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‘Quarantine’ is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2020

Cambridge Dictionary has announced quarantine as Word of the Year 2020, after data shows it was one of the most highly searched words on the Cambridge Dictionary this year.

Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top five for both search spikes and overall views (more than 183,000 by early November), with the largest spike in searches (28,545) seen the week of 18-24 March, when many countries around the world went into lockdown as a result of COVID-19.

The Cambridge Dictionary editors have also tracked how people are using quarantine, and have discovered a new meaning emerging: a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease. Research shows the word is being used synonymously with lockdown, particularly in the U.S.,to refer to a situation in which people stay home to avoid catching the disease.

This new sense of quarantine has now been added to the Cambridge Dictionary, and marks a shift from the existing meanings that relate to containing a person or animal suspected of being contagious: a specific period of time in which a person or animal that has a disease, or may have one, must stay or be kept away from others in order to prevent the spread of the disease.

Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary publishing manager, said: ‘The words that people search for reveal not just what is happening in the world, but what matters most to them in relation to those events.

‘Neither coronavirus nor COVID-19 appeared among the words that Cambridge Dictionary users searched for most this year. We believe this indicates that people have been fairly confident about what the virus is. Instead, users have been searching for words related to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic, as evidenced not just by quarantine but by the two runners-up on the shortlist for Word of the Year: lockdown, and pandemic itself.’ 

Cambridge Dictionary’s most highly viewed blog post this year was Quarantine, carriers and face masks: the language of the coronavirus, which had almost 80,000 views in the first six weeks after it was posted on February 26, and now ranks as the ninth most viewed About Words post in the nearly ten years that the blog has been live. The post covers a range of related terms, such as infectious, contagious, carriers, super-spreaders, and symptoms, as well as phrases such as contract a virus, a spike in cases, contain the spread, and develop a vaccine.

The Cambridge Dictionary editors regularly monitor a wide range of sources for the new words and meanings that are added monthly to the online dictionary. On the ‘New Words’ blog, potential new additions are posted weekly for readers to cast their vote on whether they feel these words should be added. In a recent poll, 33% of respondents said quaranteam—combining quarantine and team, meaning a group of people who go into quarantine together—should be added to the dictionary. Other suggestions include the portmanteau words quaranteen, coronnial, and lockstalgia.

Five Million Assessments Reveal COVID Educational Slide

A new report based on 5.3 million assessments of student progress in grades 1-8 details the effects on learning associated with COVID-19 school disruptions. Released by Renaissance (a leader in pre-K–12 education technology) to end the speculation and provide guidance for educators as they address learning gaps, How Kids Are Performing: Tracking the Impact of COVID-19 on Reading and Mathematics Achievement, is based  on student assessments from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Students in grades 1–8 who took Star Early Literacy, Star Reading, or Star Math assessments during both Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, were included in the sample.

Key findings include:

  • Reading performance: Student achievement in reading was, on average, only a single percentile point below where it should have been in a normal school year.
  • Math performance: Math achievement has been significantly more affected by learning disruptions, falling on average seven percentile points.
  • Student growth: Students grew more slowly from 2019 to 2020. In a typical year, the median student growth percentile (SGP) on Star Assessments sits at the midpoint of approximately 50. This year, the median growth percentile for reading was 45 and for math just 35.
  • Learning loss: Translated into terms of instructional time, students in grades 4–7 will need on average 4–7 weeks to catch up in reading, while grades 1–3 and 8 were already on track. Students in grades 5 and 6 were more than 12 weeks behind beginning-of-year expectations in math, and students in grades 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 would need 4–11 weeks to meet the expectations for the beginning of a typical school year.

Some student groups were more affected by learning disruptions than others, though the difference tended to be minor, at just one or two percentile ranks. Groups more negatively affected include:

  • Black, Hispanic, and Native American students;
  • Students who attend schools that serve high poverty populations;
  • Students who attend public rather than private schools;
  • Students in rural or small towns as opposed to suburban or urban schools.

The negative impacts of the pandemic were similar for students whose prior 2019 normative performance was categorized as either low, typical, or high. Essentially, there is no evidence that the pandemic exacerbated existing achievement gaps.

“After months of speculation and predictions about the effects of school building closures on student achievement, we are now in a place to use data to quantify this,” said Dr. Gene Kerns, vice president and chief academic officer at Renaissance. “We’re proud to offer the first significant assessment of student achievement in this new world, and we look forward to providing more data-driven reports as well as tools that educators can use to support their students as they close the gaps created by the pandemic.”

To further document how students are performing in 2020–2021, Renaissance will follow up the How Kids Are Performing report with a series of updates on students after the typical winter and spring screening periods to help guide educators throughout this unprecedented academic year.

Educators can download a free copy of the report now by visiting www.renaissance.com/how-kids-are-performing.

Smart Entertainment for Preschoolers in Spanish

Building on HITN’s experience of providing quality, educational, and entertaining content for Hispanic families across the U.S., HITN has launched Edye, a Spanish-language, premium SVOD (subscription video-on-demand service) that offers smart and safe entertainment for preschoolers.

Edye has been created for children between the ages of two and six years old and features over 2,500 episodes from more than 70 world-renowned content producers around the globe, including Sesame Workshop, the BBC, the Jim Henson Company, Studio 100, Nine Story, and WildBrain. The idea is to transform “watch time” into “smart time” within a safe and secure environment.

Content showcases some of children’s most beloved characters, including Elmo, Cookie Monster, Daniel Tiger, Mölang, Sid the Science Kid, Sarah and Duck, Dinosaur Train, Maya the Bee, Heidi, and Pocoyo, among many others. In addition to video content, Edye offers e-books, games, and interactive activities within its state-of-the-art app that provide children with a unique experience.

“We are tremendously proud to be able to offer Edye to Hispanic families all over the U.S.,” said Guillermo Sierra, head of Television and Digital Services at HITN. “Children’s video consumption habits have changed to center on services that provide content on demand, and they are doing it, primarily, on portable devices. Screen time, content selection, and safety have become top concerns for parents in this new landscape. Edye offers the type of entertainment parents want for their children: content that promotes formative and educational values within a safe and protected environment. For over three years, Edye has been carefully designed and curated by a team of professionals who are also parents themselves.”

To help parents participate in their children’s experience, Edye’s educational experts have created guides that offer tips and ideas on using the content to have fun with their children away from the screen.
www.hitn.org

The Shoulders We Stand On

The University of New Mexico Press has published a new book tracing the complex history of bilingual education in the “Land of Enchantment.”

The Shoulders We Stand On, edited by Rebecca Blum-Martinez and Mary Jean Habermann López, traces the complex history of bilingual education in New Mexico, covering Spanish, Diné, and Pueblo languages. The book focuses on the formal establishment of bilingual education infrastructure and looks at the range of contemporary challenges facing the educational environment today. The book’s contributors highlight particular actions, initiatives, and people that have made significant impacts on bilingual education in New Mexico, and they place New Mexico’s experience in context with other states’ responses to bilingual education. The book also includes an excellent timeline of bilingual education in the state. The Shoulders We Stand On is the first book to delve into the history of bilingual education in New Mexico and to present New Mexico’s leaders, families, and educators who have pioneered program development, legislation, policy, evaluation, curriculum development, and teacher preparation in the field of bilingual multicultural education at state and national levels. Historians of education, educators, and educators in training will want to consider this as required reading.

Rebecca Blum-Martinez is a professor of bilingual education and ESL in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies in the University of New Mexico’s College of Education.
Mary Jean Habermann López was the state director for state and federal bilingual education at the New Mexico Public Education Department for most of her professional career. She also has extensive classroom and university teaching experience

Visit https://www.bkwrks.com/book/9780826360175 to order.

Yiddish Garners Support in Israeli Legislature

An Israeli legislature (Knesset) lobby focused on revitalizing the Yiddish language and culture in the country had its first public meeting earlier this month, according to The Forward. Historically, Yiddish has been suppressed in Israel despite many elderly citizens speaking it natively, so members of the Knesset have joined forces to support policies that will boost the language’s status.

The Lobby for Promoting the Yiddish Language and Culture is spearheaded by Knesset member Tali Ploskov and Dr. Dov Ber Kotlerman, a Yiddish studies professor at Bar-Ilan University. According to The Forward, the lobby’s goal is to secure Israel’s status as a center for Yiddish culture and preserve the language, which the Endangered Languages Project currently classifies as an at-risk language.

The Knesset serves as Israel’s legislative branch of government. Members can form groups known as lobbies, which serve to rally support for (or opposition to) individuals and policies. At the lobby’s first meeting, Dr. Kotlerman evoked the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, stating that the Israeli government should look to the preservation efforts of other nations as examples for Israel to emulate.

Today, Yiddish is a sizable minority language in Israel, spoken by around 200,000 native speakers, though it pales in comparison to other minority languages such as Arabic and Russian, both of which are spoken natively by more than 1.5 million Israelis. The vast majority of the world’s Yiddish speakers actually reside in the U.S.

Many of the European Jews who began settling Israel spoke Yiddish natively, however a number of Zionist groups sought to subdue the language’s prevalence as many saw it as a reminder of life in the diaspora, favoring Hebrew to become the official language. During the early years of Israel’s statehood, the anti-Yiddish campaigns and sentiment prevailed—Yiddish theater, for example, was effectively banned in the 1950s as a 10% tax was placed on shows in Yiddish.

However, public opinion in Israel has shifted, and many young Israelis have become interested in learning Yiddish and engaging with Eastern European Jewish culture. Dr. Kotlerman noted Sweden as a particularly inspiring example of a nation that has worked toward preserving the Yiddish language by supporting the production of art and children’s literature in the language and even allowing Yiddish speakers to conduct government business in the language. “My goal is for Israel to help raise the status of Yiddish as a national language, the way Sweden has done for it as an official minority language,” Kotlerman said at the lobby’s first meeting. “That would mean partnering with Yiddish institutions around the globe and eventually becoming a global center of Yiddishist activity.”

The Other Spanish Golden Age

Students encounter excellent cultural references in today’s Spanish language textbooks. Striking photographs, stunning videos, and authentic materials bring the art, music, cuisine, and literature of the Spanish-speaking world to learners. But where are the cultural vignettes and references linked to the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields? Specifically, a topic absent from these cultural discussions is la edad de oro del software español (the golden age of Spanish software).

Known in Spain and Europe, but largely ignored in the U.S. and elsewhere, the years 1983–1992 were the golden age of Spanish software. During this time span, Spain became Europe’s second-largest software producer of eight-bit computer software games, the dominant gaming platform at the time. Spanish coders and Spanish software companies developed a unique style of video games and text adventures. Many of these made-in-Spain games, and their characters and artwork, are still featured as classics in video gaming publications and culture today.

The golden age of Spanish software makes an engaging topic on which to base a cultural presentation, when going beyond the textbook. Research shows that video games are a part of students’ lives, crossing cultural and racial divides, making the golden age of Spanish software a motivating topic to assign individual students or small groups for a project. A presentation would start with the historical fact that video gaming in Spain, and much of Europe, in the late 1980s was done on eight-bit home computers. Examples of computers popular at the time in Spain were the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX2, and Commodore 64. A quick picture of the Commodore 64, as it was the best-selling computer in history and popular in the U.S., would quickly connect to students’ background knowledge. Similarly, a quick picture of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) would be recognizable to students and show what was popular in the U.S. at the same time. However, programmers in Spain were primarily creating game ROMs that were released on cassette tapes or 5 ¼” floppy discs for computer gaming, and not cartridges for gaming consoles as in the U.S.

YouTube, Vimeo, and other video-sharing websites have complete walk-throughs and homages, in multiple languages, for many of these games. Searching for the major Spanish gaming companies of the era, such as Dinamic, Erbe, Opera Soft, or Topo Soft, easily locates material to share with students. These exercises connect a cultural achievement in the Spanish language to an audience generally excited by video gaming. Best-selling games to show students include Babaliba by Dinamic or La Abadía del Crimen, regarded as a jewel of the golden age, by Opera Soft. Video games are modern examples of story-telling, myth-making, and rhetoric, to which students easily connect. These games showcase the classic sounds, colors, shapes, and text in Spanish of this era while connecting to cultural themes of the Spanish-speaking world.

Text adventure was a popular genre of the golden age, and Spanish programmers excelled at it. In early text adventures, there are no graphics at all. The player types simple word commands such as sur (south) to move to the south or examina (examine) to take a closer look. The gameplay is relayed back to the player through a response to the action, setting the scene for the next command; for example, a response may be: Un dragón controla que nadie se escape, puedes ir al norte o este. (A dragon ensures that no one escapes, you can go north or east.) Players often must try multiple commands before the games allows them to progress along the journey. Owing to the limited graphical capabilities of the computers at the time, these games utilized text commands drawn from a limited vocabulary base, making them useful learning tools for beginning and intermediate language learners. Text adventures at this time became so popular in Spain that Dinamic broke off a division of its company and created Aventuras AD, a programming firm dedicated solely to programming text adventures. Some of the well-known games of this genre are El Jabato, La Diosa de Cozumel, and Don Quijote. Combining cultural and historical themes with basic Spanish-language gameplay, these games are authentic language tools to bring into the classroom. A popular and up-to-date website for current fans of text adventures is CAAD: Club de Aventuras AD. The site has forums, articles, and direct links to classic text adventures from the golden age of Spanish software, free to play and recreated with exacting historical accuracy to play on modern browsers.

The video gaming industry in Spain collapsed in the 1990s and the golden age of Spanish software ended in 1992. Multiple factors contributed to the fall. Specifically, users rapidly replaced their eight-bit machines with 16-bit computers such as the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous IBM PC, while the Spanish video gaming industry remained focused on eight-bit computers.

This was further exacerbated by casual gamers switching to consoles such as the Sega Genesis and NES for gaming. Finally, programming companies lost potential revenue through rampant software piracy. The cassette and 5 ¼” floppy disc formats’ low cost and ease of distribution aided in the rise of the golden age of software, but these features also made them susceptible to piracy, which accelerated the fall of the golden age.

Few resources in English document the golden age of Spanish software. However, the definitive history of the golden age, titled Ocho Quilates: Una historia de la Edad de Oro del software Español, exists in two books, one focused on 1983–1986 and the other 1987–1992. The author, Jaume Esteve Gutiérrez, updated them and released new editions in 2016. These are detailed and well-researched resources to learn more about the golden age of Spanish software and its impact in Spain and globally.

The golden age of Spanish software should not be a historical footnote. STEM needs to be connected throughout the curriculum, and Spanish achievement in STEM needs to be showcased along with the art, music, and theater of the Spanish-speaking world. Students are comfortable with video games and they provide a real-life application of STEM. Exposure to STEM and to coding needs to be part of the modern curriculum and brought into the classroom, this includes the world language classroom. Making the golden age of Spanish software come alive for students achieves this objective.

Ransom Gladwin is a full professor of Spanish at Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia, and coordinator of both the English as a second language and the foreign language education programs. If you would like a free classroom presentation on the The golden age of Spanish software, send a request to [email protected].

German Teachers & Students: Take the German Quiz Challenge

Calling all German teachers! Are you interested in tools that can make your classroom more fun and engaging? Look no further, meet the The German Quiz Challenge (GQC). Bring the thrill of an innovative quiz game, the keenness to learn, and increase the quality of your German lessons, all in one new interactive game app, straight to your classes.

GQC is a new free learning tool brought to you by the Goethe-Institut London designed for German teachers and secondary school level pupils aged 13-16 to learn German in a fun and interactive way at school or privately – using computers, smartphones and tablets.

Each student gets to read, write, listen and engage with the story of five young skateboarders in Munich, touching topics relevant to them including music, culture, the environment and everyday life activities.

HOW IT WORKS

Access the game through any computer browser or download the app for mobile devices. The game can be played in person and also remotely.

Getting started is easy, follow these 4 steps:

    1) Register your teacher account via browser: gqc.app.ovosplay.com/admin

    2) Set-up a new game session choosing a blueprint for the game and get an activation code.

    3) Invite your students to download the app on their devices, get them to register, create their 

        profiles and pick their team.

    4) Share the activation code to start the game.

Now you and your class are ready to play! Register your free account today at:

goethe.de/uk/gqc

Deaf Community Debates Sign for ‘Joe Biden’

The Deaf community is currently debating on what exactly to sign for the U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden. Until now, the community has been spelling the name out, signing B-I-D-E-N, but many public figures, including the president, often get shorthand signs instead of spelling out the name. For example, the sign for Donald Trump is to wave one’s hand above one’s head, as if it is emulating hair being picked up in the wind. Other political shorthands include the sign for Bernie Sanders, which is waving hand from your heart to Feel the Bern, whereas Nixon’s sign is to put one’s hand in the n shape, and move across one’s chin to indicate the word liar.

As for Biden, there has been no consensus on what to call him. The Deaf community has raised concerns over a previous suggestion for a possible American Sign Language gesture as it resembles that of a gang. The name is supposed to represent Biden’s Ray Ban sunglasses that he often wears, and is made by making a c shape with one’s pointer finger and thumb. However, this c shape is almost exactly that of the gang sign for the Crips.

“The deaf community tends to come together to create new signs when our society experiences changes,” said Michael Agyin, a deaf activist in L.A. and the founder of the Compton ASL Club told the LA Times. “Just as a sign for the coronavirus came about, the same applies to the new president.”

Felicia Williams pointed out on NPR that there is no rush to decide for a shorthand sign and that there is no single authority to make the final call. The community, instead, will coalesce around a sign.

“I think that we need to just slow down and back up and have white deaf people respect the space and have the process be organic. Don’t force it,” Williams stated on NPR through an interpreter.

Reviving Lost Languages through AI

Adam Conner-Simons introduces an MIT CSAIL system that aims to help linguists decipher languages without advanced knowledge of relations to other languages.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have recently developed a new system that can automatically decipher a lost language without needing advanced knowledge of its relation to other languages. They also showed that their system can itself determine relationships between languages, and they have used it to corroborate recent scholarship suggesting that the language Iberian is not actually related to Basque.

The team’s ultimate goal is for the system to be able to decipher lost languages that have eluded linguists for decades, using just a few thousand words.

Spearheaded by MIT professor Regina Barzilay, the system relies on several principles grounded in insights from historical linguistics, such as the fact that languages generally only evolve in certain predictable ways. For instance, while a given language rarely adds or deletes an entire sound, certain sound substitutions are likely to occur. A word with a “p” in the parent language may change into a “b” in the descendant language, but changing to a “k” is less likely due to the significant pronunciation gap.

By incorporating these and other linguistic constraints, Barzilay and MIT PhD student Jiaming Luo developed a decipherment algorithm that can handle the vast space of possible transformations and the scarcity of a guiding signal in the input. The algorithm learns to embed language sounds into a multidimensional space where differences in pronunciation are reflected in the distance between corresponding vectors. This design enables them to capture pertinent patterns of language change and express them as computational constraints. The resulting model can segment words in an ancient language and map them to counterparts in a related language.

The project builds on a paper Barzilay and Luo wrote last year that deciphered the dead languages Ugaritic and Linear B, the latter of which had previously taken decades for humans to decode. However, a key difference with that project was that the team knew that these languages were related to early forms of Hebrew and Greek, respectively.

With the new system, the relationship between languages is inferred by the algorithm. This question is one of the biggest challenges in decipherment. In the case of Linear B, it took several decades to discover the correct known descendant. For Iberian, the scholars still cannot agree on the related language: some argue for Basque, while others refute this hypothesis and claim that Iberian doesn’t relate to any known language. The proposed algorithm can assess the proximity between two languages; in fact, when tested on known languages, it can even accurately identify language families. The team applied their algorithm to Iberian considering Basque, as well as less-likely candidates from Romance, Germanic, Turkic, and Uralic families. While Basque and Latin were closer to Iberian than other languages, they were still too different to be considered related.

In future work, the team hopes to expand beyond the act of connecting texts to related words in a known language—an approach referred to as cognate-based decipherment. This paradigm assumes that such a known language exists, but the example of Iberian shows that this is not always the case. The team’s new approach would involve identifying semantic meaning of the words, even if they don’t know how to read them.

“For instance, we may identify all the references to people or locations in the document, which can then be further investigated in light of the known historical evidence,” says Barzilay.

The project was supported, in part, by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

This article was originally published by MIT News (https://news.mit.edu/2020/translating-lost-languages-using-machine-learning-1021).

Language Learning Rewires Adult Brain

Adults who learn a new language may find reading and listening to their target language easier than producing speech, according to a recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience. In the study, researchers from the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language conducted fMRI experiments on 48 Spanish adults who were learning another language in order to observe brain activity during a series of comprehension and production tasks.

“The human propensity for language requires a delicate balance between neural specialization and capacity for re-organization, making language learning the ideal candidate for examination of specialization and plasticity in the human brain,” the paper reads.

Children, unlike adults, are widely known to use both hemispheres of the brain in language development; this plasticity—the brain’s ability to use various regions to perform the same task—contributes to the ease young children generally have in picking up a first or even second language. As we age, the different hemispheres of the brain become more specialized for certain tasks, a process known as lateralization.

Common knowledge has it that the left hemisphere stores most of our linguistic faculties, however this study suggests that this idea is an oversimplification.

The researchers conducted two separate experiments, one focused on native Spanish speakers who were learning Basque at either a beginning or advanced level and the other on bilingual Spanish and Basque speakers with an intermediate proficiency in English. In both sets of experiments, they found differences in which regions of the brain were activated during production and comprehension tasks.

During speech production tasks, the researchers found that regions in the left hemisphere of the brain were activated. However, when participants did the listening and reading comprehension tasks, there did not appear to be a consistently dominant hemisphere across each participant—it varied quite a bit between individuals.

With beginners, they also found that participants in the study tended to activate the same regions of the brain for comprehension in both their native and target language. As speakers advanced in the language, however, comprehension lateralized such that the non-native language was stored in the opposite side of the brain from the native language. This same process did not occur for speech production, however.

Because speaking appears to be very strongly lateralized to the left side of the brain, the researchers suggest that it may be easier for adults to pick up languages with a similar phonology to their native language. Likewise, due to the fact that comprehension involves a more flexible, child-like neuroplasticity, adults may find that their reading and listening skills progress more quickly than their speaking skills.

“These convergent results shed light on the long-standing debate of neural organization of language by establishing robust principles of lateralization and plasticity of the main language systems,” the paper reads.

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