The research question addressed is: How can high school Spanish students improve language proficiency through the use of authentic assessments? This capstone documents the research and design of a high school Spanish language curriculum. The capstone explores methods and strategies used to teach world languages throughout the twentieth century to American students and provides analysis of the popular trends in foreign language instruction over the years. The author illustrates the curriculum model and identifies the performance-based assessments used to evaluate student’s proficiency in Spanish. The capstone goes on to highlight the limitations and challenges of creating a performance-based, proficiencycentered curriculum which relies on authentic assessments to measure learning goals. It also provides recommendations for using the curriculum. Spanish curriculum is divided into categories based on what specific language performance skill is being assessed
