Why are there 5 stations?

The design of this exhibit was inspired by the American Council for Teaching Foreign Language (ACTFL) Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century. Each of the five stations correspond to ACTFL’s five goal areas of “world-readiness”: Communities, Connections, Communication, Comparisons, and Cultures. “[Together these] create a roadmap to guide learners to develop competence to communicate effectively and interact with cultural competence to participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world.”

As written in ACTFL’s World Languages Map:

 “Language education not only contributes to students’ career and college readiness, it also helps develop the individual as language learners take on a new and more invigorating view of the world. They come to understand the world better because of their knowledge of speakers of another language – of people who share many of the same hopes and dreams for their future. While perspectives may differ among speakers of different languages, more similarities exist than we might imagine. However, it is only through knowing the language of others that we can truly understand how they view the world. And this is what makes the language student a 21st-century skilled learner!”