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About CALNews Archive - 2009What Kinds of Schools Are Most Likely to Teach Foreign Languages? Private elementary schools are more than three times more likely than public elementary schools to offer students foreign-language classes, according to a national survey released recently by the Center for Applied Linguistics. Read the rest of the article online.
Forsa-Arabic for Opportunity — draws students to learn the language Mayor Daley and Chicago Public Schools officials announced plans earlier this week to expand the CPS Arabic language program using an $888,000 U.S. Department of Education grant. The program was launched three years ago and has served 2,000 CPS students in 10 schools citywide. Under the grant, three additional schools will offer Arabic language courses. This articles also references CAL’s national survey of K-12 foreign language education. Read the rest of the article online.
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. |
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