ABSTRACT

The PSTA in its present form was also inspired, influenced, and based on simi­­ lar work done by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), and Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC). We have added the Arabic dimension and its specificities to the standards elaborated by these professional or­­ ganizations. The impetus driving our collaborative interest in sharing it with our colleagues is strongly embedded in our concern for excellence in teaching and our belief in all the positive developments represented in the so-called "paradigm shift" that has transformed the foreign language teaching field in general in the last two and a half decades (Swaffar, Arens, & Byrnes, 1991; Harper et al., 1998).