Language students learn best when given the opportunity to communicate meaningful content in realistic settings. Providing those realistic contexts hasn’t always been easy, but—as this book emphatically demonstrates—technology can help. Internet- and software-based technologies can offer language students authentic, individualized interactions with members of the target language community—precisely the kind of interaction that leads to the biggest gains in proficiency. Months’ worth of lesson plans and activities show you how to use the best of these technology tools to build content-based curricula for all ages and languages, and simultaneously address critical technology and content area standards.

Features

• Dozens of lesson plans on CD-ROM that can be used as stand-alone activities or month-long curriculum plans
• Introductory essays on technology integration and foreign language standards, performance assessment, and distance learning
• Interdisciplinary links, teaching tips, lesson extenders, and assessment rubrics for each unit

“The NETS•S Curriculum Series Project Foreign Language Units for All Proficiency Levels fulfills a long-awaited need for language educators looking for support and assistance in meeting the NETS•S and ACTFL’s Standards for Foreign Language Learning. This publication offers integrated language/technology units for all proficiency levels that are specifically designed to be easily and successfully used by classroom teachers.

“This is an excellent resource for language teachers and teacher educators interested in integrating technology into language-learning classrooms. The publication will be helpful for all educators from the hesitant language educator, fearing a lack of technology understanding and expertise, to the technology-savvy language educator wanting to weave technology seamlessly and effectively into their curriculum to support student achievement of technology and foreign language standards.

“The ‘Strategies for Getting Started’ provide the reader with guidelines for integrating technology in foreign language learning, ideas on integrating technology and foreign language standards, a discussion of the role technology plays in performance assessment, and an often-overlooked but important topic, the possibility of enhancing foreign language education with distance learning.

“The Resource Units have been designed, taught and assessed by language teachers. As such, they will be extremely valuable to language teachers who actively seek to integrate technology in meaningful ways to assist student learning and meet each identified foreign language and technology standard.”

—Elizabeth Hoffman, past president of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages