Design of the Chinese Elementary School Foreign Language Curriculum

The Chinese Elementary School Foreign Language curriculum is both historically grounded and cutting-edge in design. The following document describes the curriculum design process and invites collaboration from the profession.

Background on Elementary School Foreign Language Curriculum

Elementary school foreign languages programs, although in rapid growth in the early 1960s, ultimately failed and virtually disappeared by the early 1970s. This failure was due in part to a lack of achievable program goals and written curriculum. Elementary school foreign language teachers in the 1970s and early 1980s focused on providing hands-on, interesting activities that kept students engaged in learning in the classroom, but rarely did they prepare a written curriculum. When the teacher left the program, therefore, the new teacher had to start all over again on designing the content of the curriculum since there were no written program goals, curriculum, or record of what teaching had taken place.

During these years, teachers also rarely taught the classes all in the second language. It was Dr. Carol Ann Dahlberg and Dr. Helena Curtain who helped clarify for the profession the value of maximizing students’ opportunities for experiencing the language by teaching the classes in the second language. It was also Dr. Dahlberg, through her doctoral dissertation, who moved the profession toward teaching thematically, rather than topically. Previously, the focus had been on teaching a topic such as “transportation” – but there was no clear purpose for the use of the words and expressions related to that topic in a real life context such as a theme could provide.

In the early 1990s, teachers began to become aware of content-related teaching. Based on the experience gained in immersion programs, the power of introducing, teaching and/or reinforcing curricular content in the elementary school foreign language classroom was made evident. Thematic content-based teaching was explored in foreign language classrooms of innovative elementary school teachers and some examples of theme-focused curriculum were made available to the profession. At this time, some teachers also began exploring integrating rich cultural content in the themes they were developing. Yet, unlike most elementary school content areas, written curriculum in foreign language education is still not common in elementary school programs today.

National Student Standards

With the publication of the national student standards in 1996 (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, 1996), teachers began to explore using the standards to guide the design of their thematic units. Notable among the early-published examples of standards-based instruction are the culturally rich, content-related thematic units developed by participants in summer professional development institutes at the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at Iowa State University. By 1998, three French and three Spanish thematic units had been published and made available at cost by the NFLRC. All are still in great demand in the profession: http://nflrc.iastate.edu/pubs/homepage.html.

Backward Design

In the late 1980s, in addressing curriculum design in the broader field of education, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offered Backward Design as an approach to traditional curriculum design. This approach is an alternative to activity-oriented curriculum that focuses on engaging, hands-on activities to involve students in learning and to the “covering” of the content in a textbook or curriculum.

Backward Design challenges teachers to make their primary focus the development of deep student understanding, instead of the development of knowledge. When students have developed understanding, they show evidence that they know and can do specific things and can transfer their learning to new settings, situations, and problems. Backward Design emphasizes assessment as a way to evaluate students’ capacity to use their knowledge and transfer its application to a variety of settings.

Backward Design does not begin planning at the instructional level, but rather, planning begins by focusing on the desired results of the instruction. The Backward Design planning process involves three stages:

Stage One: Identify desired results

Stage Two: Determine acceptable evidence

Stage Three: Plan learning experiences and instruction

In the early 2000s, leaders in the foreign language profession became interested in exploring the use of Backward Design in K-12 foreign language curriculum design, resulting in several innovative district or state projects in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Wyoming, among others.

Laying the Groundwork for the Chinese Curriculum

As we began the development of the Chinese curriculum for this project, we had the good fortune of working with consultants such as Dr. Shuhan Wang, Executive Director of Chinese Language Initiatives at the Asia Society http://www.asiasociety.org/ and Dr. Wei-ling Wu, West Windsor-Plainsboro High School, who guided us in the use of Backward Design in our early stages of planning. Working with them, we project staff and teachers created the following draft documents by working backwards from our project end point, fifth grade, to our starting point, kindergarten:

• Student Linguistic and Cultural Profile: Grade Level Expectations
  
  
• Overview of K-5 Curricular Thematic Mapping, including overall Enduring Understandings, Essential Questions and essential strategies
  
  
• Chinese K-5 FLES Draft Conceptual Overview, which references the previous two documents
  
  
• Kindergarten Curriculum Scope and Sequence Draft

Designing the Curriculum

In July 2007, as the project staff and teachers sat down to write the curriculum needed to begin the two new Chinese programs in rapidly-approaching August, we relied on our extensive previous experience as classroom teachers and focused on teaching all in the target language using engaging activities to address the themes we had defined. What we did not do was to keep in mind the desired results, nor did we plan the assessment of student learning before planning our activities.

It soon became evident that we were not on the right track. Although our activities were interesting and engaging to students, they did not develop the Enduring Understandings or address the Essential Questions we had defined for the units. See our early kindergarten units, for examples of this planning:

1. Theme Kindergarten A 1: Who are we in our Chinese classroom?
   
   
2. Theme Kindergarten A 2: Who are our friends?

Recognizing that we had not used the strategies of the Backward Design approach to curriculum, we changed our focus and began working to understand and incorporate elements of Backward Design into our next kindergarten units by using the three stages of Backward design to identify desired results by using the three stages of Backward design to identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, and plan the learning experiences and instruction,:

1. Kindergarten Theme B.3: What Do We Know About Our Families?
   
   
2. Kindergarten Theme C: What People and Places are in our Community?
   
   
3. Kindergarten Theme D: Who are we? (KDwhoarewe)

We have now developed the first grade scope and sequence document and are currently developing the first grade thematic- and concept-based units following the three stages of the Backward Design. As we plan, we are responding to input from the project teachers who are implementing the thematic units in their classrooms. We also continue to work on enhancing our understanding of Backward Design with each new unit. We are focusing on better understanding the nature of Performance Assessments in Backward Design and, in the future, want to develop rubrics for evaluating student performance assessments. We also want to enhance assessment strategies at the lesson level and develop a means of recording the assessment outcomes.

1. Chinese Curriculum Scope and Sequence: Grade 1
   
   
2. Draft Theme 1.A.1 Who are our friends at school?
   
   
3. Draft Theme 1.A.2 Who are our friends at home?

We encourage and welcome your comments and suggestions on any part of the scope and sequence, use of Backward Design, the thematic units, and the lessons. We especially seek suggestions for variations on the activities and ideas for performance assessments, classroom assessments, songs, poems, and games related to the theme. We also welcome any corrections to what we have proposed.

Google Groups Discussion Website

To provide your comments, we suggest that you go to our GoogleGroups website so that others can read and respond to your suggestions, and thus, we can share ideas together and collaboratively enhance the curriculum. 

To participate in the GoogleGroup discussion of the curriculum, go to this website: http://groups.google.com/group/chinese-FLES and sign up to become a member. When you have received an email approving your membership (to keep junk emailers out), learn how to post your comments, by reading the "Help with Posting Your Comments" on the Chinese-FLES GoogleGroups website. We look forward to your comments!

Email Peifeng Zhang at pzhang@iastate.edu if you have questions or concerns about posting your comments or problems becoming a member of the group. If you are unable to navigate Google Groups, but want to still share comments, please send them to us at our email addresses below.

Thank you!

Marcia Rosenbusch, Director, National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center, mrosenbu@iastate.edu   

Nancy Rhodes, Chinese K-5 Curriculum Project \Director, Center for Applied Linguistics, nrhodes@cal.org

Chengbin Yin, Chinese K-5 Curriculum Project Coordinator, Center for Applied Linguistics, cyin@cal.org