Advanced Low

Please see the evaluative measures below to ensure the content and tasks of the materials you are creating are appropriate for performance at the Advanced-Low ACTFL level. 

Text Development

Content/Context

  1. Texts are familiar, personal, social, and real-world 
  2. Informal texts are mostly authentic
  3. Formal texts can be authentic but are sometimes modified to meet the needs of the level

Examples:

family, weather, school, work, food, travel, transportation, community, home, sports, shopping, health, college subjects, history, culture, hobbies, news

Text Type

Learners at this level can understand passages with the following:

  1. Narrative and descriptive forms 
  2. Some expository elements in non-fiction text
  3. Some straightforward argumentative texts
  4. Concrete ideas with little to no abstract forms

Examples:

weather reports, social announcements, advertisements, forums, online notices, news reports, short stories, factual paragraphs

Structure

  1. Mostly uses predictable patterns of presentation based on repetition, background knowledge, familiar contexts and grammar structure, etc.
  2. May use simple, compound, and complex sentence structures
  3. Can grasp order of events, sequencing, or chronology to make sense of the text
  4. Mostly consists of high frequency vocabulary and some academic words

Learner Characteristics

Function

Learners at this level can understand the following:

  1. Explicit and implicit main ideas
  2. Explicit and implicit major details
  3. Author’s purpose and point of view in personal and general topics
  1. Inferences on concrete ideas

Level of Tasks

Learners at this level are able to:

  1. Preview for main ideas
  2. Scan for major and minor details
  3. Skim for main ideas
  4. Make inferences using explicit information from the text
  5. Use context to infer meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary
  6. Use syntactic and morphological cues to infer meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary
  1. Connect content to background knowledge
  2. Recognize basic organizational patterns

Example activities:

Discussions or writing prompts related to the topic, making predictions about text before reading, scanning to find major details, guess the meaning of target vocabulary from context, learn word parts or word families, identify topic sentences, skim titles/subtitles/keywords/etc, create questions that must use context clues to make inferences, identify transition words that indicate organization

Assessment

Learners at this level should be able to understand and answer questions about the following:

  1. Main ideas stated and implied straightforwardly within the text
  2. Major details stated and implied straightforwardly within the text
  3. The author’s point of view or purpose
  4. The organizational pattern of the text

Provide at least 5-8 multiple choice comprehension questions after each reading passage.

This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.

Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/PositivePsychologyReadingMaterials/advanced_low.