Defining Graduate Academic Yiddish Proficiency: Results of an Evidence-Based Study

In the field of second language pedagogy, it has become increasingly common to consider the real-world usage for language when strategizing goals and curriculum development for language instruction. Emerging from a reverse design perspective, which prioritizes desired outcomes as a starting place for curricular design, language instructors identify and define the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) they aim for their students to acquire. In cases in which existing proficiency guidelines are not well aligned with the real-world language use that a particular course is targeting, it is becoming increasingly common for instructors to design Languages for Special Purposes (LSP) courses that reflect the unique uses certain bodies of students may have for the language. This paper considers one such case, that of Yiddish for Academic Purposes. Using domain analysis, a multidimensional research framework that supports and undergirds the development of new LSP courses in an assessment-driven proficiency-oriented reverse design framework and evidence-centered design (ECD), this study presents a series of target KSAs for Yiddish for Academic Purposes, on the basis of which curriculum developers could build assessments and subsequently curricula aligned with one another and with the specific language usage unique to the real-world language use domain of graduate academic Yiddish. This process of domain analysis could be replicated for other languages when academic usage is considered as a specific purpose for which an LSP course could be developed. This study is particularly relevant to the development of LSP courses for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), which tend to be under-resourced and under-researched. Examining academic applications of LCTLs is particularly essential for those languages for which there are fewer, or more constrained, other “real world” applications for the language outside of academic use than there are for more commonly spoken languages.