io School District. The authors state that in 1983, the district reorganized and one curricular addition was the inclusion of a middle school program for a seventh-grade foreign language exploration course.
The course provided nine weeks each of French, German, and Spanish, and related the languages to content areas using an interdisciplinary approach. The fourth nine weeks were spent in a reading course not taught by the foreign language teachers.
Four academic areas (social studies, science, English, and mathematics) were team-taught, and the teachers related their individual disciplines to the target language and culture. The course emphasized oral communication with vocabulary limited to high-frequency expressions, grammar limited to basic concepts, and culture being a significant portion of the content.
In addition, every day the class included a game or other fun activities with course content being easy enough that every student could experience some success. Student evaluations of the course were found to be very positive. Also, parents wer
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