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As Foreign Language Annals concludes its 50th anniversary, it is fitting to review the past and peer into the future of standards‐based education and assessment. Standards are a common yardstick used by educators and researchers as a powerful framework for conceptualizing teaching and measuring learner success. The impact of standards on language assessment, teaching, curricula, course design, and educational policy is indisputable, but can they even be more impactful, more beneficial? In this article, we reflect upon the role of language learning standards on world language practices and assessments and discuss standards’ design, implementation, and appropriation issues that will challenge the field over the next few decades. Although predicting the future is risky, forward thinking is critical when examining an issue as large and complex as the teaching and learning of world languages. Challenges This paper explores how standards‐based instruction and assessment have evolved and suggests areas in which future work may be helpful. How can advances in the field of applied linguistics inform our thinking? How will new approaches to assessment drive alternative conceptions of language teaching and pathways to language learning? Video & Discussion

Culture in the teaching and learning of foreign languages tends to be stereotypical and monolithic, marginalizing the diversity of local cultures and practices and resulting in a monocultural and monolingual bias. Expanding on the ACTFL Cultures and Comparisons Standards, the current article presents the MAPS model for Exploring Local Cultures aimed at engaging students with local products, practices, and perspectives through the creation, exchange, and analysis of digital artifacts of local cultures. The article demonstrates how a complex pedagogical model can be constructed from existing research and theory as well as how to implement it: in addition to presenting the model and its underlying literature, the article details its implementation in two classes. The Challenge Despite the growing superdiversity of today's world, monolithic national cultures remain the norm in language education. How can foreign language instruction meaningfully highlight local cultures? How can instructors engage students in the local diversity of cultural products, practices, and perspectives in an era of virtual mobility and distant access?

This article presents evidence for a validity argument on the ACTFL Assessment of Performance Toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL) tests (Interpersonal Listening/Speaking, Presentational Writing, Interpretive Listening, and Interpretive Reading) by summarizing an analysis of the 2014 test data from examinations administered in three languages (Chinese, French, and Spanish) to more than 10,000 students in grades 5 to 12. The specific stages the authors evaluated included the following: (1) the design of the instrument, (2) the effectiveness of the rating scale, (3) the reliability of the instrument, and (4) the extent to which ACTFL proficiency levels were generalizable across languages. As a complete test battery, there is validity evidence that the Assessment of Performance Toward Proficiency can be used to measure the performance of upper elementary, middle, and high school students as they develop increasingly sophisticated language proficiency. The strengths of the examinations are the productive skill areas, whereas the receptive skill areas have been targeted for continuing development. The Challenge Developing reliable and valid measurement instruments is essential to the effort to use student learning outcomes to guide goal setting, curriculum development, and instruction. To what extent does the Assessment of Performance Toward Proficiency validly assess grade 5 to 12 students’ performance? How can validity studies positively influence teaching and learning of world languages?

This study explored the expectations that Moroccan native speakers (n = 57) and beginning‐level learners of Arabic (n = 38) held of one another regarding conformity to Moroccan cultural norms. Questionnaires and interviews were used to unpack two assumptions that shape pedagogical practices: (1) that native speakers (NSs) expect nonnative speakers (NNSs) to conform to NSs’ politeness norms; and (2) that NNSs differ from NSs in their perceptions of politeness norms. Results showed that Moroccan participants hold both an expectation of and flexibility toward learners’ conformity to politeness norms and that NNSs may not differ notably from NSs in their perceptions of politeness. The study has implications for understanding the conceptualization and development of intercultural competence and teaching the Communities goal area. Challenges Expectations play a significant role in achieving the Cultures and Communities goal areas. Exploring what beginning‐level learners of Arabic and Moroccan native speakers expect of one another will inform language educators about perspectives that influence learners’ engagement with communities. In addition, examining expectations holds the potential to unpack certain underpinnings of intercultural competence development.

Scholars and professional organizations have described participation in target language (TL) communities as one of the primary aims of language learning, but little work has been done to determine how students define those communities or envision their own involvement within them. This exploratory study drew on questionnaire and interview data to investigate the extent to which beginning‐level learners of German (n = 23) valued the goals that are outlined in the World‐Readiness Standards for Language Learning (National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015)—particularly the Communities‐oriented goals—and examined the ways in which these students delineated a TL community and conceived of participation in that community. Findings suggest that, relative to other goal areas, the items representing the Communities standard on the whole were rated as unimportant to these learners; however, there were some specific aspects of Communities that were rated much more favorably. Regardless of their alignment with those goals, learners' definition of what constituted a TL community focused on native speaker status and geographical location and excluded groups that met in local settings (e.g., German classes).

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) requires students to use language in myriad ways as they define a problem, design and conduct an original research project, disseminate their findings, and take change‐seeking actions in their community. YPAR embeds language development in community‐centered and cross‐disciplinary work and empowers youth as valuable knowledge producers and change agents in their community. In so doing, it offers a unique opportunity to world language teachers, particularly those of heritage speakers, who are looking for ways to address the World‐Readiness Standards (National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015), meaningfully incorporate best practices, and affirmatively engage their students. This article details YPAR's connection to existing world language methods and standards, offers an example of YPAR in practice, and presents the results of a study examining teachers’ and heritage language learners’ observations of learner growth using the NCSSFL‐ACTFL Can‐Do statements as a result of their participation in a course‐embedded YPAR project. Findings demonstrated that students had positive mean gain scores across all categories of communication skill and all but one student finished the semester performing above grade level in at least three of the five communicative domains. The largest gains were for written and spoken presentational communication. Video and Discussion

This article analyzes literature on mentored learning to teach in ways consistent with the standards reform movement. It suggests that although reformers encourage mentoring for standards-based teaching, the assumptions underlying mentoring programs are often focused not on standards but on emotional and technical support. Mentoring practices are consistent with program assumptions rather than with the assumptions underlying standards-based teaching. Mentoring practices promote novices' retention but may not support their learning to teach. Although mentoring practices alone cannot be expected to reform teaching, case studies can illustrate practices for novices learning to teach in reform-minded ways. The authors argue that policymakers need to find effective ways to educate mentoring program developers and that mentors and researchers need to explore the content and process of reform-minded mentoring. (DIPF/Orig.).

This study investigates the effectiveness of the Responsive Classroom (RC) approach, a social and emotional learning intervention, on changing the relations between mathematics teacher and classroom inputs (mathematical knowledge for teaching [MKT] and standards-based mathematics teaching practices) and student mathematics achievement. Work was conducted in the context of a randomized controlled trial. Participants were 88 third-grade teachers and their 1,533 students. A multigroup path analysis accounting for fidelity of implementation revealed no direct or indirect effects linking MKT to student achievement in the RC or control condition. The same analysis revealed different findings for the RC versus control teachers. In the RC group only: (a) Teachers trained in RC who used more RC practices showed higher use of standards-based mathematics teaching practices, and (b) higher use of standards-based mathematics teaching practices related to greater improvements in math achievement. No comparable findings were evident in the control condition. Results demonstrate the importance of building social and emotional capacity in teachers by helping create a supportive classroom that helps teachers provide stronger mathematics teaching practices that lead to improved student learning.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between prospective teachers’ (PTs) instructional practises and their efficacy beliefs in classroom management and mathematics teaching. A sequential, explanatory mixed-methods design was employed. Results from efficacy surveys, implemented with 54 PTs were linked to a sample of teachers’ instructional practises during the qualitative phase. In this phase, video-recorded lessons were analysed based on tasks, representations, discourse, and classroom management. Findings indicate that PTs with higher levels of mathematics teaching efficacy taught lessons characterised by tasks of higher cognitive demand, extended student explanations, student-to-student discourse, and explicit connections between representations. Classroom management efficacy seems to bear influence on the utilised grouping structures. These findings support explicit attention to PTs’ mathematics teaching and classroom management efficacy throughout teacher preparation and a need for formative feedback to inform development of beliefs about teaching practises.

Debates about the future of school mathematics in the United States often center on whether standards-based instruction is improving or undermining students' achievement. Critical for making progress in these debates is information about the actual nature of classroom practice in U.S. classrooms. This article focuses on one key element of classroom practice-teaching-and presents the results of two studies of randomly selected, nationally representative U.S. eighth-grade mathematics lessons that were videotaped as part of the TIMSS 1995 and 1999 Video Studies. Analyses compare features of teaching found in these lessons with pedagogical recommendations for middle school teachers in the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (Principles and Standards) in order to examine the extent to which teaching in U.S. eight-grade classrooms is standards-based. Results show that typical mathematics teaching, in both 1995 and 1999, is more like the kind of traditional teaching reported for most of the past century (Cuban, 1993; Fey, 1979; Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003; Welch, 1978) than the kind of teaching promoted in Principles and Standards.