Reexamining the priorities of theNational Standards for Foreign Language Education

The National Standards for Foreign Language Education offer goals for student learning. During the past decade, they have been used increasingly as objectives for foreign language teaching. In the Standards document, the five Standards are presented in a hierarchical order: 1. Communication, 2. Cultures, 3. Connections, 4. Comparisons, and 5. Communities. Looking to Dell Hymes's portrayal of communicative competence and building on notions from sociocultural theory and the concept communities of practice, this paper questions this hierarchical ordering especially in terms of the primacy of Communication over Cultures and Communities. It is suggested that, of the five Cs, Communities should be considered the most fundamental.