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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.

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Multilingualism Brings Communities Closer Together
Science Daily, February 10, 2009
Learning their community language outside the home enhances minority ethnic children's development, according to research led from the University of Birmingham. The research, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that attending language classes at complementary schools has a positive impact on students.
Read the full article online.

 

Finding Our Way with Words
NEA Today, October 2008
What does it say about America that we are the only industrialized nation that routinely graduates high school students who speak only one language? Frankly, it says that if you want to talk to us—to do business with us, negotiate peace with us, learn from or teach us, or even just pal around with us—you'd better speak English. The fact that we're woefully behind in world language skills has long registered somewhere between, "Hmmm," and "Yeah, so?" on the national priority gauge. (Compare that to our panicky responses to indicators that we're not on top in math and science.)

"The norm is still either no foreign language or two years in high school," says Marty Abbott, director of Education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The Council's most recent estimates show enrollment in foreign language programs in the United States at about 30 percent for grades 7–12, and just 5 percent for elementary students.

But the English-only-is-OK attitude may be on the way out. A series of wake-up calls relating to national security, diplomacy, and economics—for example, the scramble to find Arabic translators after 9/11 and the struggle federal agencies faced aiding the Gulf Coast's sizable Vietnamese community post-Katrina—elicited voices of concern from the business community, the Department of Defense, educators, and families, all dismayed by our collective ignorance of world languages and cultures.
Read the full article online.

 

Deutsch Spoken Here: German School starts 2nd year at Rippowam
Stamford Advocate, September 25, 2008
The German School, serving Connecticut communities on Saturdays for nearly 30 years, moved from Weston to Stamford last year.

With 350 students divided between the Stamford and Hartford branches, GSC started its second year at Rippowam Middle School on High Ridge Road two weeks ago.

The smallest toddlers go to the school with their parents. Some of them are too young to go on their own. After they first start to speak, they learn their first German words.

They learn that red is rot, yellow is gelb and green is gruen. They hold their daddy's or mommy's hand and learn what different streetlight colors mean, and - of course - how to pronounce the words in German.
Download a PDF of the full article. (364 KB)

 

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.
Visit the Baltimore Sun Web site to locate this article in their archives.

 

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.
Visit the Detroit Free Press Web site to locate this article in their archives.

 

Rescuing 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.

 

Students search for the words to go with their cultural pride
New York Times, May 7, 2007
CLOSTER, N.J. — Last summer, watching Al Jazeera’s reports of the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, Fidele Harfouche was startled to realize that in addition to understanding the Arabic spoken by the anchors, she could, for the first time, read some of the words marching across the bottom of the screen.

Ms. Harfouche, 20, was born in Lebanon, but moved to this verdant Bergen County borough of 9,000 people when she was 6, before learning to read and write in Arabic, the language she and her parents still speak at home. Her mother often tried to sit her down for lessons, but Ms. Harfouche said she avoided them, feigning headaches or claiming that she was too consumed with schoolwork.

“I wanted to fit in so badly,” she said. “I figured if I practiced English, if I spoke English well, I’d be an American, like the other kids in my school.”

But during her sophomore year at Drew University, a small liberal arts college not far from here, Ms. Harfouche signed up for a class in classic Arabic in a quest to become fully literate in her mother tongue. It’s a move that many immigrants who came to the United States as children and those who were born here to immigrant parents have been making, said language experts, who refer to such students as “heritage speakers.”
Read the full article online.

 

After-school institutions in Chinese and Korean immigrant communities: A model for others?
Migration Information Source, May 2007
The extraordinary educational achievement of the children of Asian immigrants has attracted a great deal of media and scholarly attention. The 2000 US census shows that about one-third of Asian Americans are US born and that 50 percent of US-born Asian Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 have at least a bachelor's degree — a rate more than 20 percent higher than non-Hispanic whites.

What is more striking is that young Asian Americans — not only the children of foreign-born physicians, scientists, and engineers, but also those of uneducated, low-skilled, and poor immigrants and refugees — have repeatedly shown up as high school valedictorians and academic decathlon winners, and have enrolled in prestigious colleges and universities in disproportionately large numbers.

Past studies have consistently found that ethnicity has varied effects on the educational outcomes of immigrant children. Asians fare significantly better than whites in school outcomes such as grade point average, while blacks and Hispanics fare significantly worse. Social scientists have attempted to account for significant intergroup differences either from a cultural or a structural perspective.

The exceptional educational achievement of Asian Americans has often been attributed either to Confucianism, which places high value on education (the cultural argument), or to immigration selectivity, which generally favors individuals from urban middle-class backgrounds (the structural argument). In the end, however, social scientists have used the "ethnicity" dummy variable to measure "culture" as well as "structure" but have kept the exact meaning of ethnicity in a black box.

This article seeks to explain the effect of ethnicity on educational outcomes by comparing the ethnic systems of supplementary education in the Chinese and Korean immigrant communities in Los Angeles. We trace the development of ethnic language schools and other private, ethnic, after-school institutions to illustrate how ethnicity can create tangible resources and an advantageous social environment conducive to education.
Read the full article online.

 

S.D. lawmakers set up Indian education office
Sioux City Journal, March 5, 2007
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- South Dakota lawmakers have sent to Gov. Mike Rounds a plan to give South Dakotans a better understanding of American Indian culture by making it a permanent priority in public schools.

Both legislative chambers have passed a bill offered by the Republican governor that would set up an Indian Education Office and an Indian Education Advisory Council with representatives from each of the state's nine tribes.
Read the full article online.

 

When foreign language isn't foreign
Inside Higher Ed, December 15, 2006
Vanessa Fonseca, now a graduate teaching assistant in the University of New Mexico’s Sabine Ulibarrí Spanish as a Heritage Language program, said it took her all of two minutes to figure out a non-heritage Spanish class she stumbled into as an undergraduate was not for her.

It wasn’t just that Fonseca and her sister comprised two of the three Hispanic students in a class of about two dozen. It was also that once her fellow students started speaking, Fonseca, who had been exposed to the language as a child largely through her grandparents’ conversations, in addition to her schoolwork, realized that she’d been misplaced. The other students were at a different level, she said. Not higher, not lower. Just different.

“I knew the first day of class that it wasn’t what I was looking for,” said Fonseca, who quickly switched to the heritage language program, where she said a different instructional approach better suited her needs.
Read the full article online.

 

Association stresses importance of languages       
Indian Country Today
WASHINGTON - The Native code talkers of wartime and national lore took another tour of duty July 12, serving as the centerpiece of the National Indian Education Association's effort to win congressional backing for Native language immersion school funding.

The Navajo and Lakota veterans, all in or near their 80s, needed all the military bearing they could muster for a day that began in the mid-morning on Capitol Hill and ended that night with a celebratory reception at the National Museum of the American Indian. They were still standing when NIEA President Ryan Wilson urged them to take a seat; and still a turnout in the hundreds couldn't get enough, snapping picture after picture as the crowd thinned. In the meantime, former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Three Affiliated Tribes Chairman Tex Hall hailed their accomplishments and the long track record of volunteer military service among Natives.
Visit the Indian Country Web site to locate this article in their archives.

 

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."
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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."
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