National Standards and Korean as a Second Language1

Abstract

By the mid-1990s, the field of foreign language (FL) education had matured enough to call for national standards that would transcend local practices and articulate a common set of goals and guidelines across all FL education in North America. “The National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project,” initiated by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL), produced National Standards for the first set of ten languages. The second set of languages (Arabic, Korean, and Scandinavian languages) was developed in 2012, followed by American Sign Language and Hindi in the latest World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (National Standards, henceforth) in 2015. Standards for Korean Language Learning (2012) (Korean Standards, henceforth), a collaborative result between the American Association of Teachers of Korean (AATK) and K–12 Korean teachers, finally placed Korean as a second language (KSL) in the proper context of FL education. As a blueprint for implementing an extended sequence of study for the full K–16 range, Korean Standards provides a common framework for all KSL stakeholders with possibilities of new curriculum development, assessment tools, teacher education, and pedagogical research, as well as a means to realize the effective transition from secondary to postsecondary levels. This chapter discusses a number of significant contributions Korean Standards have made in the areas of curriculum articulation, language maintenance, learner diversity, and 5Cs implementation: (1) mitigating the educational challenges of the mixed group of heritage, nonheritage, and culturally diverse learners; (2) providing links between formal K–12 education and collegiate programs; (3) enhancing community engagement across local, national, and international spaces; and (4) transforming KSL curriculum to create meaningful language-content connections.