Affiliated Associations

ACTFL Affiliation

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages http://www.actfl.org

The first CLTA annual conferences were held in December, in conjunction with the Modern Languages Association (MLA). The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) formed out of MLA in 1967, and officially established a separate November conference in 1969. CLTA chose to collaborate with ACTFL, and has been a dues-paying member since. CLTA has voting representation at ACTFL’s annual ACTFL Assembly and Business Meeting.

ACTFL, headquartered in Yonkers, New York, is a large, national organization that is dedicated to the improvement and expansion of the teaching and learning of all languages at all levels of instruction; it is the only national organization representing teachers of all languages at all education levels. ACTFL’s annual Delegate Assembly meetings focus on professional initiatives at the national level and projects in collaboration with other language organizations. These meetings, which receive input from well over a hundred delegates from affiliated organizations, are held in conjunction with ACTFL’s annual convention, where CLTA also holds its annual meetings.

Special projects at ACTFL that impact the Chinese language teaching field include the maintenance of statistics on foreign language enrollment¹, and the National Standards Project, a collaborative project responsible for the development of national content standards for foreign language education, including Chinese; and the New Visions in Foreign Language Education Project (see below the report by Prof. Cynthia Ning (Immediate Past President, 2000), published in the December 2000 issue of the CLTA Newsletter). These and other ACTFL projects will continue to have impact on the foreign language teaching field at large.

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¹For some information on enrollment, see our page on Statistics on Chinese Language Enrollment.