ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we turn to a discussion of national standards in world language education. The National Standards Movement has, since its inception, proven to be extremely controversial and divisive among educators, policy-makers, parents, and the general public. Early in this chapter, we pose the question of whether national standards in general, and the ACTFL Standards in particular, can be manifested in ways that are compatible with – or at the very least, not completely incompatible with – the goals of critical approaches to teaching and learning, and to schooling concerned with social justice. We believe that a critical pedagogy of world language education can be reasonably consistent with the ACTFL Standards, even given the commodification and marketization of the Standards which characterizes the current milieu in world language education. We recognize that this claim may be limited to world language education, but since our students are striving to learn a medium that will, we would hope, enable them to pursue even minimal communication with the disenfranchised second language speakers in our own context (and perhaps in other contexts), we are confident in this assertion.
