Press Release of Interest
$2.2 Million in Grants Awarded for Critical Foreign Language Instruction
July 22, 2008
The U.S. Department of Education today announced the award of more than $2.2 million in grants to school districts in seven states to help increase the number of Americans learning foreign languages critical to national security and commerce. The five-year grants were awarded to local educational agencies to work in partnership with one or more institutions of higher education.
The funding, part of President Bush's National Security Language Initiative, is intended to address the shortage of critical foreign language speakers by supporting new and expanded programs in grades K-12.
"With our increasing global economy and national security needs, it's crucial that we have as many citizens as possible who can communicate in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Korean and Hindi," said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
Read the entire press release at the U.S. Department of Education Web site.
Research and Resources
Online News Stories
The Alliance periodically posts links to online news articles that feature information related to heritage languages.
Because the direct links to these articles change as news organizations move articles to archives on their Web sites, we provide links to the home page of the appropriate news outlet when an article is no longer accessible. Many of these Web sites retain archives that can be accessed by visitors, some free and some for a small fee.
Wise to nurture 'heritage speakers'
Baltimore Sun, June 23, 2008
Op-Ed piece by Alliance member Dr. Catherine Ingold
Maryland has adopted a promising new strategy to deal with the U.S. shortage of skilled foreign language speakers, one that offers a model for other states. A new state law seeks to make better use of an under-valued language asset: immigrants and their descendants.
Many of these "heritage speakers" converse in a foreign language at home and learn English at school. This early bilingual experience helps them in mastering critical languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Chinese and Wolof, to name just a few. Heritage speakers represent the most reliable pool of bilingual talent as our nation plays language catch-up with the rest of the world.
Gov. Martin O'Malley recently signed into law a bill creating the Task Force on the Preservation of Heritage Language Skills. It charges the task force with making an inventory of existing heritage resources and recommending steps to use them better.
As simple as this may sound, it's more than others have done. Certainly, many current, vigorous efforts to improve our national foreign language capabilities naturally turn to heritage speakers when recruiting students and teachers. For example, the new federal STARTALK summer program has shown that well-educated heritage speakers make excellent and willing teachers of critical languages.
Read the full article online.
2nd-generation Asian Americans embrace identity, enrich area
Detroit Free Press, May 4, 2008
They grew up in a crescent around Detroit, with some scattered inside the city like stars.
They grew up the children of immigrants, traversing two identities fraught with self-imposed barriers and subtle discrimination.
They grew up into a new consciousness, calling themselves what previous generations did not: Asian Americans.
Like no other generation before them, this wave of Asian Americans had access to college classes that examined their histories, courses that arose in the aftermath of a cataclysmic movement that started in Detroit. U.S. census data released last week showed that Asian Americans continue to be the fastest-growing ethnic group in Michigan, topping Latinos, the fastest-growing minority in the nation. And this generation, now in their 20s and 30s, is a huge reason why.
Read the full article online.
Resucing Languages From Extinction
The Experience of the Hoopa Valley, Karuk, and Yurok Tribes
Jefferson Public Radio, March 21, 2008
According to a National Geographic report released last September, more than half of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will likely be extinct by the year 2100, and languages are dying at the rate of one every two weeks. The Pacific Northwest, Oklahoma, the Amazon Basin, Siberia, and Australia were identified in that report as global hotspots of language extinction. Many languages die as the speakers die off. Other languages die as their words are replaced in the minds of their speakers with the language of a more dominant culture—like English or Portuguese or Russian.
In the United States, the federal government’s policy of forced assimilation in the first half of the twentieth century had a particularly devastating effect on the continuity of native languages. Children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their own languages.
Many Hupa children were sent to a boarding school in Riverside, California, even though a similar institution operated on their own reservation. This arrangement was made apparently to prevent the children from staying in contact with their families. Verdena Parker, the most fluent of the remaining Hupa native speakers, was one of the exceptions. She went to the Hoopa Valley boarding school beginning at age six and was able to maintain regular contact with her family. At seventy-one years old, she is today the youngest of the native Hupa speakers. She credits this to being raised by her grandmother, who spoke only Hupa to her.
Read the full article online.
Speaking Their Own Language
The Washington Post, January 22, 2008
Lilian Diaz, an emergency room technician, used to feel apprehensive when a doctor or nurse at her Takoma Park hospital would ask her to interpret for a Spanish-speaking patient. She knew she was chosen because of her Spanish surname, but what if she told someone the wrong thing? Her Spanish was fine for everyday matters, but was it really good enough, she wondered, to explain a life-threatening illness to a fearful patient?
Now Diaz and a dozen of her co-workers have new confidence in their skills. They are the first graduates of a program at Adventist Health Care Systems that trains already-bilingual staff in the technical terms and cultural nuances of interpreting in a hospital setting. It is one way area health-care providers are trying to meet the demand for qualified interpreters to help inform and reassure a growing community of non-English-speaking patients.
Read the full article online.
Number of immigrants hits record 37.5M
San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 2007
Nearly one in five people living in the United States speaks
a language at home other than English, according to new Census data that
illustrate the wide-ranging effects of immigration.
The number of immigrants nationwide reached an all-time high of 37.5 million in
2006, affecting incomes and education levels in many cities across the country.
But the effects have not been uniform.
Read the full article online.
Oneida Nation makes effort to save language
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , April 12, 2004
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the Oneida Nation has signed a charter that outlines a language immersion plan for their tribal members in an attempt to revive the declining language. The plan calls for the hiring of a linguist fluent in the Oneida language to assist members in learning the language. In addition, the Oneida Nation is creating a teacher certification program to expand on the number of teachers teaching Oneida. The hope is that in seven generations the Oneida people will all once again speak their language. Although only about 5,000 members of the tribe live on or around the reservation in the Green Bay area, the plan calls for all 15,000 of its members around the world to speak Oneida fluently.
Read full article online.
Schools Tap Talent for Home Languages
Education Week, April 2, 2003
Spanish, so far, is the language that most public schools have focused on if they do provide classes for heritage speakers. Nine percent of the nation's high schools that teach foreign languages offer Spanish classes that are designed for native speakers, according to a 1997 survey by the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics.
But proponents of language classes for heritage speakers say the field lacks appropriate state language tests, teacher preparation, and directives from districts or states to require the classes when schools have a critical mass of heritage speakers.
To draw attention to their cause, the Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Foreign Language Center, located at the University of Maryland College Park, have co-sponsored two conferences since 1999 aimed at mobilizing teachers of heritage speakers. ("Support for 'Heritage Languages' Encouraged at Conference," Reporter's Notebook, Oct. 30, 2002.)
Read full article online. (Registration Required)
The Answer Is On the Tip of Our Many Tongues
Washington Post, December 9, 2001
"FBI director Robert Mueller exposed one of the most glaring deficiencies in our intelligence capabilities when he made a public appeal for translators of Arabic, Farsi and Pashto, which some people took as the occasion to criticize foreign-language programs in American schools and universities. If the war on terrorism awakens some students and school administrators to the importance of language study, so much the better. But it would be a mistake to lay responsibility for our lack of strategic language resources chiefly with schools or universities -- or to believe they are in a position to rectify the problem."
Read the full article online.
We Can't Squander Language Skills
Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2001, by Joy Kreeft Peyton and Donald A. Ranard
"After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI put out urgent appeals for citizens fluent in Arabic and Farsi. The fact that the United States' domestic intelligence agency lacked the language resources to understand the intelligence it was gathering probably came as a surprise to most Americans but not to language experts. The FBI's language problem is part of a larger national problem that is rooted in the U.S. education system. But a solution lies within our schools too--with our immigrant students."
Read full article online.
