Course Description: This course continues to address research, theory, and standards advocated 21at Century World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages advocated by      

ACTFL and the Alabama Standards as organizing principles for curriculum development. The focus of this course is developing literacy across the Foreign Language Curriculum. Students define communicative competence and proficiency, apply these constructs to second language literacy instruction, and explain how current models of text comprehension embedded in thematic units develop interpretive mode, as well as interpersonal and presentational modes.

Students write a rationale to defend and explain why the creation and implementation of thematic units are important in foreign language classrooms. Their defense is based on the National Standards and Alabama Standards with examples from their units.

Students select a topic and authentic texts to create instruction for an Interdisciplinary Thematic Unit for a self-selected level of French or Spanish. Technology provides students with the possibility to search for and find authentic texts from the entire French- or Spanish—speaking worlds. These authentic texts furnish students materials to adapt and create instruction to connect to other disciplines and compare their own culture (C1) to the many cultures that exist in their target languages (C2).

Distance-students video themselves teaching a lesson from their thematic units in their own classrooms, and on-campus students teach one of their lessons and video the lesson in a field experience with a cooperating teacher. Students post their videos on our Google drive. The class is divided into small groups, and they watch a video of someone not in their group and write a critique based on specific questions. Each student receives a group critique which they use to help themselves write their Professional Work Samples (PWS).