Stanford Language Programs

Language programs are proficiency-oriented and standards-based. A proficiency orientation refers to emphasizing doing rather than knowing. We try to make sure that students learn to speak, listen, read, and write in ways that are immediately useful in a real-world setting. Based in research and theory on language and on discourse functions, this orientation is adaptive, compensatory, and developmental, not additive. Standards-based refers to the World Readiness Standards on Foreign Language Learning that attend not only to linguistic dimensions, but also to connections that learners make between languages, cultures, and various academic areas; to comparisons between languages and cultures; and to a knowledge of communities that speak a particular language.