Clearly, spiraling the skills represented in the Standards requires a teacher to be aware of the developmental and social needs of their students, as well as of their specific language abilities.

     What can guide a teacher in developing a curriculum across one level or several is not only knowledge of how the Standards build on each other, but also a sense of what reading means for an individual.

     Particularly for foreign language students, reading for meaning in any language involves re-reading -- returning to passages of the text to confirm and reflect about the pattern of concepts it presents.  That return can happen in subsequent units, or in subsequent classes.  If re-reading is built into a curriculum, it can not only enhance comprehension, thereby promoting learning of vocabulary and grammar, it also provides the base for increasing discursive sophistication -- for the more sophisticated language and cultural skills that the Standards direct long-term language students toward.

     The Units that follow will describe a framework for implementing reading into the foreign-language classroom as a learning spiral that can aid students in filling the requirements set by the Standards.  Reading in the foreign language classroom is implemented in a developing series of activities; each task builds on the preceding one, in phases that move the students into comprehension of a text, and then from that comprehension into the fundamental skills identified by the Standards.

  For foreign language learners, the optimal phases in "reading" fall into five stages, each with different activities:

-pre-reading, to anchor the themes or topics of the text in students'
     conceptual framework
-initial reading for 5-10 words in a text that anchor its global ideas
-rereading to elaborate, modify, and augment ideas gleaned in initial reading
-rereading to articulate what the reader has appropriated in textual information
-rereading to create discourses that articulate an independent viewpoint
     vis-à-vis textual perspectives, and that negotiate among communities.

The Units that follow focus on the tasks and learning goals in each of these phases.  Each offers suggestions about tasks that help learners fulfill goals framed by the Standards, and focuses on how to adapt these goals into curricula for different cognitive levels, to meet different Standards.

Part 2 Introduction and Table of Contents
Unit 4 Introduction