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The Agency of Artificial Intelligence

Peter Foltz, Eric Hilfer, Kevin McClure, and Dmitry Stavisky explain what artificial intelligence (AI) means for the teaching of language and literacy

Peter Foltz:

Artificial intelligence is doing something that is human-like, doing things that appear human in terms of performance, although more recently, it’s become more associated with some of the modern kinds of machine-learning-type approaches, using large amounts of data.

You don’t want to think about AI as being general intelligence like a human’s. It works within a narrow domain and it tends to be applied in specific areas, but the term has become very widely used for anything where there’s some kind of decision-making process done by computers.

There are several different kinds of things that AI is able to do for language learning and literacy. One of the areas I think is key is the assessment of more open-ended responses, of things that beforehand were thought to be only at the level that could be assessed by humans. In automated essay evaluation, as well as automated spoken-language assessments, we can assess a wide range of different traits of the language used—so for writing, you can look at not just the quality of the writing or grammar, but you can also assess content knowledge and whether the student is able to understand the domain as well as able to express in the way that you would expect for a person at that level of language ability.

So that gives a way of not just awarding a grade but being able to say, “Here are some of your strengths and weaknesses—you seem to need to do more work on this content,” or “you’re strong in these areas, but you need to work on your writing style, or your organization.” We can do that similarly with spoken language, where we can ask students to speak and we get information back about their fluency, pronunciation, and mastery of sentences, vocabulary, those kinds of information.

Here’s an example from the writing side that applies equally well for the spoken side: When a student writes an essay, we’re comparing that essay against anywhere from hundreds to thousands of other essays that have been written on that topic or in that domain for which we already have scores. The computer breaks down that essay into 15 to 100 different language features. Some of them may be around word usage; some may look at sentence structure; some look at larger overall structures; some may look at grammar.

Then, we have a variety of AI-based techniques that can actually assess content, not just at the keyword level but at the semantic or meaning level, so we can assess if the way a student expresses meaning is similar to the way other students have done it. We can either do that for scoring on a particular topic, comparing against essays that other students have written about that topic, or, more generally for language ability, we can compare against other students who were at the same or different levels of language ability.

We believe it’s not good enough just to score student responses—we also need to know when the scoring engine doesn’t know how to score well, so when it’s evaluating, it’s also looking at all those features and asking: “Have I seen responses like this before?” If they look highly unusual, then it sends it to the instructor or rater for scoring. We don’t like to take the control away from the instructor but prefer to create something that works with an instructor but only marks what it’s confident about. It can even learn from the instructor’s marking and gain the confidence to know what to do next time.

There’s a product just coming out called Tell Progress, which is a tablet-based assessment system where students are asked to speak or write. They listen and then have to repeat back or summarize what they’ve heard, or they might be able to hear some verbal instructions and then have to interact with the system in a variety of ways. And so, it provides a way to look at English language abilities across reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We’re incorporating both automated writing analysis in that and automated spoken-language analysis.

This technology is really well suited for the formative side because it allows for a much greater level of one-to-one tutoring, where it can assess what a student says, or what a student writes, and then give feedback to the student. The student can then learn from it, revise it, and continue on. For example, in some of our writing applications, students can submit multiple drafts because they can write something, submit it, and instantly, within about a second, get feedback both about the quality of the writing and about the quality of the content that they’re covering.

It’s then tied into instructional material that allows them to dig deeper. So, for example, if it says you scored low on organization, it will then take you into some extra training on how to organize writing better. Students can then go back, revise, and resubmit. In about an hour, students will often generate four or five drafts that have been marked by the engine, but it doesn’t remove the instructor from that because the instructor has a dashboard where he or she can keep track of what the student is writing. The student can still submit the final draft to the instructor but gets much more time to interact and get feedback in real time.

I don’t see AI as a replacement for the teacher but I see it as a way to provide students with a lot more independent time interacting and getting feedback. With language learning, one of the best ways to learn is to get very quick feedback on writing or speaking, but students don’t get enough opportunity interacting one on one with instructors.

This is not really designed to replace the instructor, but the instructor doesn’t have time in a class of 30 students to interact with each one of them regularly. It allows students to interact with something that can give them fairly direct feedback with some ways to improve while keeping the instructor in the loop because the instructor is still getting information on how the student is doing. So, I see AI as a way of multiplying what an instructor can do while the instructor remains just as involved with the class.

Dr. Peter Foltz is VP in Pearson’s Advanced Computing and Data Sciences Laboratory and research professor at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Cognitive Science. His work covers reading comprehension and writing skills, 21st-century skills learning, large-scale data analytics, artificial intelligence, and uses of machine learning and natural language processing for educational and clinical assessments.

Eric Hilfer:

Language is among the first things we learn as humans, undertaking a complex multiyear process that is key to our survival as social creatures.

As children, humans acquire all the aspects of their native language(s) including the sound system, the meaning of words, and the rules for forming sentences. At older ages, such as in adult learning, languages may be learned more formally—through instruction and explicit explanation of a new language’s structure.

This learning “about” language seems quite different from naturally “picking up” a language from the environment—and there is evidence that these two types of learning, in fact, rely on different underlying brain systems. In both cases, however, fluency and full ability to use the language come only with extensive practice speaking the language to communicate. Immersion is an ideal way to get this practice, but it’s not practical or available for all learners.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have great potential to provide targeted speaking practice for many adult learners. Machine learning has long been the cornerstone of speech recognition for the automation of speaking instruction and targeted pronunciation training. AI instructional models are trained on real student behavior and subsequent achievement. These hold the promise of providing tireless, individualized instruction, giving learners the large volume of feedback and scaffolded practice needed to achieve fluency, all within a low-stakes environment where learners are more willing to take risks and make mistakes.

With the advent of cheaper processing, deep neural networks (DNN) have surpassed expectations and are increasingly available to solve a broader set of problems. A deep neural network is a mathematical construct that encodes a multilayered transformation of raw data into useful patterns, based on structured feedback. In the past, the process of training a small DNN with several layers could take hundreds of hours without yielding a useful result. With advances in computing and innovation in training algorithms, more accurate DNNs with as many as a thousand layers have become an area of intense interest in learning science. This has sparked an era of rapid innovation as these tools become easier to adopt, adapt, and apply.

One of the wonderful challenges and opportunities before language teachers today is figuring out how to best use technology to harness what we know about the brain and how machine learning, DNN, and AI can individualize the learning experience to meet learners exactly where their brains are in the language-acquisition process.

It’s something we’re taking a closer look at as we consider future innovations to our own language-learning programs at Rosetta Stone. AI has the potential to integrate many new features and capabilities to improve the learning experience for language learners. For example, with AI we can mix teaching approaches, as appropriate, for each learner in each skill at the current moment.

Since mastering a new language—whether it’s your first, second, third, or beyond—is not a short process and requires commitment to successfully achieve, the great promise of AI is that it can shorten the time to gain proficiency. For example, one could use AI to determine when learners have mastered content and allow them to skip ahead to new material as appropriate. This in turn helps get learners to elementary and intermediate levels of competence more quickly, making them functional users of the language faster. Conversely, AI can allow us to determine where a learner is struggling and provide remediation to get them over the hump and back on track.

Another promise of AI is that it can more seamlessly determine learners’ interests and provide them with content that matches their personal needs.

That is, we can use AI to discover learners’ interests without intrusive surveys that take time away from learning. And when we provide learners with content that is engaging and speaks to them personally, they spend more time learning and achieve more.
AI can also provide an invisible match between taught content and assessment, ensuring that a system tests learners on what they have learned, and then use the results of the assessment to further personalize the learning.

It’s important to note that AI need not push the expert teacher out of the learning equation. Rather, AI should be viewed as a powerful resource with the promise to enable teachers with insights into where learners need additional help or are ready for bigger challenges.

It also has the potential to support interactions between students, helping to group them by level and interest for more interesting, fruitful, and educational interactions.
Eric Hilfer is vice president of product development at Rosetta Stone.

Kevin McClure:

I have a very optimistic view of how AI will affect language learning that is based on my experience at DynEd International, where we are dedicated to blended learning.
AI-powered courseware takes care of the more mundane tasks involved in language learning so that teachers or coaches can spend class time having learners doing communicative activities—for example, discussions or simulations.

AI allows the digital courseware to address the individual needs of learners at a level that is difficult to achieve in a classroom.

Examples of this include:

  • Starting learners at a course level that is appropriate for their individual needs;
    Identifying what learners already know so that practice of those concepts and content is limited,
  • Identifying learners’ weaknesses so that they receive extra presentation and practice of those concepts and content;
  • Providing clear goals for the learner;
  • Laying out a course of study for the learner, ordering the activities in a way that helps each individual learner master key concepts and content quickly;
  • Providing learners with a reasonable number of choices that allows learners some degree of control over their learning, based on their learning styles and personal preferences;
  • Giving individual learners advice about how to use the courseware most effectively—for example, to record their speech more often with speech recognition (SR) technology;
  • Giving each learner immediate feedback on his or her comprehension of the content and concepts;
  • Giving instructors detailed information on how the learners in their classes are progressing and how effectively they are using the courseware;
  • Guiding learners through activities in a brain-effective manner,
    meaning that new concepts and content are repeated in a variety of ways until learners demonstrate mastery;
  • Coordinating communication between courseware and instructors so that learners are prepared for live sessions with instructors because they have mastered the concepts and content they will need for their upcoming classes or coaching sessions.

David Nunan, the renowned researcher in ELT, has always maintained that AI-driven courseware should be seen as a great boon for teachers, as it will relieve them of teaching chores such as explaining grammar rules or practicing sentence patterns.
I share his positive view and look forward to an ELT future in which teachers are given the information on individual learners that they need to optimize their students’ progress.
Kevin McClure is DynEd’s AI and assessment lead. He has a master’s degree in applied linguistics and has 36 years of experience in all aspects of English language teaching.

Dmitry Stavisky:

Mastering a foreign language requires a lot of practice. Self-study is usually inefficient, and one-to-one teacher-led lessons are very expensive. So public and private schools resort to more affordable group lessons. Unfortunately, group format is not optimal for language learning. Learning a foreign language while surrounded by people at the same minimal fluency level does not work. As a result, in many countries, we see low foreign language fluency despite students spending a lot of time and money on foreign language learning.The good news is that any of these tasks can be partially or completely automated using artificial intelligence technologies. I believe the best way to teach a language is to provide every student with personalized one-to-one tutoring. By combining advanced machine learning, natural language understanding, and speech technologies with on-demand human instructors, innovative language-learning services like Edwin provide more effective, and much more affordable, teaching than traditional language-learning techniques.

At Edwin, we rely on AI-powered bots and voice assistants to do the bulk of English teaching and language practice, freeing teachers to use their valuable time for the most nuanced tasks. In other words, we don’t digitize classrooms, lectures, and books. We break the language knowledge graph down to the concepts and skills, develop personalized learning plans, and teach these concepts and skills to every student individually. This approach will allow us to get Edwin students to proficiency in one-third the time and for one-third the cost of cram schools, currently the most common way to prepare for English tests.

There is no silver bullet in foreign language learning, but we can already see that artificial intelligence is radically changing the economics of language education. It helps students and teachers move from factory-model classrooms and methodologies to more effective, personalized education.

Dmitry Stavisky is co-founder and CEO at Edwin.ai, an innovative education-technology company helping people around the world learn English.

Act for a Multilingual America

Leaders from Business, Government, Academia, and the Arts Call for Improved Access to Language Education

In support of its recent report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has released a call-to-action signed by 37 individuals and over 150 organizations, including Language Magazine, who urge greater support for languages in order to maintain and enhance American global leadership.

The call-to-action, “Bridging America’s Language Gap,” includes endorsements from business, government, and cultural leaders such as Norman R. Augustine, retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation; Melody C. Barnes, former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; documentary filmmaker Ken Burns; Robert D. Haas, Chairman Emeritus of Levi Strauss; former Secretary of Defense and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Leon E. Panetta; and Natasha Trethewey, 19th United States Poet Laureate.

“Bridging America’s Language Gap” has been endorsed by dozens of businesses, academic and professional associations, school systems, and other institutions that support the five recommendations of the America’s Languages report:

  • Provide access to languages for all age groups and every level of the education continuum, from early childhood through retirement;
  • Prepare more language teachers, without whom we cannot advance language education;
  • Promote public-private partnerships in language education to amplify the work begun in our schools;
  • Support heritage and indigenous language communities in their traditions and birthrights, and as an important and distinctive national resource; and
  • Encourage international learning experiences for students, teachers, and workers through educational and professional programs, as a critical aspect of advanced language learning.

“The people and organizations who have signed this call-to-action are witnesses to the enduring importance of language education in the United States,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the American Academy. “They affirm the fundamental recommendation of the Academy’s report: to improve access to language education for as many Americans as possible in order to strengthen our relationships at home and abroad.”

The American Academy will continue to collect endorsements for “Bridging America’s Language Gap” and will update the document periodically.

“Bridging America’s Language Gap” is the first product of the America’s Languages Working Group, an informal group convened under the aegis of the American Academy that includes representatives from the language profession, academia, government, business, NGOs, and heritage and indigenous communities. Over the next few years, Working Group members will be undertaking a series of collaborative activities in support of the America’s Languages report.

“The members of the Working Group have come together, across institutional divides, to advance the common cause of improving language education,” Fanton added. “This collaborative spirit is as important as any report or call to action and is the basis of real change. The Academy is proud to have inspired such cooperation through its America’s Languages report, and we are happy to help sustain the Working Group’s ongoing efforts.”

The members of the America’s Languages Working Group include:

Marty Abbott, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

Mohamed Abdel-Kader, The Aspen Institute

Lenna Aoki, General Counsel to Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI)

Erlin Barnard, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Richard Brecht, University of Maryland and American Councils Research Center

Dan E. Davidson, American Councils for International Education and Bryn Mawr College

Ambassador Ruth A. Davis, International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge and the International Mission of Mercy USA

Kathleen Diamond, ASTM F43 Language Services and Product

Rosemary G. Feal, Wellesley College

Sharon Ahern Fechter, Montgomery College

Stephen Kidd, National Humanities Alliance

Gail McGinn, former (retired) Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Plans in the Office of the Secretary of Defense

Maria Pulcini (secretary), Joint National Committee for Languages

Bill Rivers, Joint National Committee for Languages

Julia A. Smith, Association of American Universities

Emily Spinelli, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese

John Tessitore (chair), American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Santiago Wood, National Association for Bilingual Education

Sonia Zamborsky, Marriott International

“Bridging America’s Language Gap” is available at www.amacad.org/language-gap. The America’s Languages report is available at www.amacad.org/language.

To join the effort, contact John Tessitore at [email protected].

Follow the conversation at #AmericasLanguages.

Alaskans First to Receive Seal of Biliteracy in Native Tongue

The Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) is roughly the size of West Virginia, with 22 schools spread across a remote area of Alaska’s Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. There are no roads, and the most common ways to travel between towns are to fly or snowmobile.

It is also a region where the native Alaskan language of Yup’ik is still spoken and taught, and the LKSD’s mission is to ensure effective bilingual education for all students. In this way, they are actually far ahead of many more urban American school districts, where only in recent years have schools begun to embrace dual-language programs and adopt initiatives like the Seal of Biliteracy.

But LKSD had one big challenge that typical school districts do not: how do you effectively measure a student’s language skills when there is no approved test in their language?
When the district learned about the Seal of Biliteracy, they wanted to make sure that their students did not miss out on this opportunity to showcase their skills. To do that, they needed a language proficiency test that met national standards.

So in the fall of 2016, a group of LKSD language instructors began working
closely with Avant to develop the WorldSpeak assessment system for Yup’ik.
Creating the assessment proved more complex than they thought. They not only had to translate but to completely rewrite and recontextualize the WorldSpeak rubrics and testing questions to reflect the realities of life in the most remote parts of Alaska.

For example, a prompt asking students to “tell us about the last time you drove to the grocery store” would have no relevant equivalent in Yup’ik and for LKSD students. In this remote region, instead of communities being connected by roads, highways, stores, and restaurants, there is only Alaskan tundra.

“Our students would not be able to talk about driving, shopping, or malls, because up here, there are no roads between communities. If you need to go to another town, you fly. And if you need to get food, you don’t go to a grocery store, you go hunting,” Carlton Kuhns, assistant superintendent of instruction, explained.

After many months working through these challenges to develop and test the WorldSpeak system for Yup’ik, this month, 16 students became the first to take the Yup’ik WorldSpeak assessment and earn Seals of Biliteracy for their proficiency in English and Yup’ik.

“The development of the Seal of Biliteracy in the Yup’ik language is a testament to the ongoing commitment of our district to maintaining the local language. It was important to us to give our students the opportunity to get a Seal of Biliteracy, and I am so very proud of our students who have achieved this landmark,” said Dan Walker, LKSD superintendent. It was important to Avant, too.

“We believe passionately that all multilingual students deserve the opportunity to earn the Seal of Biliteracy and showcase their language skills to schools and employers, no matter what their language may be,” said David Bong, CEO of Avant Assessment. “It’s why we jumped at the chance to support LKSD and Yup’ik and why we continue to add new languages to our portfolio of assessments every year.”

So congratulations to all the students graduating with their Seals of Biliteracy this year, and here’s to many more to come.

David Bong is CEO and co-founder of Avant Assessment, the leading language-proficiency assessment provider. Avant offers proficiency tests in more than 24 languages and is looking to add more.

The Bilingual Advantage in the Global Workplace

For the last 30 years, the world economy has been more global and multicultural than ever before. In any given country, foreign-based companies operate every day, while overseas branches of the same companies are often present in various countries. The job market is consequently more global, multilingual, and multicultural in nature, and the workforce of the future will need to be more linguistically and culturally heterogeneous.

In that context, bilingual and bicultural individuals, even with limited knowledge of one or more languages and their attendant cultures, have a clear advantage, since more and more jobs will require experience in international and cross-cultural areas.1

On the other hand, we also know that half of the world’s population speaks two or more languages and there are many places where bilingualism or multilingualism is the norm, for example in regions of Africa.2

So, will half the world then benefit from the new job opportunities created by a more global job market? Not exactly.

Being bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate are not equivalent skills, and being bilingual is not the only condition to be hired for any job. It does not replace a solid further education, but it is becoming obvious that linguistic and cultural fluency enhances one’s “human capital” (the measure of the economic value of a person’s skill set). More and more, at equal technical skills, a bilingual individual will be chosen over a monolingual person.

The main reason is that bilinguals display key qualities, unique transversal competencies, that are becoming increasingly important in a more internationally integrated job market. We can precisely identify four traits commonly shared by all bilingual and bicultural individuals that give a real edge in the global marketplace: better focus and multitasking abilities, better adaptability, increased cultural fluency, and more opportunities.

Focusing in a Connected World

First of all, the cognitive advantages of being bilingual are numerous, including increased mental flexibility and metalinguistic abilities, improved executive function, and better ability and more willingness to learn a third language. The reason is that when using two or more languages, ideas come from a common source. What Jim Cummins calls the common underlying proficiency (CUP) model explains that proficiencies involving more cognitively demanding tasks (such as abstract thinking and problem solving) are common across languages.3 The CUP provides the base for the development of both the first language and the second language, and consequently any expansion of the CUP that takes place in one language will have a beneficial effect on the other languages. This theory serves to explain why it becomes easier and easier to learn additional languages and why individuals can function with two or more languages with relative ease.

Along with the CUP, research shows that information about both languages is activated in the brain even when a speaker is only using one language. In addition, because all languages are constantly activated in the brain, bilinguals must deactivate the language not needed. By doing so, they enhance executive control functions (such as inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) and are better at focusing, multitasking, and selecting relevant information.

Some researchers, like Ellen Bialystok, clearly show that because bilingual speakers access linguistic information in their brains differently from monolingual speakers, they have an advantage in language processing, and they outperform monolingual speakers in reaction times for language processing and then producing relevant language in certain tasks. This is true for children,4 but also for young adults and the elderly, who have also both demonstrated this “bilingual advantage.”5

In an increasingly complex and connected world, with an overwhelming number of distractions and masses of information, the ability to perform multiple tasks at once while remaining focused and selecting relevant information is an essential advantage of being bilingual.

Adaptability in an Ambiguous World

Because all languages are constantly activated in the brain of a multilingual individual, bilinguals find themselves at various points on a situational continuum which will result in particular language modes.6 

The language mode is the state of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language-processing mechanisms at a given point in time. At one end of the language mode, bilinguals are in a monolingual mode (in their first, second, or any additional language). They then have to choose and use the correct language and deactivate (or inhibit) the second one. At the other end of the continuum, bilinguals find themselves in a fully bilingual mode where they can code-switch or borrow between languages. So, in a sense, bilinguals have to adapt to the situation they are in. They use clues to select which language to speak, giving them more flexibility and ability to read others. In multilingual and global workplaces, people navigate constantly on the continuum.

Being bilingual helps develop more adaptability and social, emotional, and interpersonal skills. Indeed, bilinguals have to be more aware of the needs of the listener and others and have to navigate and express various and multiple perspectives. In a world charged with ambiguity and global challenges, the capacity to understand and appreciate the viewpoints of others is a stepping stone for success.

Cultural Fluency in Our Global Arena

Multilingualism also helps to build self-esteem and maintain a strong sense of identity while developing sensitivity toward other people and cultures. Bilinguals have direct access to two or more different cultures.

From a sociocultural perspective, thanks to in-depth knowledge of languages, bilinguals have a better grasp of the cultural diversity that exists in this world. They understand better that we are all unique individuals, with different culturally defining backgrounds, and that the world can be seen and described in different ways, particularly through cultural lenses. This develops cultural fluency, or the capability to relate and work effectively across cultures. Most bilingual people are also bicultural or have a broad knowledge of different cultures and understand that cultural fluency is essential. In our globalized environment, people equipped with the ability to communicate with diverse groups and with strong intercultural capacity have a tremendous advantage.

Opportunities 

Lastly, being bilingual can give a head start that is not only beneficial early in life but is also cumulative over time. Indeed, while language skills have always been a requirement in some fields, such as trade or diplomacy, nowadays more and more traditional fields, organizations, and firms have a global reach. And while some research has shown that in the U.S. people who are bilingual often make less than people who are monolingual in similar jobs,7 the situation is changing rapidly, and being bilingual gives a clear head start in competition for the best high schools and universities.

Benjamin Boyer, academic director of the ESCP Europe (a top European business school) undergraduate program, described recently in the French newspaper Le Monde the kind of profiles ESCP is looking for in their new program: “What we are looking for are binational, trilingual profiles, but also good at math. Personalities who have lived experiences, lived all over the world and do not want to be confined to a single country in higher education.”8 Being bilingual clearly enhances people’s human capital at a time when the international competition for student recruitment is accelerating.  Workplaces are more global, and employees who are proficient in multiple languages and at ease in multiple cultures have more opportunities. These opportunities will continue to expand, as we are living in increasingly interconnected societies and workplaces.

In sum, in our global and ultracompetitive world, required personal and professional skills are more diverse and complex than ever. The ability to communicate efficiently in many languages across different cultures has become a necessity for many jobs.

Bilinguals possess transversal competencies, such as taking different perspectives, ignoring irrelevant information, problem solving, multitasking, and dealing with conflicting cues, that are and will be highly regarded in an increasingly integrated global work market.

One can only agree with Gregg Roberts, former dual-language immersion program officer for the Utah State Office of Education, when he said that “monolingualism is the illiteracy of the 21st century.”9

References

1. Cere, Ronald C. (2012). “Foreign Language Careers for International Business and the Professions,” in Global Advances in Business Communication 1 (1), Article 6.

2. See for instance: Ansaldo, A. I., Marcotte, K., Scherer, L., and Raboyeau, G. (2008). “Language Therapy and Bilingual Aphasia: Clinical implications of psycholinguistic and neuroimaging research.” Journal of Neurolinguistics 21, 539–557; De Bot, K. (1992). “A Bilingual Production Model: Levelt’s ‘speaking’ model adapted.” Applied Linguistics 13 (1), 1–24.

3. Cummins, J. (1984). “Wanted: A theoretical framework for relating language proficiency to academic achievement among bilingual students.” In C. Rivera (ed.), Language Proficiency and Academic Achievement. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Cummins, J. (2000). Language, Power, and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

4. See for instance: Bialystok, E. (1999). “Cognitive Complexity and Attentional Control in the Bilingual Mind.” Child Development 70 (3), 636–644; Bialystok, E., and Senman, L. (2004). “Role of Inhibition of Attention and Symbolic Representation.” Child Development 75 (2), 562–579; Bialystok, E., and Martin M. M. (2004). “Attention and Inhibition in Bilingual Children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sort task.” Developmental Science 7 (3), 325–339.

5. Bialystok, E., Craik, F., and Luk, G. (2008). “Cognitive Control and Lexical Access in Younger and Older Bilinguals.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 34, 859–873; Craik, F., Bialystok, E., and Freedman, M. (2010). “Delaying the Onset of Alzheimer Disease: Bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve.” Neurology 75(19), 1726–1729.

6. Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7. Gándara, P. (2014). Is There Really a Labor Market Advantage to Being Bilingual in the U.S.? (Policy Information Report, Research Report No. RR-15-07). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

8. In Le Monde, “Blog Orientation,” October 17, 2017.

Mehdi Lazar, PhD, is head of school at Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley, California, and associate researcher at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, France.

This Dictionary Illuminates the Meaning of Everything


Richard Lederer celebrates “the most impressive collective achievement of our civilization”

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the greatest monument ever erected to the English language. In 1857, the idea of a comprehensive “dictionary of historical principles” was first presented. On June 1, 1928, the first two complete twelve-volume sets were formally presented—one to King George V and one to President Calvin Coolidge.

It took almost three-quarters of a century to complete the original tombstone-sized, twelve-volume edition and 29 years to update it in an integrated 22,000-page, 20-volume second edition that consists of nearly 60 million words.

As a lexicon based on historical principles, the Oxford English Dictionary is an undertaking that attempts to record the birth and history of every printed word in the language from the time of King Alfred in the ninth century and how their forms and meanings changed over time to the date of publication.

I urge you to learn more about this magnificent tribute to our collective love of the English language in Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press). Here is how Winchester describes the grand plan of the OED:

“No, nothing that had been made so far was good enough. What was needed was a brand-new dictionary. A dictionary of the English language in its totality. From a fresh start, from a tabula rasa, there should be constructed now a wholly new dictionary that would give, in essence and in fact, the meaning of everything.

“Moreover, the book must be sure to present an elegantly written and carefully thought out definition, an exquisite summation of every single sense and meaning of every word ever known. It had to explain, in detail and as comprehensively as could be ascertained, every single word’s etymology. And it had to offer up a full-length illustrated biography of every word.” In The Meaning of Everything, you will come to know the OED’s editors—the brilliant but tubercular Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the romantic poet Samuel Taylor; the colorful, boisterous Frederick James Furnivall, who left the project in a shambles; and, most prominently, James Augustus Henry Murray, the indefatigable Scottish schoolmaster who spent half a century bringing the dictionary to fruition. Such was Murray’s passion for the aborning dictionary that before the Oxford University delegates added three subeditors to the staff, he was working 90 hours a week caught in the web of words.

The OED editors appealed to the public for help, and thousands of ordinary citizens from all around the English-speaking world signed up. These volunteer readers supplied the raw material for dictionary entries, actual examples taken from books and documents showing how each word was used at different periods in its history.

Over more than seven decades, they sent to the OED staff more than six million slips of paper with recorded usages. These were housed in an ugly corrugated-iron shed that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium—the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it. Murray lined the Scriptorium with pigeonholes, but there were never enough to hold the mountain of handwritten slips. They arrived in parcels and sacks, a dead rat in one, a live mouse family in another.

Among the legion of volunteer readers was Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit who obsessively devoted at least four hours every day for 20 years to the OED. Another devotee was Dr. William Chester Minor, a Civil War veteran locked away in an asylum for criminal lunatics. Minor was the madman in Winchester’s 1998 chronicle The Professor and the Madman, and the author recapitulates Minor’s journey from homicidal madness to ultimate redemption.

Author Anthony Burgess calls the OED “as much a poem as the source of poems, and hence the longest epic ever written.” What the pyramids were to the ancient Egyptians the Oxford English Dictionary is to English language scholarship—the most impressive collective achievement of our civilization. The difference is that inside the OED pulses something alive, growing, and evolving.

Richard Lederer, MAT English and education, PhD linguistics, is the author of more than 50 books on language, history, and humor, available at his website, www.verbivore.com. Please send your questions and comments about language to [email protected].

Stamina in Silent Reading


Elfrieda H. Hiebert offers literacy advice

In all likelihood, you are reading these words silently. Silent reading is the mode in which adults typically read. In the primary grades especially, and sometimes even beyond in school, oral reading dominates. Oral reading is a fairly good predictor of automaticity in recognizing words in silent reading, but the transfer between oral and silent reading is not a perfect one by any means. In oral-reading contexts, a teacher typically keeps tabs on whether students are reading. In silent reading, students need to monitor themselves.

A significant number of American students do relatively well on oral-reading assessments, but in independent-reading contexts such as state assessments, many engage in unproductive reading behaviors. If the text is short, they may do reasonably well, but when the text gets longer, a sizable group of students begin to skip around the text or jump to questions without reading.

Often, word recognition is seen to be the culprit for these behaviors of students. However, the majority of students have fairly accurate word recognition by the end of third grade.

The problem lies with their lack of automaticity at recognizing word meanings, which, in turn, stems from an insufficient amount of reading in school.

To become proficient at anything—whether it is surfing, drawing, or reading—requires spending substantial time in the activity. Without extensive reading, students’ stamina as readers will be inadequate for the tasks of community, college, and careers in the 21st century. Stamina refers to the ability to stay on task during silent reading.

Following are three ways to increase the amount that students read silently with the aim of building their stamina as readers.

First, provide students with daily opportunities to read magazine articles. For struggling readers, reading an article is likely to be viewed as achievable, since articles are typically short and pertain to engaging topics. A great resource is the Article-a-Day initiative of readworks.org, a nonprofit with approximately 4,500 free, downloadable articles.  Second, divide extended texts into chunks, which students read silently. Teachers can guide students in learning to set purposes as they read parts of texts. Talking Points for Kids (free and downloadable at Textproject.org) are presented in sections around a topic, making them ideal for supporting struggling readers in reading extended texts.

Third, have frequent conversations with students about their capacities as readers. Many students do not have a realistic sense of what they can read or what to expect from texts. The majority of words in texts come from a relatively small group—about 2,500 word families (e.g., help, helpful, helpless, unhelpful). Demonstrating to students that they know the majority of words in a text can be useful in increasing their confidence as readers.  Stamina is not something that develops overnight but rather requires extensive opportunities to read over a school career. As they read, students need to be supported in reflecting on what they are learning from texts. Reading is not a school exercise done for practice. Reading begets knowledge and knowledge opens opportunities.

Elfrieda Hiebert is the CEO/president of TextProject. She has had a long career as a literacy educator in California and, subsequently, as a teacher, educator, and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder,Michigan and California – Berkeley. Her research, which addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts, has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the Study of Reading, 1985) and Every Child a Reader (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, 1999), she has contributed to making research accessible to educators.https://tinyurl.com/y7bbr443  

New Literacy Program for Middle School & Up


The National Center for Education Statistics has found that approximately two-thirds of eighth-grade students in the U.S. cannot read proficiently (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf), a figure that has held relatively steady for 25 years. To help schools and districts close the achievement gap for nonproficient readers in grades six and above, Lexia Learning has released PowerUp Literacy, designed to simultaneously accelerate the development of both fundamental literacy skills and higher-order thinking skills through adaptive learning paths.

Developed specifically for adolescent students, the program identifies skill gaps and provides personalized and systematic instruction in word study, grammar, and comprehension. By engaging students with a range of relevant, high-interest authentic texts, instructional videos, and game-based motivational elements, the program is intended to help students take ownership of their learning, acknowledging their growing autonomy and building their confidence.

“Schools and districts need to prepare all middle and high school students, including nonproficient readers, for college and careers, so closing the literacy achievement gap in grades 6–12 is often a matter of special concern.

That’s especially true when teachers don’t feel they have the training or tools to support nonproficient readers,” says Lexia president Nick Gaehde. “PowerUp equips teachers with the knowledge, data, and instructional resources they need to support and motivate those readers.”

“With more than 30 years of experience in reading pedagogy and research and several peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the efficacy of our instructional approach, we have always put the needs of teachers and students at the core of what we do,” adds Gaehde. “We want to empower teachers who might otherwise feel unprepared to support nonproficient readers. And we want to meet the needs of a wide range of students—whether they are struggling or nearly proficient readers—through a highly engaging and personalized instruction experience that we believe will effectively address the decades-long gap in reading proficiency across our country.”

See Language Magazine October 2017 for an interview with Nick Gaehde and Liz Brooke of Lexia.
www.lexialearning.com/pr/introducing-lexia-powerup-literacy

Making Connections That Count

Roberto Rivera explores the vital connection between social and cultural competence—for both students and teachers

My father is from Nicaragua, and when I was growing up, he brought several of his siblings to the U.S. to live with us. We mostly spoke Spanish at home, and there was a disconnect at school, because my teachers believed my “learning acquisition” in English was delayed. They ran a bunch of tests on me, and no one had the cultural sensitivity to ask if I was learning a new language. So I got labeled LD, and I deeply internalized that label. Even when we moved and it took my transcripts a while to catch up, I self-selected to be in remedial classes.

I got into a lot of trouble in my middle school and high school years. I barely graduated, and it was not until I started working with the community and volunteering at hip-hop arts programs that I realized that I was not stupid, I just learned differently. In community college, I started to apply my “learning difference” to school and connected my creative communication and community-organizing gifts to what I was learning in the classroom. I was not even trying to get good grades; I just wanted to gain knowledge that I could use to serve my community—and I got all As in the process. When I graduated from UW-Madison with a major I had created, entitled “social change, youth culture, and the arts,” it was bittersweet because I was the only one from my community who had not ended up in jail, dead, or addicted to drugs. I was determined to let youth like me in middle school and high school know that they are smart, that there is a difference between schooling and education, and that they can take a lead in their own education.

So, I created the Fulfill the Dream program. The activities in the Fulfill the Dream social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum come from a bottom-up approach of working with youth in underresourced schools and marginalized communities for the better part of 20 years. The curriculum has been iterated and co-created with youth, which is why it is so engaging and relevant.

Redefining Rigor

Our aim is to redefine what constitutes academic rigor. For us, helping kids to solve problems on a test is not rigorous enough if it is not also helping them to solve problems in their lives and in the world around them. In the words of Paulo Freire, we want young people to “read the word and the world.” We want them to cultivate social and emotional competence but also to be socially aware of how their social and political contexts impact their development. We take a culturally relevant approach that lets the youth know that we honor the social and emotional competences that are already embedded in their cultures and experiences. We start with an asset-based frame and build from there. We find that students are much more motivated to participate and put in the effort if they feel like they already have some strength in these areas.

For example, in working with students whose families have recently immigrated to the U.S., we have to honor their resilience, grit, and ability to exercise extreme competence in the face of great challenge, and we build from there. The best teachers are students of their students. If we agree that academic rigor is more than just having students regurgitate information on a test, if it includes them being able to think critically and creatively about complex problems, then educators need to know what is going on in the lives of their students.

Once educators have this information, they can incorporate this context into their lessons and make them more effective and engaging. In my experience, students are hungry for knowledge that is relevant to their lives socially and culturally.

The ELL Advantage

SEL is important because communicating and collaborating are important skills that youth need to have to thrive in the 21st century. ELLs have an advantage because, through the proliferation of technology, the world is shrinking and the millennials and generation Z have the potential to develop a global citizenry and professional network that is unprecedented. The multilingual students will have the greatest advantage as it relates to careers and global service opportunities.

Being multilingual, as well as socially and emotionally competent, positions them to succeed in careers that do not even exist yet. Further, this ability to communicate and collaborate with people around the globe in ways that others cannot builds their confidence, stimulates resilience, and promotes hope that there are other options for them.

Bringing a Community Together

ELLs, like all students, have different passions and learning styles. By using a variety of modalities to engage youth and allow them to process information through movement, media, and music, we see genuine learning taking place while they also reinforce their racial and cultural identities.

Some of the projects I have seen over the years include block parties to rebrand communities; workshops to empower younger youth; town hall meetings to hold political leaders accountable; youth-developed documentaries; and youth-led books, apps, and albums. My favorite thing is when youth start to take a leadership role in teaching and mentoring their younger peers.

My philosophy is that the walls of the classroom are the community and the community is the classroom. My advice to educators is to become students of your students. The more we can learn about their cultures and languages at home in the community, the more we can use this knowledge to make our curriculum and lesson plans more engaging. This allows us as educators to reclaim the art of teaching, and not just the science. When we only focus on the scope and sequence of what we have to teach, we are not being creative and we lose the joy and fun of teaching. It is time to reclaim that so our youth stay engaged—and so we do not burn out.

Teacher, Teach Thyself

I believe that we teach who we are. If we are not passionate about life, it is hard to teach youth to become passionate. If we are not socially and emotionally competent, it is hard to teach youth these skills.

Asking educators to engage in the same SEL activities as their students gives them greater credibility and authenticity in engaging their classes. With online SEL programs, we have the ability to connect with teachers in culturally relevant ways and the ability to help them connect with youth from diverse backgrounds in ways that appeal to different learning styles.

The Future of SEL

As our population changes, the notion that educating students is only the responsibility of teachers or parents is going to need to change. The future of SEL is creating an ecosystem where all of our youth can thrive and everyone in the school, home, and community plays a part. If we are not willing to come together and model these things, then the media will turn our children into hyperindividualistic consumers with no concern for democracy or diplomacy.

We are at a critical juncture in our nation, where we are realizing that bashing each other is not getting us where we need to go. We need to come together, and what better reason than for our children? In the future, being socially and emotionally competent will need to become synonymous with being multiculturally competent and having the personal and collective empathy to ensure that no one is marginalized, oppressed, or excluded because of their race, language, gender, or ability. Our youth are watching more of what we do than what we say, so we cannot be like the parents who smoke in front of their children and then tell them not to smoke. The change has to start with us, and as we know from new research into neural science, it is never too late to change our mindsets or behavior.

Roberto Rivera is the chief empowerment officer at 7 Mindsets, which publishes multimedia educational tools and trains educators around the nation. Rivera is also a predoctoral fellow with the Social and Emotional Learning Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in the relationship of youth voice to social and emotional learning. He can be reached at [email protected].

Binational California Professional Development

Tijuana Cultural Center

CABE Binational Project GLAD in partnership with Sistema Educativo Estatal (SEE) de Baja California and Project GLAD National Training Center is offering a summer/fall training program in Tijuana, BC, Mexico, and SoCal.

  • Become a Project GLAD®-certified teacher!
  • Enjoy a bilingual, bicultural professional development experience with your colleagues!
  • Dual immersion teachers: Develop high levels of academic Spanish!
  • Build collaborative relationships with colleagues from Baja California, Mexico, and California!
  • Learn about Mexico’s educational system and the transnational students we share!

Tijuana: July 16-20, 2018  |  Fall 2018

WHO:

Up to 15 California elementary teachers from Spanish Dual Language Immersion programs with a BCLAD credential/authorization or Bilingual Authorization

Up to 15 California elementary teachers with a CLAD credential/authorization or SB 2042 credential who teach English Learners in English

Up to 15 Mexican English as a Second Language teachers

Up to 15 Mexican teachers who teach in Spanish

WHAT:

Tier 1 Theory and Research Training (delivered in English for CLAD/SB2042 teachers and in Spanish for BCLAD/Bilingual Authorization teachers) in Tijuana, BC, Mexico: July 16-20, 2018 (2 days of training, plus travel and school site visit days)

Tier 1 Demonstration Session in English for CLAD/SB2042 teachers and in Spanish for BCLAD/Bilingual Authorization teachers in host district in Southern California, Fall 2018 (4 days; not including travel days)

COST:

$3,500 per teacher, including:

  • Project GLAD® Tier 1: 2-day Theory/Research Training in Tijuana, BC, Mexico, plus school site visit and travel days (total of 5 days) for all participants
    • Round trip transportation from San Diego, CA, to Tijuana, Mexico
    • Lodging (double occupancy) and food at the Grand Hotel, Tijuana (http://www.grandhoteltj.com)
    • International travel insurance
    • Cultural activity (whole group; transportation and escort provided)
  • Project GLAD® Tier 1: 4-day demonstration/observation trainig in host district (TBD) in Southern California (including breakfast and lunch each day; does not include travel days)

REGISTER:

BCLAD/Bilingual Authorization teachers: http://cabe.k12oms.org/1524-143290

CLAD/SB2042 teachers: http://cabe.k12oms.org/1524-143289

www.gocabe.org | [email protected] | 626-814-4441 X212

Immigrant Students Worldwide Need More Support

Socio-economic disadvantage and language barriers are the biggest obstacles to success at school and in society for students with an immigrant background. More effective and better targeted education and social policies are needed to help migrant children integrate and fulfil their potential, according to an OECD report.

The OECD’s Resilience of Students with an Immigrant Background: Factors that Shape Well-Being finds that almost one in four 15 year-old students in OECD and European Union countries was either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent, and that the share of students with an immigrant background has risen over the past decade.

Yet, many of these students tend to underperform in school, particularly first-generation immigrant students (that is, foreign-born students of foreign-born parents). On average across OECD countries, around one in two first-generation immigrant students failed to reach baseline academic proficiency in reading, mathematics and science, compared to around one in four students without an immigrant background.

“A good education is essential to give young migrants the skills they need to overcome adversity, contribute to the economy and integrate into society,” said Gabriela Ramos, OECD Chief of Staff and Sherpa to the G20, and who oversees the work of Education at the OECD, launching the report in Brussels, Belgium. “It is alarming that, if you compare a sample of 100 European students with an immigrant background with a similar group of native students, 15 more students in the immigrant group will fail to attain baseline levels of proficiency in science, reading and math. This is unacceptable and has long-lasting effects on both integration and broader social cohesion. Countries need to do more to provide these kids with the means, instruments and support to succeed in school. We need targeted policies that give everyone the opportunity to fulfil their full potential.”

The report found that immigrant students felt a lower sense of belonging at school than non-immigrant students, reported less life satisfaction and higher schoolwork-related anxiety. However, many also expressed high levels of motivation to achieve their best in school and beyond.

Academic underperformance among students with an immigrant background is particularly high in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland. In these countries, immigrant students are more than twice as likely as students without an immigrant background to fail to achieve baseline academic proficiency.

Differences in socio-economic status explain over one-fifth of the gap between immigrant students and native students in the likelihood of attaining baseline skills, on average across OECD and EU countries.

Language is also key: immigrant students who do not speak the host-country language at home are less likely to do well – by around eight percentage points – in the OECD PISA test than native-speaking immigrant students.

Immigrant students are more likely to attend schools with a worse disciplinary climate and a higher prevalence of truancy and are more likely than native students to be victims of bullying and to perceive being unfairly treated by teachers. This all contributes to differences between native and immigrant students in academic performance and well-being. Yet, many immigrant students report that their teachers provide them with additional support, an indication of the willingness of teachers to support them effectively.

Teachers have a key role to play in helping students adjust in their classrooms and society more generally. They should be offered more support and training to deal with increasingly multicultural classrooms, tackling bullying and engaging with parents of immigrant students.

To help non-native students succeed, introducing early assessment of language and other skills is essential. Students with an immigrant background should be offered targeted language training. Screening for language proficiency not only informs teachers about individual students’ needs, but also local or regional education authorities, and can be used to help target which schools should receive additional funding, training and support.

The report, co-funded by the European Union, The Resilience of Students with an Immigrant Background: Factors that Shape Well-Being, is available at http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/the-resilience-of-students-with-an-immigrant-background_9789264292093-en

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