ACTFL Guiding Principles

The Somos Curriculum upholds ACTFL's Guiding Principles, which identify what is effective in language learning.

The Guiding principles are as follows:

1. Benefits of Language Learning
2. Literacy in Language Learning
3. Articulated Sequences in Language Learning
4. Plan with Backward Design
5. Facilitate Target Language Use
6. Use Authentic Text
7. Design Communicative Tasks
8. Teach Grammar as a Concept in Context
9. Provide Effective Feedback

Benefits of Language Learning

Like ACTFL, The Comprehensible Classroom believes that [additional] "language learning is a core component essential in the education of every student".

The Somos Curriculum enacts this belief by providing teachers with a course map and instructional resources designed to help all students experience success as language learners. By focusing instruction on the outcome of language acquisition instead of language learning, every student can experience the same success in building proficiency in a new language that they experienced with their first language. 

Language classes, both beginning and advanced, should not be an exclusive option for college-bound and otherwise academically motivated students. The benefits of additional language acquisition are for everyone, and language courses must be designed to promote equal success for everyone.

Literacy in Language Learning

Literacy development is an important component of primary and secondary education, and language courses are an ideal setting for students to build literacy skills in a variety of content areas. Because language is acquired when students understand what they hear or read, students enrolled in classes taught with The Somos Curriculum engage daily with oral and written texts. In addition to interpretation, both independent and guided, students engage with language in the interpersonal and presentational modes.

Articulated Sequences in Language Learning

The Somos family of curricula is sequential and spiraled, with each unit and level building on the previous unit and level so that students gradually build proficiency. As they move through each subsequent unit, students are able to communicate about ever more topics, for ever more purposes, with an ever greater degree of accuracy.

Furthermore, The Somos family of curricula supports a well articulated 6-12 program that allows students to engage with new content in each year of language study and provides options for students to begin language study at multiple points in the program sequence.

Learn more about our curricula in this support article.

Plan with Backward Design

The Somos Curriculum makes planning easy for teachers, because we have done the work for you. The program, each level of the program, and each unit were all developed by identifying desired results, determining acceptable evidence, and from there planning learning experiences and instruction. 

The primary big-picture goals for the curriculum are the development of linguistic proficiency and cultural competency, in service of Interculturality.

Facilitate Target Language Use

Language educators must maximize and optimize student exposure to the target language in class because language is acquired through the processing of communicative input. The Somos Curriculum provides teachers with everything they need to spend every class period communicating with learners, successfully, in the target language. From the provision of content written in the target language to explore and discuss to tutorials for maximizing linguistic comprehension and processing, The Somos Curriculum is the perfect tool for language teachers.

Learn more about our recommended practices for optimizing student exposure to the target language in class »

Use Authentic Text

The Somos Curriculum integrates language and cultural instruction from the very beginning of the program. Authentic materials are a cornerstone of the curriculum, and they are used for meaningful, real-world purposes.

Authentic resources used in The Somos Curriculum match the text types used in AP Task Models, including:

• Promotional materials, such as advertisements
• Literary texts, such as short stories and poems, both written and spoken
• Articles 
• Charts
• Audio reports
• Conversations and conversation transcripts
• Interviews
• Instructions, and
• Songs and short films.

The Somos Curriculum uses a scaffolded instructional sequence to help students access the information and perspectives available through the resource, and to use that knowledge and understanding in communicative exchanges. Click here to learn more about our vision for the use of Authentic Resources in language classes »

Design Communicative Tasks

Communication is the interpretation, expression, and/or negotiation of meaning in a given context for a purpose (Bill VanPatten), and courses led with The Somos Curriculum are communication rich. At The Comprehensible Classroom, we believe that communication that happens within the classroom should be authentic, and so the communicative tasks found in Somos are aligned with real-world communicative purposes:

1. Psychosocial: Connecting with self and others
2. Cognitive-informational: Learning about the world
3. Entertainment

Students engage authentically in these communicative tasks as they build communicative ability first through interpretation, and subsequently through expression and negotiation of meaning. Common communicative tasks included at regular intervals throughout the curriculum are:

• Listening to stories for enjoyment.
• Asking and answering questions about self, interests, and opinions.
• Reading and listening to learn new information.
• Playing games in the TL for enjoyment.
• Comparing and contrasting opinions, possibly with our own.

Teach Grammar as a Concept in Context

Language is not governed by rules, or even made up of them. Grammar is the study of language, but it is not language. The Comprehensible Classroom agrees with ACTFL that the focus of any grammar instruction should be meaning-making. Primarily, The Somos Curriculum limits grammar instruction to contextualized strategies such as Pop-Up Grammar. Read more here and here.

Provide Effective Feedback

In communicative language programs, feedback is critical to ensuring successful communication. As teachers and students engage in discourse, feedback allows them to negotiate meaning and ensure that messages are expressed and interpreted in accordance with the intention of the parties involved in the communicative exchange. 

The Somos Curriculum provides specific guidance for conducting formative assessment and delivering feedback that helps students to progress toward the learning target of proficiency. It also provides summative assessments with rubrics and grading guides that enable teachers to easily share meaningful feedback with students; feedback that helps them understand their position on the path toward proficiency and next steps.

Learn more about our vision for assessment on The Comprehensible Classroom blog »