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About CALIn the NewsCAL periodically posts links to online news articles that feature information related to our work and mission. Prague Daily Monitor (Czech Republic) 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.
Anchorage Daily News "It's made a huge difference," said Sachiko Kono, a second-grade teacher at the school since 1990. Kono, who partners with Murofushi, has seen the course's popularity slowly grow -- now she always has classes maxed out at 25 to 30 students. Immersion programs have spread rapidly in the United States, from just a couple dozen in the mid-1980s to hundreds now, according to the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics. Anchorage's growth mirrors the national trend. What started with the Japanese school 20 years ago with 50 students now is 1,780 students in 11 programs in four languages -- Japanese, Spanish, German and Russian. 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.
York Daily Record (York, PA) Experts attribute the class sizes to curiosity about the Arab world and Islam, as well as geopolitical interest in the Middle East and jobs available to Arabic speakers in industries such as oil, national security and journalism. "Arabic's become very trendy since 9/11," said Alexandra Jerome, a lecturer who last year began teaching the first Arabic-language classes at York College. "The kids take Arabic because not only are they curious about the language and what the language represents, but also because it's got job opportunities attached to it." 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.
The Daily Telegram (Superior, WI) Although the board has not yet approved starting an immersion school in the district, if one is offered it would almost certainly be at Lake Superior, said Superintendent Jay Mitchell. Spanish is the most likely language choice because of the availability of resources and native-speaking teachers, he said. Read the rest of the article online.
ArgusLeader.com 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.
The MidWeek (DeKalb County, IL) Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Becky McCabe recently told the school board, “DeKalb is on the right track with bilingual education and it's because of Sue's leadership. English Language Learners (ELL) are a difficult group of kids to peg. People learning to be proficient in a second language have to be proficient in academic content areas also. You must first be literate in your own language. “They can converse, but writing in English is something else again,” McCabe said. “Any kid will learn English survival skills. But that isn't learning academic subjects.” 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.
The Republican-American The Kansas City School District also is at the vanguard of this movement. It incorporates about 60 minutes of Spanish instruction each week into 21 preschools. Soon, three teachers from China are expected to begin introducing Mandarin into six district preschools. It's a small world after all, and across the country, parents increasingly are clamoring for some sort of foreign-language exposure for toddlers and preschoolers. 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.
The Californian "I heard 'Spanish for Spanish speakers' and it kind of caught me off guard," he said. "Once they explained to me what it really was ... the light went on." Supporters say these classes are needed for the same reason that American children who grow up speaking English at home study English in 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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