in culturally appropriate ways.

 

Efficient Language Learning Strategies

 

One of the most frequently used strategies by all second language students is that of MAKING CONNECTIONS:

• Refer to one’s native language to identify similarities and differences between the two languages.

 

Another common strategy is that of VISUALIZING:

• Create visual models of sentence and grammatical structures.

 

Learners often use the strategy of ASKING QUESTIONS:

• Ask how to apply new information and grammatical rules learned.

 

Learners also use MAKING INFERENCES:

• Learn to read the foreign language by making predictions, using vocabulary in context, and gaining deeper understanding of the texts.
• Use cognates appropriately.

 

Students build upon new ideas by SYNTHESIZING:

• Stimulate prior knowledge of native language skills to build upon and create new or similar skills in second language.

 

Finally students IDENTIFY STRATEGIES USED:

• Identifying the learning strategies that will help students make conscious decisions about the learning process and the strategies that are best adapted to personal learning styles.

 

Sequence of Topics

Students who are learning a world language follow a sequence of topics during each year of study. Please follow the link below to become familiar with this sequence:

Sequence of Topics Levels I-IV

 

The World Language Curriculum was adopted by the Epping School Board on 4/19/12.