Middlebury Interactive Languages (review)

Fluency High School Spanish I, Semester 1from Middlebury Interactive Languages, a company born of the partnership between Middlebury College and K12.com that came about in 2010, is a user-friendly online language learning program for the hybrid, or blended, learning environment geared for teachers interested in exploring the world of technology-based language learning products. Aimed at creating an immersion experience for K–9 through K–12 learners, it has a number of positive features. Activities are explicitly linked to the national standards (see the 101-page ACTFL Alignmentdocument where they are crossreferenced). The target language (TL) is used almost exclusively from the start in both the course materials and the assessments, although in the latter case learners have the option to see the instructions in English. The challenging authentic materials motivate and encourage learners to stretch their abilities. Both course materials and assessments are set in real-life contexts, the majority personalized to make the learning more relevant. They are, overall, age and level appropriate and are esthetically pleasing. The assessment system is educative in nature; it both teaches and measures, requiring learners to perform authentic tasks and providing both learners and teachers with meaningful feedback and a mechanism for evaluating the use of the feedback through practice, review, and self-assessment activities.

Reasonably intuitive, Fluency High School Spanish I, Semester 1requires guidance from a company representative and/or instructions from tech support, accessible through e-tickets or by telephone, to understand the basics. This reviewer, a digital novice, felt comfortable navigating the program after three hours of trial and error work that included two calls to tech support, which is to be expected when exploring a new, multifaceted learning system for adoption. Teachers interested in reviewing the course can access the website after obtaining a password from a company representative. The website dashboard has a button with horizontal bars that leads to a sidebar menu containing the following sections: Home; Calendar, Gradebook, Notifications, Announcements, Section Administration, Change Password, and Help.

The Home tab provides a dropdown menu with the different Fluencyproduct lines in Spanish: Semesters 1–4 and AP Spanish. The calendar displays a sample layout for the semester-long course with links to all materials. On the first day of the course, learners view an introductory video and slides at the welcome tab before starting the first of 12 units (which include four exams): ¡Hola!; retratos; mi familia; mi mundo; la moda; el calendario; mi rutina diaria; en el colegio; mi tiempo libre; mi ciudad, mi pueblo; la compra; and ¡a la mesa!. Each unit, which takes approximately seven days to cover, is composed of eight lessons, a review, and a two-part evaluation. In the calendar, the user clicks the unit/lesson tab to open the lesson. Each lesson contains differing combinations of the activities below:

• • Introducción: Welcomes learners, highlights the learning goals/objectives in English (an exception to the TL norm) and indicates the skill focus. The objectives for lesson 7, for example, where fashion is the topical domain, are to understand a magazine article about fashion and to write a description of personal fashion preferences. Each lesson generally focuses on two of the four communication skills (e.g., reading and writing, listening and writing, etc.).

• • Exposición: Provides a prereading or prelistening activity entirely in Spanish where the learner is asked to guess at the topic of the authentic reading text or listening passage by using the title of the text.

• • Prácticas: 1) Presents a true or false task with statements based on the first half of the reading text or listening passage; 2) contains a second true or false task with statements based on the second half of the reading text or listening passage; and 3) includes a task that asks the learner to distinguish main ideas from details in the reading text or listening passage.

• • Evaluación: Provides a personalized, thematically linked task.

• • Presentación/Preparación para escribir: Presents a personalized, thematically linked task.

• • Evaluación/¿Cuál es tu...