Department of Languages and Literatures

Learning Outcomes in Foreign Languages

A. French and Spanish majors will demonstrate:

1. oral proficiency at the Advanced-Low level, according to the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Speakers at this level are "able to handle a variety of communicative tasks," participating "actively in most informal and a limited number of formal conversations on activities related to school, home, and leisure activities and, to a lesser degree, those related to events of work, current, public, and personal interest or individual relevance." Although communication at this level can be somewhat strained, with "noticeable self-correction and a certain "grammatical roughness," speakers at this level of proficiency "demonstrate the ability to narrate and describe in all major time frames... in paragraph length discourse" (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines-Speaking. Revised 1999).

2. writing proficiency at the Advanced-Low level of proficiency as described in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines.  At this level students can "write about familiar topics by means of narratives and descriptions of a factual nature, and write simple summaries" using "major time frames with some control of aspect".  Although their writing demonstrates "sustained control of simple target-language sentence structures and partial control of more complex syntactic structures" it can be "understood by natives not used to the writing of non-natives through some additional effort may be required in the reading of the text (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines-Writing. Revised 2001).

B. Foreign Language students at the 201 level will demonstrate:

       * basic proficiency in the understanding and use of a foreign language;

       * knowledge of the distinctive features of culture(s) associated with the language they are studying.