The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) announced February is CTE Month (https://www.acteonline.org/why-cte/cte-awareness/cte-month/), and one technical school in Pennsylvania is launching an innovative credentialing initiative to kick the month off with style.
Language skills in CTE?
Upper Bucks County Technical School (UBCTS) is pioneering the integration of language skills into its Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. This initiative is aimed at preparing students for the multilingual demands of today’s job market by assessing language ability with official ACTFL tests.
“Historically, CTE programs have not emphasized language education, but UBCTS is changing this narrative,” says Dr. Michael Herrera, Executive Director of UBCTS. “Incorporating language skills into our curriculum is not only about enhancing individual job prospects; it’s about fortifying our economy and asserting our global leadership in innovation. The trades, healthcare, law enforcement, and manufacturing sectors are all increasingly seeking multilingual professionals.” The ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Language (AAPPL) is being offered to any student who identifies as having ability in more than one language, regardless of whether they’re enrolled in world language courses, ESL programming, or no language-related coursework.
Why credentialing for multilingualism?
Beyond the traditional CTE certifications, language credentials open new avenues for learners in both job and educational sectors. An AAPPL certificate reflects a concrete measure of language ability and intercultural skills. Regardless of whether students achieve their state’s Seal of Biliteracy, Herrera and his teachers believe there is significant value in credentialing language skills for CTE students as well as value to the marketplace.
The Job recently posted an article emphasizing a growing funding focus around multilingualism. In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, incentives to community colleges for career-connected education are part of a next wave of state funding formulas, including a focus on high-demand credentials that equip learners for a global workforce, such as language ability.
ACTFL’s Making Languages our Business report underscores that 9 out of 10 U.S. Employers rely on employees with language skills other than English. And 1 in 4 lost business due to a lack of foreign language skills. The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report reported highest labor job shortages among Building and Related Trades, with top job growth in the last five years among equipment operators, machinery workers, and building frame and related trades workers (p. 11, 31). Building on the findings from Making Languages our Business, the Future of Job report listed multilingualism among the top 20 skills needed in the workforce for the 5 years to come (p.38)!
How to get started?
Sensitizing your administrators, teachers, and students to the idea of language as an employability asset is key. If you’re pursuing integrating language instruction into CTE programming, Michele Lockhart’s feature in Edutopia from 2023 may be interesting. She said, “The first step in presenting this idea to teachers included listening to the podcast “We Teach Languages, Episode 151: Task-Based Language Teaching and Heritage Learning.” We listened with an ear toward adopting these practices through the lens of CTE language” (https://www.edutopia.org/article/world-languages-career-technical-education/).
Even without implementing world language curriculum in your tech schools, a focus on providing a language credential is significant. This simple framework can guide your efforts.
To help your students recognize the value of multilingualism and encourage them to pursue language certification and/or the Seal of Biliteracy, we created special posters you can print and post around your school. You can download them here.
Are you ready to bring ACTFL language proficiency assessments to your program? Contact us to get started.
Resources
ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL)
