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A Framework for
21 st Century Learning
to come right into the language class and
produce,” she says. “There does not have to be
a lot of teacher-talk time in English, explaining
how a site works.”
A number of educators take issue with
the term “digital natives,” contending that it
belies the average student’s true technological
knowledge and skills. A poll by The Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation in 2010 found that
children between the ages of 8 and 18 spent
more than seven hours a day using entertainment
media. But media use does not equate
to media literacy, cautions Nicole Stiles, a
French teacher in Pottsville, PA, who gave a
presentation on critical media literacy at the
2012 ACTFL Convention in Philadelphia.
“We put too much emphasis on the fact
that they grew up with the technology,” she
says. “In too many cases, they have never been
taught how to use it. If it’s not Google or Wikipedia,
students often don’t know what to do.”
In lower-income districts, many students
have limited access to the Internet outside
school. That is the case with a majority of
Kara Parker’s Spanish students at South Park
TAPP, an alternative school in Fairdale, KY.
“They would be at a great disadvantage if
they did not have the opportunity to learn
how to create using technology,” says Parker.
“Since I use authentic resources, they learn
about new forms of media as they learn
the language. I especially love to use social
media as models of the language, before they
create a similar product themselves.”
20
Life and Career Skills
Learning and Innovation Skills – 4Cs
Core Subjects – 3Rs and 21st Century Themes
Standards and Assessments
Curriculum and Instruction
Professional Development
Learning Environments
Information, Media, and
Technology Skills
For example, her Spanish students have
picked up new vocabulary from messages
Parker discovered through key word searches
on Twitter, including opinions of last
summer’s Olympic Games and Valentine’s
Day love notes. Posts on corporate Facebook
pages—Parker has gathered comments to
and from Taco Bell Colombia, Heinz, and Oil
of Olay—allow students to see how others
express themselves and their views in the
language they are learning, Parker says.
Teachers and students also can tap sites
such as Yelp (www.yelp.com), which offers
user reviews of restaurants and other businesses,
by searching business categories in
target language cities.
“I take this approach: if they can understand
it, they can create it,” Parker says. “So
if they read a Yelp review of a restaurant in
Madrid, then they write a review of a restaurant
they love or hate. If they watch a commercial,
then they can create a commercial. I
hope that this will also show them different
types of creative jobs using technology. And
I try to connect to why they need to do it in
the target language by showing bilingual job
postings or positions.”
Parker shares many of her ideas in The
Creative Language Class blog (creative
languageclass.wordpress.com), which she
co-founded last year with fellow Spanish
teacher Megan Johnston.
True Media Literacy
Many teachers argue that Standards-based
world language classes lend themselves ideally
to promoting scrutiny of—and critical
exchanges about—media messages. In that
setting, students are primed to consider
perspective—whether the views are of an
individual in the target culture or the slant of
an international corporation—and how that
relates to the media product.
During her eight years as a teacher, Stiles
often included period paintings, images,
and texts in her French 4 unit on the French
Revolution. Last year, she asked her students
to go a step further—to try analyzing how
different artists rendered the participants and
events of that time period.
At the outset, she found her students
unprepared to engage in critical discussion
of either the images or text. By the end of
the unit, she says, students could articulate
a new-found understanding of the perspectives
behind the images and better apply
critical skills to other types of media.
“We said, from here on, whenever you
look at anything, think about what you think
the authors want you to take away from
it—whether it is the messages you are getting
through TV shows, or the ads on Facebook, or
the videos on YouTube,” she says. “The number
of images presented to students is so great that,
without instruction in media literacy, they are
forced to accept at face value all of the messages
with which they are being bombarded.”
Stiles and other teachers emphasize that
such analyses are possible at all levels of language
instruction. “At the Novice level, you
can do this even with the short video clips
that come with textbook series,” Stiles says.
“There is an idea that France is just Paris
and Paris is all accordion players and men
in striped shirts. You need to get students
beyond that idea.”
In an example echoed in the skills map,
some instructors have their students compare
how the same topics are handled differently
in American and target culture publications,
with special attention paid to the
prominence of news articles and the space
devoted to each subject. At the lower levels,
the focus might be solely on headlines, while
upper-level students could consider which
The Language Educator n February 2013