TEACHING ACROSS PROFICIENCY LEVELS

-The ACTFL proficiency guideline have come to be a widely recognized proficiency standard in language- teaching circles.

- The ACTFL guidelines were created to expand on the FSI levels so that listening, reading, and writing would also be included. The guidelines have one other important diffrence: they are not connected with any one proficiency test.

TEACHING BEGINNING LEVELS

Teaching beginners is considered a challenge for the teacher. It is very stressful when you dont want to make a mistake with beginners because you know that this mistake can be reproduced in others. There are some steps for teachers to teach beginners:

Students' cognitive learning processes

The teacher need to encourage his/ her students to practice the new language that they are learning, can be simple words, sentences or whatever the teacher believe is good to practice.

The role of the teacher and talk

Beginnig students are highly dependent on the teacher for models of language. Students are able to initiate few questions and comments, so it is a responsability of the teacher to get the ball rolling. In a second language  context where instruction is acrried out in the target language, virtually all of your class time will be teacher-controlled. In a foreign language situation, where students speak the same native language, some negotiation might be possible in the native language, allowing for a small amount of student control.

Student's  creativity

Depending on the level the students are going to be able to produce some words or express what they feel. The thing is that the tecaher need to stimulate self-confidence in his/her students because sometimes they are afraid to say something and it is a problem because they are not going to show their knowledge about something.

Techniques

For beginning levels short and simple techniques must be used, repetition and other drilling.

For intermediate levels the teacher has the opportunity to increase the complexity of things because at that moment students are supposed to know more things.

For advanced levels the teacher could apply some different techniques because the students are wiser in some things. They are gonna be able to pronounce well, and they gonna have some new vocabulary.

Some skills are going to be developed for example speaking, writing, reading, listening and grammar.
Each of them depend on the level. The students since the beginning are gonna start learning one of them until they are in an advanced level.