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this level. In reading proficiency, after two years of high school Russian 54%
typically reach at least the Novice-High level, and after one year of college
Russian 64% reach this level.28
As we have presented this proposal in a variety of forums over the last
several years, this two-to-one correspondence has caused more
misunderstanding than perhaps any other topic in the framework. It is worth
pausing to explain our focus on this correlation in the development of this
approach to articulation. First, it is important to note that we are not asserting
that all high school programs must adopt this goal. Rather, we chose it because
it is at this point that the curriculum design challenge is relatively acute. If, for
whatever reasons, the designers of a particular high school program decide that
their four-year program will aim to place its students into the intermediate level
(second-year) in college, then the issues that this framework addresses are
much less problematic. There are many fewer possible gaps and conflicts that
will arise when college freshmen are placed into intermediate Russian than into
advanced. The high school program that we have been discussing in this
paragraph would simply take as its four year goal completion of the elementary
stage.
The two-for-one rule presented a starting point, an articulation tactic
rather than a goal (although we believe that it is achievable given appropriate
circumstances). We sought to develop a characterization of what a typical
college student knows after each of the first two years in a challenging Russian
program. Our reasoning was that this would provide useful information with
which high school programs could develop rational targets. In a maximally
efficient system, high school teachers would know what goes on in each year of
college programs and could aim their courses to mesh with these units in one-
year increments. Whether a particular high school program reaches these
targets in two, three, or even four years is irrelevant to the general goal that
articulation be made smoother. Thus, the most important task at the level of
specific goals is to specify the elementary and intermediate stages in such a
way that they correspond to large numbers of college programs. If we can
define such stages, then high schools can set their program goals accordingly,
and colleges can define programs that will be accessible to students from a
broad range of other programs.
In order to define each of the stages, we suggest below that this be done
by specifying goals in three domains of knowledge: skill levels and functional
abilities, lexical/topical knowledge, structural knowledge. In principle, this ought
to be redundant; one could argue that the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, if they
were properly calibrated for Russian, would serve precisely the purpose we are
addressing. There are, infact, two problems with relying on proficiency levels.
One problem is that, while very useful for a broad range of purposes, they are
28Statistics cited by ETS in the 1990-1991 version of the teachers' test booklet for the
Russian proficiency test.
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