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About CALIn the NewsCAL periodically posts links to online news articles that reference information related to our work and mission. These links are provided for informational purposes only, and the opinions expressed therein do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the Center for Applied Linguistics. Learning the Language (blog) Read the rest of the entry online.
Learning the Language (blog) Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, said that the working group will soon unveil a Web site about using funds of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for English-language learners. Findings from the survey will be posted on that Web site before the end of the calendar year. Read the rest of the entry online.
San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate.com) "Chinese has become a global language," said Shuhan Wang, deputy director of the University of Maryland Foreign Language Center, pointing out there are more Chinese native speakers in the world than any other language. The West Portal school community will officially celebrate the program's 25th anniversary next month. The decision in San Francisco to teach children Chinese by immersing them in the language now seems prescient given the current economic and global importance of China. But back then it was a big gamble even with the city's large Chinese immigrant population. "Some people were threatened by the idea and some people didn't understand it," said Dan Kelly, whose eldest son attended the first Cantonese kindergarten in 1984. "It was something you heard frequently: 'Why Chinese? Why are you doing that? Kids need to learn English.' " The program started with a group of parents looking for a way to preserve their heritage and to offer options to families who might otherwise think about moving to schools in the suburbs. Read the rest of the article online.
Cincinnati Enquirer American schools have been losing the language race for decades - a loss that translates into ever greater economic disadvantages for U.S. businesses and national security concerns. Each year, U.S. companies lose an estimated $2 billion because of employees' inadequate language skills and poor cultural competence, according to the Committee for Economic Development. "It's always been a good thing to know more about the world and to speak another language, but now it's become an issue of our economic security, our national security and our public diplomacy," says Charles Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development in Washington, D.C. "Speaking a second language gives our young people an edge in terms of the competition we're facing around the globe. Believe me, you win kudos if you're negotiating in another country and you're fluent in that language." Read the rest of the article online.
Converge Magazine Read the rest of the article online.
ResourceShelf.com (blog) Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to rectify that. Now, nearly eight years after its passage, 13 states and numerous districts still don’t report that information to the U.S. Department of Education. And some of those that do are offering numbers that may not be entirely accurate. "The previous administration didn’t do enough to get absolute clarity from states about when they would be able to report their graduation rates for English-language learners," said Daria Hall, the director of K-12 policy development for the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that advocates high academic standards, especially for disadvantaged students. "There has been this notion of, 'We're working on it. We're working on it,' " she said. Read the rest of the article online.
Media-Newswire.com Read the rest of the article online.
WCCO.COM (Minneapolis, MN) Read the rest of the article online.
Townhall.com (Arlington, VA) New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier. "We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology. Read the rest of the article online.
The Triangle.Org (Drexel University, PA) Read the rest of the op-ed online.
Education Week (edweek.org) Jana Echevarria, a special education professor at California State University, Long Beach, and MaryEllen Vogt, an associate professor of education at the same university, are offering the workshop August 13-14 in Long Beach, California. While these women have expertise in special education and reading, they are better known across the country for having created SIOP, along with Deborah Short, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics. That's a set of 30 strategies based on research that regular classroom teachers can use to teach English-language learners. Read the rest of the article online.
Wicked Local (Framingham, MA) Educators hope to "make students proud and pleased to be bilingual," said Sara Hamerla, a Fuller Middle School eighth-grade teacher who is in charge of that building's English as a second language and bilingual education programs. Before her current job, she spent five years working in the district's dual immersion program, and she serves on the board for the Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages. "I think in my time in the dual language (program), the teachers really emphasize the benefits of bilingualism," Hamerla said. Read the rest of the article online.
Tampa Bay Online The languages range from Abkhazian, spoken in the region between Russia and the Black Sea, to Zulu, an official language of South Africa. Nearly 31,000 students spoke Spanish at home; six of the 20 most commonly spoken languages are from India. A district tally shows nearly every school has students in the cultural mix. Most have students who speak an array of languages - many a dozen or more. Students at King High and Tampa Palms Elementary speak more than three dozen languages. The numbers reflect a national trend. The focus has shifted from immigrants as a problem to immigrants as a resource, said Joy Kreeft Peyton, vice president of the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics. Read the rest of the article online.
CommercialAppeal.com (Memphis, TN) In the fall, she will offer the first two-way language immersion optional program in Memphis City Schools. Half of the 5- and 6-year-old student body will be Spanish speakers, half will be English. On the first day of class, 90 percent of what the teacher says will be in Spanish, meaning only half the class will be learning to read, do math and tie their shoes in their native language. By the time they are second-graders, the ratio of Spanish to English will be about 70/30. "My Hispanic parents are thrilled about the opportunity," said Perry, who is fluent in Spanish and a onetime resident of Japan and Morocco. "If you think about it, their expectation is that their children would be taught in English, which makes school harder." Read the rest of the article online.
The Las Vegas Sun The gathering of information on foreign-based terrorists and their organizations would seem to be an impossible task without the mastery of foreign language skills necessary to interpret the verbal and written material gathered in the course of an investigation. One would think the CIA — in the nearly eight years since the terrorist attacks — would have become proficient in that skill set. In fact, the number of CIA employees who speak more than one language has risen by 70 percent over the past five years. But USA Today reported Monday that even with that increase, only 28 percent of the agency’s clandestine operations employees and only 18 percent of its analysts speak a foreign language. The overall number of CIA employees proficient in at least a second language is a pathetic 13 percent. Read the rest of the article online.
The Capital Times (Madison, WI) Read the rest of the article online.
2theadvocate.com (Baton Rouge, LA) In today’s globalized economy, American workers are competing not just with employees of companies in other states, but with workers in other countries throughout the world. And more and more often, the Americans will require translators. A new study suggests the future capacity of Americans to interact with the world will diminish as foreign language instruction declines in schools. Elementary school classrooms teaching foreign languages are declining, according to a forthcoming study by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. About one in four elementary schools offered foreign languages in 2008. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) The group of 14 researchers drew up the recommendations because they didn't want ELLs to lose out on the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, said Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, who helped convene the group and sent me the document. "We wanted to provide some input. We were quite disappointed there was nothing in the bill that specifically addresses the needs of ELLs," she told me in a phone interview. Yet they saw the potential for the act to really benefit ELLs, she added. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) The arrival of thousands of Iraqi refugees means that some of you are receiving Iraqi children in your classrooms for English-language learners. For some background information on them, see Refugees from Iraq, a publication of the Center for Applied Linguistics. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) Heritage speakers have been exposed to or speak a language other than English at home. The Task Force for the Preservation of Heritage Language Skills, which was established by the Maryland General Assembly last year, presented a report to Gov. Martin O’Malley and the legislature Feb. 26 with recommendations for how the state can better support the use of native languages other than English. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) Robert Slater, the director of the National Security Education Program, which is housed in the U.S. Department of Defense, said it was troubling that elementary school foreign-language offerings are slipping nationwide, "because children learn second and third languages easier at that level." Read the rest of the article online.
The Clarksdale Press Register (Clarksdale, MS) Today, over thirty-three states offer language immersion programs. CAL proposes that language immersion is a highly effective manner in which to teach a second language to children. Toya Matthews, principal of Myrtle Hall 4, notes that "The general rule for learning a new language seems to be 'the earlier, the better'. Children are sponges at earlier ages and they seem to simply absorb an incredible amount of information at a fairly quick pace." Read the rest of the article online.
Washington Post When it comes to learning another language, educators say yes. "The kids getting it for 30 minutes won't become fluent, but that's not the point of those programs," said Julie Sugarman, research associate at the nonprofit Center for Applied Linguistics in the District. "It's to give them exposure to the language. Just because kids aren't able to do calculus in sixth grade doesn't mean we shouldn't teach math in elementary school." Foreign language instruction is considered more important than ever as the nation's demographics and national security issues change and the world's economies become intertwined. Read the rest of the article online.
Stars and Stripes (Stuttgart, Germany) No changes to the Foreign Language Elementary School program, launched three years ago, will be made between now and 2010, according to Charlie Toth, DODEA’s acting associate director for education. But the review, which will be conducted over the next six months, will make recommendations on ways to get the most out of its various language programs. "We’re in a period of reflection and evaluation with our foreign language program," Toth said, adding that a team of educators will submit its findings to DODEA director Shirley Miles. "We have some significant challenges in the (elementary school) program we haven’t resolved yet," he said. Read the rest of the article online.
Medill Reports (Northwestern University) That's the opinion of a cross-section of experts concerned that a weakened economy and heightened international tensions leave the nation in need of clearer communication with friend and foe alike. Deficiencies in Middle Eastern and Asian languages pose the most immediate problems. "If the U.S., in the modern world, is going to maintain its position as a global leader," said Ken Gude, a former Center for National Security Studies policy analyst, "it's going to have to become more conversant." An estimated 200 million school-aged children in China study English, according to a 2006 Education Department release. Just 24,000 of their U.S. counterparts study Chinese languages. The gap is significant. Read the rest of the article online.
Boston Globe According to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., five other districts in Massachusetts have two-way programs: Framingham, Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, and Roxbury. Four districts - Milton, Holliston, Mendon-Upton Regional, and Millis - offer foreign-language immersion, but nearly all the students are English speakers and aren't integrated with students who speak another language. Fall River is discussing launching a Spanish and Portuguese two-way immersion program. According to parents and educators, two-way foreign-language immersion is giving students a rare opportunity to break down social barriers. Read the rest of the article online.
MNDaily.com The three-day conference, called “Pathways to Bilingualism & Beyond,” kicks off Thursday, and is being held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Riverfront in St. Paul. This year's conference is the third of its kind. Both the University's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, as well as the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. are leading the event. CARLA Immersion Projects Coordinator and conference co-chairwoman Tara Fortune said more than 600 people from around the world are scheduled to attend. CAL President Donna Christian worked with Fortune and a planning committee on the logistics of the conference. Read the rest of the article online.
Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) The number of English as a second language students grew from 1,439 five years ago to 2,105 last year. Students in poverty grew 6 percentage points to 26.4 percent in the past five years. "We can see that the face of Chesterfield is very different from what it once was," said Dianne Pettitt, School Board chairwoman, to a group of school employees and community members gathered to discuss ways to educate a diverse student population. "And also we're facing new accountability standards," she continued. "We work in a time where schools are held accountable for results in ways they never were before." Read the rest of the article online.
St. Petersburg Times Research from the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., suggests that children who learn a second language are better at solving complex problems. There's some indication that children who are learning two languages have better "metalinguistic awareness," said Barbara Alexander Pan, an education professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. That means they understand the relationship between a word and its meaning is arbitrary and changing its name does not change the object. While others catch on to that concept eventually, it still helps to learn young. Pan said that younger children have an advantage in learning native-like pronunciation, so their accents sound more authentic. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) Even so, the state is still pushing ahead with its overall requirement that districts provide intensive—and separate—instruction of English skills for those students, despite criticism from experts who say there is little evidence to support that approach. “The proposed four hours of instruction do not have a rigorous research basis,” Deborah Short, a researcher with the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, said in an e-mail. “There are no experimental or quasi-experimental studies that show this type of instruction helps students learn English better or faster.” Read the rest of the article online.
Twin Cities Daily Planet (Minnesota) The Center for Applied Linguistics, which provides cultural profiles on refugees in the U.S., called Burma “the source of one of the world's most protracted refugee crises.” The government has long been accused of human rights abuses, including forcibly relocating citizens and using forced labor. In 1948, Burma (also known as Myanmar) received independence from Britain. In 1949, an ethnic minority called the Karen began fighting for independence. The Karen continue to seek independence today, almost sixty years later. Around 150,000 Karen currently live in refugee camps in Thailand, in order to escape persecution at the hands of the military government. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week News (edweek.org) But the July 25 order in the long-running case of U.S. v. Texas has drawn praise from ELL advocates, who hope it will spur improvement of the quality of education for English-language learners in middle and high schools across the nation. The ruling "will end up forcing the state to address an often-ignored problem in education, and that is the quality of education for English-language learners at the secondary level," said David Hinojosa, a staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and a lawyer. Read the rest of the article online.
Daily News Record (Harrisonburg, VA) “We as a society do a really bad job of teaching foreign language and it's costing us in the global marketplace,” he said. “When it comes to second-language learners, the most important thing is not to get bogged down in ideology, but figure out what works,” he said “Everybody should be bilingual, or everybody should be trilingual.” Many foreign countries start teaching kids as young as eight another language. In the U.S., many students do not start taking another language until they are 14, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. Read the rest of the article online.
Orlando Sentinel “We as a society do a really bad job of teaching foreign language and it's costing us in the global marketplace,” he said. “When it comes to second-language learners, the most important thing is not to get bogged down in ideology, but figure out what works,” he said “Everybody should be bilingual, or everybody should be trilingual.” Many foreign countries start teaching kids as young as eight another language. In the U.S., many students do not start taking another language until they are 14, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. Read the rest of the article online.
Connecticut Business News Journal The "negative effect" is being reported by schools responding to a K-12 foreign language national survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C., according to Nancy Rhodes, director of CAL's foreign language division. Last undertaken a decade ago, the survey is a random sample of public and private, elementary and secondary schools, looking at schools by location (rural, urban and suburban), size, socioeconomic status and other criteria, to provide a "national snapshot" of what's going on with foreign language education. "Many, many schools are saying because of NCLB they've either had to cut back the number of hours they've offered to spend more time on math and literacy reading skills or they've had to cut back on the number of students taking foreign languages because they weren't making enough progress in these other areas," Rhodes says. "So schools that used to offer two or three languages now are only offering one. Read the rest of the article online.
Queens Chronicle (Queens, NY) The program, which teaches core classes like science and language arts in two languages, has grown in recent years, with programs at more than 60 schools around the city. So far, all but one of the 15 Queens schools that host the programs have been in lower grade levels, in some cases starting as early as pre-kindergarten. "It's not just a regular language program, its not just Spanish or French," explained Lillian Berenberg, assistant principal at J.H.S. 190, and the head of the program there. "The students are walking away bilingual, biliterate and bicultural." Read the rest of the article online.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel John Melnick, of Pompano Beach, enrolled his sons, Daniel, 6, and Jonny, 4, in the Lycée Franco-Américain in Cooper City, a private, K-8 school that teaches all classes in French. His wife had done research on the school and liked the French system. Read the rest of the article online.
dailycamera.com (Boulder, CO) Administrators at the Lafayette middle school changed the responsibilities of three of the staff, including an exchange teacher from Boulder's sister city in Mexico, with just weeks left in the school year. All of the teachers remain employed with the school district until school ends Thursday, but none are working solely in the school's bilingual program. The changes come amid parent concerns about teacher communication, classroom control and a slump in student enthusiasm for the program, according to minutes from a February community meeting about the program. Read the rest of the article online.
2TheAdvocate.com (Kentucky) Speaking through a translator as she signed up her daughter on May 8, [Sayuri] Flores said it is important for her child to learn English and be able adapt to her environment by interacting with English-speaking children. “If you don't speak English, you don't get to benefit from things you could possibly do here,” Flores said. She is from Mexico, but has been in the United States several years, mostly in Arizona. The pre-K class of 20 4-year-olds would comprise English speakers and Spanish speakers. Half of the day's class would be in English and other half in Spanish, said Cynthia Elliott, an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at SLU. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) Those educators live in cities such as Burlington, Vt., and St. Paul, Minn., that—for reasons including civic culture, existing ethnic communities, availability of jobs, and the location of refugee-resettlement organizations—periodically receive waves of such immigrants. As a result, officials in those communities have become adept at educating themselves on the cultures and educational needs of newly arriving groups, which in recent years have included refugees from Burundi, Burma, Somalia, and now Bhutan. School administrators and teachers who work with English-language learners browse the Web sites of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the State Department, or the Cultural Orientation Resource Center of the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics to learn more about what to expect. Read the rest of the article online.
Wicked Local Brookline (Needham, MA) Backers said the new initiative, which promises to be better supported and coordinated than Brookline's first experiment with early world language education, is essential for preparing students for an increasingly global community. "Right now, our students are entering it unprepared because they're not given the opportunity to start foreign language study early on," said Rebecca Stone, a School Committee member and spokeswoman for the pro-override group Yes for Brookline. "American students are at a disadvantage." But, to the disappointment of some supporters, funding for the program will be presented as an add-on spending option on next month's ballots. Read the rest of the article online.
San Diego Union-Tribune By then, these native English speakers who have been speaking Spanish for two years will be studying Mandarin Chinese, the world's most-spoken language. They eventually could become fluent in three major languages, unusual in the United States, where most people speak one or two. "It's about believing what young minds are capable of and providing them with the opportunities," Lakeside Union School District Superintendent Stephen Halfaker said. The Lakeside school board voted this month to add Mandarin to the foreign language program as an enrichment class. The East County district is applying for a federal grant to support instruction. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) Rebecca Kopriva—a visiting research scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison—and Jim Bauman—a senior associate in language testing at the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics—are directing the project, called Obtaining Necessary Parity Through Academic Rigor, or ONPAR. It is being funded with a $1.8 million "enhanced assessment grant" from the U.S. Department of Education. The researchers have begun to write the test items, which are computerized and interactive. Some items include animation. But they aren't expected to be ready for states to use until the 2011-12 school year. That seems far off in the future to me, but I've learned in this job that producing reliable tests for ELLs is a complex matter. Read the rest of the article online.
University of Connecticut Advance Howard, an assistant professor of bilingual education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, is co-investigator of a four-year study exploring the use of cognates to promote vocabulary development and reading comprehension among native Spanish speaking adolescents. The project, which received a $1.8 million grant from the federal Institute of Educational Sciences last year, expands on previous research by Howard, who has spent most of her career in bilingual literacy and language acquisition and development. Read the rest of the article online.
Dallasnews.com (Dallas Morning News) It's a radical idea in the United States – where few adults are bilingual and foreign language instruction often starts in high school. "The children that are in Spanish immersion, their families are risk-takers," principal Brad Mengwasser said. "But our data shows they have scored just as well or better than non-immersion kids taking state tests in English." Some parents view Spanish as a necessary tool in a more global workforce. "We're preparing them for the Texas economy," advanced academics coordinator Bettye Edgington said. "Knowing Spanish opens doors." Read the rest of the article online.
BYU Newsnet Now imagine on top of that not understanding the language spoken at the school. An increasing number of children find themselves in at local schools, including two last month at Cherry Hill Elementary School in Orem. "They didn't speak a word of English," Cherry Hill Principal Alisa Hart said. "It's a real challenge." Fortunately for these and other students, some local schools including Cherry Hill have a dual language immersion program where the students are taught in a classroom environment in both English and Spanish. Read the rest of the article online.
BCHeights.com (Boston College) Here we miss the point: "Everyone else" knows English because they bothered to learn it in addition to their original language in order to make them more socially aware or competitive in society. As the world continues to flatten and technology rusts the gates that once stood between us and the rest of the globe, the frail U.S. economy claims it cannot afford to allow immigrants through. In Karnataka, India, for example, children from the age of 5 will begin learning English as a foreign language in its 24,000 state schools. In many European countries, children are encouraged to learn a second language - typically English. The frail U.S. economy and the lenders of the student loans cannot afford to have its students' dreams shattered on a technicality. Read the rest of the article online.
Inside Higher Ed “In talking to individuals who would like to pursue a degree, they felt it was almost a barrier to have to take all the ESL before they could actually see progress toward a degree,” said Kenneth T. Vehrkens, dean of the Petrocelli College of Continuing Studies at Fairleigh Dickinson. “That's where we came up with the idea for a parallel model.” Adult Korean speakers who enroll in the 61-credit “MiraeRo,” or “To the Future,” program will complete their class work in a cohort, taking two three-credit courses and nine hours of ESL at a time. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week And some states have teacher-credentialing policies based on a similar assumption: California requires all teachers to be trained in understanding students' culture, for example, and Florida mandates that all elementary school teachers receive training in cross-cultural communication. Yet few research studies have actually examined whether culture-based instruction affects the achievement of such students. A research review by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, commissioned by the federal Institute of Education Sciences and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2006, concluded, for instance, that not one study showed that culture-based education improved achievement in reading and writing. Read the rest of the article online.
Shelbyville Times-Gazette (Shelbyville, TN) While the newcomers have faced opposition in other communities around the country, Shelbyville has mostly welcomed the refugees, without much public outcry over their presence. Yet problems and differences do remain, and the Times-Gazete has heard more and more complaints and criticism from members of the public and those who work with the Somalis over the past year. Read the rest of the article online.
Shelbyville Times-Gazette (Shelbyville, TN) The Cultural Orientation Resource Center, part of the Center for Applied Linguistics, has published a book about the Somali Bantu as an introduction for those providing services to the Bantu refugees "in their new communities in the United States." The Bantu-speaking peoples make up a major part of the population of nearly all African countries south of the Sahara, belonging to over 300 groups that each has its own language or dialect. Groups of Bantu can vary in size from a few hundred to several million and include the largest group in Kenya; the Kikuyu, the Swahili, and the Zulu of South Africa. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) A planned announcement last week of the membership of the Commission on Reading Research was put on hold by the National Institute for Literacy while officials sought final approval from the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies that the institute reports to. Although the institute, known as NIFL, has already recruited commission members after a lengthy nomination and selection process, Education Department officials said it has not been decided if such a panel will ever be established. “The National Institute for Literacy Interagency Group has not made a formal decision about the formation of a commission to look into reading research,” Samara Yudof, the department's press secretary, wrote in an e-mail. If such a group is formed, she added, it will have to be screened under the department's new ethics-review procedures. That news surprised some observers who have followed plans for the panel over the past several years. Read the rest of the article online.
Washington Post Today, the original class of first-graders are seniors preparing for college. Many continued to study Chinese in middle and high school, but most dropped out in recent years -- a handful as late as this fall -- citing confusion in the curriculum and difficulties with the instructor. Now, just three of the first 22 students continue to study Chinese at the cluster's high school. Read the rest of the article online.
Newswiretoday.com Today, the original class of first-graders are seniors preparing for college. Many continued to study Chinese in middle and high school, but most dropped out in recent years -- a handful as late as this fall -- citing confusion in the curriculum and difficulties with the instructor. Now, just three of the first 22 students continue to study Chinese at the cluster's high school. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) His aptitude in Russian, and several other foreign languages, he says, is “one of the absolute keys to being an effective diplomat.” Such language skills—which are coming into vogue as essential tools in the global economy—have been cultivated far away from the international spotlight. For Mr. Steffens, 47, they started to sprout in the 2nd grade, when he began studying French in the Glastonbury, Conn., public schools, and later when he took up Russian in middle and high school there. Thousands of Glastonbury students have built proficiency in those languages, as well as Spanish, Latin, Japanese, and now, Mandarin Chinese. The 8,000-student district began fashioning its renowned foreign-language program half a century ago in what was then a rural hamlet outside Hartford. The program is now viewed as a model for meeting the demand for graduates with language skills and an understanding of other countries and cultures. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (Edweek.org) Currently, 19 high schools in the state are taking part in the Oregon-Mexico Education Partnership, a program between the Mexican government and the state education department that provides students with free Spanish-language textbooks, CDs, DVDs, and an online site, covering mathematics, science, and other subjects needed to earn a diploma. Read the rest of the article online.
The Columbus Dispatch Ecole Kenwood's first principal traveled to Louisiana to recruit French-speaking teachers. And the district helped pay for Belgian-born teachers to get green cards. Those things don't happen anymore. The district has tightened its purse strings and the number of foreign-language-speaking teachers has not kept up with the needs of hundreds of new immersion schools nationwide, said Julie Sugarman, a research associate for the Center for Applied Linguistics. Read the rest of the article online.
Education Week (edweek.org) I raised this issue when blogging that U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has objected to a provision in the House Education and Labor Committee's "discussion draft" for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act involving English-language learners. The provision would permit school districts to give ELLs state tests in their native languages for up to five years, with the option of extending that time for two more years on a case-to-case basis. Some people in the field think extending the amount of time for students to take native-language tests will encourage more school districts to offer bilingual education. The secretary's comment prompts me to speculate that by saying that permitting the use of native-language tests for many years is a disincentive to speed up the learning of English, she is also meaning to imply that providing bilingual education for a long time may "slow down" the learning of English. I might be wrong to make such an assumption but, regardless, I put the following question to two experts in the field: Is the learning of English by students slowed down by some kinds of bilingual education? Read the rest of the article online.
Garden City Telegram Online (KS) The idea is that students will catch on to the content they are learning, regardless of the language they are hearing and speaking, and that all gradually will become "bilingual, bi-literate and culturally-sensitive learners in all academic areas." The program, made possible by a $438,141, three-year grant the school district won last year from the U.S. Department of Education's Foreign Language Assistance Program, is the school's staff initiative that has been in the works for a few years, with intensive planning work beginning after the grant was awarded about a year ago. Read the rest of the article online.
USA Today Since 9/11, the number of students interested in the Middle Eastern language has been skyrocketing. More than 20,000 people in the USA enrolled in an Arabic-language higher-education program in 2006, double the number who signed up from 1998 to 2002, according to projections from a study the Modern Language Association expects to release this fall. "Other languages will show an increase (in the fall report), but the only language that might be as dramatic as Arabic might be Chinese," says association executive director Rosemary Feal. Read the rest of the article online.
Sarasota Herald Tribune Read the rest of the article online.
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