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November 2017

The International Benefits of Language Education Michael Nugent, Martha “Marty” Abbott, Esther Brimmer, and Sanford J. Ungar discuss the importance of language education to the U.S. on the international stage

Elevating Investment in California’s Youngest Alejandra Campoverdi advocates investing in pre-K initiatives, including dual-language programs, for California’s most at-risk children

The Amazing Case of El Biblioburro Lori Langer de Ramirez uses the world language classroom to broaden students’ knowledge of geography and introduce sociocultural concepts like social justice

The Rise of Women through the Birth of Languages Jenna Lau reveals the secrets of Nushu and Hiragana, languages emblematic of Chinese female empowerment and sisterhood

When Literacy Gets Critical Lina Sun provides a rationale for integrating peace education into the English curriculum through graphic novels

Translating to Work in the USA Elizabeth Ricci and Michael Launer provide an update on U.S. immigration options for translators and interpreters under the Trump administration

Making the Most of Europe Students (and teachers) should take advantage of the many travel deals on offer to see as much as they can of this diverse continent

Pope Calls for Lord’s Prayer Translation Change

Pope Francis has suggested that a key phrase in the English translation of the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster) be changed to better match the intention of the Latin Vulgate, a 4th-Century Latin translation of the Bible, which had already been translated from ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

On Italian TV, the Pope said that “lead us not into temptation” was not a good translation because God does not lead humans to sin, so it should be replaced with “do not let us fall into temptation.”

The pontiff explained that France’s Catholic Church changed its translation on December 3 from “ne nous soumets pas à la tentation” to “ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation,” and other countries should follow suit.

“Do not let me fall into temptation because it is I who fall, it is not God who throws me into temptation and then sees how I fell,” he explained, adding:”A father does not do that, a father helps you to get up immediately.”

Duolingo Rolls Out New Language-Learning Podcast


The language-learning app, Duolingo has decided to add NPR style podcasts to their arsenal of tools to get people speaking. The company, which is typically known for gamifying language in their app, has launched Duolingo Spanish Podcast, aimed at English speakers who are seeking to learn Spanish. The first podcast is available here https://podcast.duolingo.com/ and is about reporter Rodrigo Soberanes meeting his childhood soccer hero. Soberanes is a seasoned journalist, and his and host Martina Castro’s banter is not only easy to understand for intermediate Spanish speakers, but is also interesting and engaging.

Future podcasts will be available every Thursday on iTunes, Google Play Music, Spotify, and Stitcher. What makes this podcast decidedly different is the storytelling format. Many language-learning podcasts, while still helpful, follow a traditional classroom format. This format can be repetitive, and a little boring for listeners. The Duolingo podcasts instead follow a format that has been popularized by prize-winning programming like This American Life. The storytelling format leads listeners to forget they are learning and just enjoy listening to the story. There are portions that are in English to lead listeners along if they start to lose the thread of the story.

California Sued for Literacy Failure


 

Stockton, CA, located on the San Joaquin River, has the third lowest-performing school district in the nation.

Yesterday, a group of students, parents, and the advocacy organizations CADRE and Fathers & Families of San Joaquin, represented by Public Counsel and Morrison & Foerster, filed suit against the State of California, the State Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson, for their collective failure to provide every child in the state access to literacy as required under the California Constitution.
The complaint was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of California students at La Salle Avenue Elementary School (Los Angeles—the 22nd lowest performing school district in the nation), Van Buren Elementary School (Stockton—the third lowest performing school district in the nation), and the charter school, Children of Promise Preparatory Academy (Inglewood), as well as on behalf of their advocates, including former teachers and community organizations CADRE and Fathers & Families of San Joaquin.
In a statement, Public Counsel claimed that: “Based on the state’s own testing standards, under-performing schools throughout California have student bodies consistently achieving less than 10 percent, and frequently less than 5 percent, proficiency in core subjects like reading and math. In 2016-17, the school-wide proficiency rates for La Salle, Van Buren, and Children of Promise, respectively, were four, six, and 11 percent. To put those figures into context, in 2016-17, only eight children out of the 179 students tested at La Salle Elementary were found to be proficient by state standards.”
“Public education was intended as the ‘great equalizer’ in our democracy, enabling all children opportunity to pursue their dreams and better their circumstances. But in California it has become the ‘great unequalizer,’” said attorney Mark Rosenbaum, Public Counsel. “Although denial of literacy is the great American tragedy, California is singlehandedly dragging down the nation despite the hard work and commitment of students, families and teachers. Of the nation’s 200 largest districts, eleven of the 26 lowest-performing districts are in California; New York, by comparison, has two, and Texas has only one. In 2017, there is no excuse for every child not learning to read, and reading to learn.”
As highlighted in the lawsuit, the state’s own literacy experts concluded in a 2012 report that “there is an urgent need to address the language and literacy development of California’s underserved populations…” The state’s experts warned, “the critical need to address the literacy development of California children and students cannot be underestimated…” Yet the state took no meaningful steps to respond to the crisis.
“It has been five years since the state identified urgent literacy issues and their remedies, but it is yet to implement a plan to address these issues,” added Michael Jacobs, partner at Morrison & Foerster. “In the meantime, children in underserved districts fall further behind and lack even the most basic literacy skills. It’s time for the state to be held accountable for the success of every student. We hope this suit will lead to immediate and effective measures implemented by the state to help these struggling students and schools.”
The plaintiffs are asking the state to meet its constitutional obligations by ensuring that all schools deliver proven literacy instruction, literacy assessments and interventions, support for teachers, and implementation of practices to promote parent involvement and learning readiness. The suit includes non-charter and charter schools.

Bill Ainsworth, communications director for the California Department of Education (CDE) responded by saying that the CDE does not have a comment on the lawsuit, but that “California has one of the most ambitious programs in the nation to serve low-income students. California, through its Local Control Funding Formula, is investing  more than $10 billion annually in extra funds for English Learners, students from low-income families, and Foster Youth. California collects high quality data in a wide variety of areas, including test scores, graduation rates, and chronic absenteeism, compiles the data and provides it to the public in the California School Dashboard. Educators turn data into action in two separate ways. School communities use the data to help direct the targeting of resources. Districts facing significant challenges qualify for the statewide System of Support. The system, launching this week, is offering 228 districts additional support next year, including the three schools named in the lawsuit.”

For more information on the lawsuit, visit www.LiteracyCalifornia.com

Parents’ Accents Affect Babies

A new study reveals that multi-accent language exposure affects word form recognition in infancy. The study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, found that babies raised in homes where they hear one language spoken with different accents, the babies recognized words dramatically differently than babies who heard little variation in accents. This demonstrates that daily exposure to multiple accents strongly impacts infants’ linguistic skills ad word form recognition.

It only makes sense that multiple accents help develop language skills in infants. In order for babies to be able to recognize certain words, it is important for them, for instance, to understand those words across different contexts. That could be extended, to hearing words across accents. Researchers pose the questions, “What does that mean for children who are routinely exposed to multiple variants of their native language? Imagine, for instance, a child born to an American English-speaking mother and an Irish English-speaking father. While her mother may label the yellow vehicle that takes her big brother to school as a bus, her father’s pronunciation will sound more like boss, leaving the child to deduce that mother’s bus and father’s boss refer to the same object even though her mother’s pronunciation of bus and boss label two separate referents. How does language development in this child differ from that in a child growing up in a family where both parents speak in the same accent?”

The researchers took two groups of monolingual English-learning 12.5-month-olds. One of the groups was exposed to the dominant regional accent while the other group was exposed to multiple variants of accents. The amount of English that the babies heard was the same across the two groups. The children heard words typically known to that age group, such as daddy, diaper, kitty, cup, shoe along with nonsense words such as shammy, kie, koddy, and koth. The researchers measured the infants’ recognition by monitoring their head movements, since children will often turn their heads when recognizing words in their languages. The results indicated that the children who heard just a single accent reacted to the real words only, while the group that heard multiple accents turned their heads at both real and nonsense words.

This suggests that the children who hear multiple accents are learning words at the same rate as those who are hearing only one accent, but they need more contextual information to recognize words because they do not assume all words will be spoken in the local accent.

World Languages from National Geographic Learning

¡Exploremos! (1-4, 1A and 1B) offers an innovative approach to language teaching that takes advantage of content the students already know about the world and brings it to them through NatGeo Explorers, NatGeo video, and contemporary themes focusing on real life situations with 21st Century skills that prepare the students to understand more about the world and their place in it.

Cumbre (Fast Track to a 5) helps students quickly and effectively prepare for the AP Spanish Language and Culture exam and uses a thematic and contextualized approach.

Ventanas is a collection of 104 authentic literature titles not available anywhere else in the U.S. for use in language arts, dual immersion, or bilingual classes. These engaging stories come with online teacher and student resources for grades K-6.

Album is a best-selling reader designed to transition students to reading and appreciating well-known Spanish literature to give them a background in famous Latin and Spanish authors. Included are various activities that aid comprehension, encourage oral and written self-expression, and promote critical thinking.

Conversaciones Creadoras is comprised of four thematic units that focus on twelve award winning short films from the Spanish speaking world Cultural notes provide insight on controversies of recent years.

Harvest Intermediate Chinese is designed for student staking the AP® Chinese Language and Culture exam. Included are tests in AP® Chinese Language format.

Step Up with Chinese (Vols. 1-3) is a communicative standards-based program for beginning Mandarin Chinese learners for middle school and high school.

Stationen is an innovative, intermediate German program that combines engaging cultural topics with authentic readings and contextualized grammar in a unifying context.
Kaleidoskop: Kultur, Literatur und Grammatik promotes communication and focuses on the literature and culture of the German speaking world with a fully integrated short film (Kurzfilm) in every other chapter. ngl.cengage.com

Literacy on the Line

Vinod Lobo describes how a California grant is giving adult English learners access to blended education programs on their smartphones

Recent data shows that adult ELLs engaging in a blended model of in-person and at-home, smartphone-based learning achieved significant gains in just ten weeks. This tells us that the blended approach works. Now, we have to scale it up.

Up until three years ago, there was virtually no state funding for adult education programs, and federal funding was hard to come by. In 2015, California launched the Adult Education Block Grant (AEBG) to improve coordination and better serve the needs of adult learners across the region. The grant distributed $500 million of state funding to support adult education programs among 71 consortia that included community colleges, school districts, and other education providers.

The AEBG has allowed a number of adult education programs, like the one at Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista, California, to expand their offerings and provide digital resources that support students’ learning outside the classroom. Sweetwater serves more than 25,000 adult learners spread among four district schools and 20 off-site locations. Unlike young students, adult ELLs often have other responsibilities such as a job (or multiple jobs) and families, making it more difficult for them to regularly attend classes.
A report from Digital Promise notes that an estimated 75% of students enrolled in adult education programs own smartphones, so, for many adult ELLs, an app may be the learning tool of choice.

Although users may only have time to engage with the app for a few minutes at a time, those minutes add up. Learners who used to spend 30 minutes per week in a computer lab at an adult school can now spend two to four (or more) hours per week learning on their phones.

By offering a curriculum of sequenced lessons that offer step-by-step proficiency and can be completed on a learner’s smartphone, adult schools can increase time on task. This naturally leads to an acceleration of learning and engagement, allowing learners to reach proficiency more quickly. Once they make a breakthrough in adult basic education courses, adult ELLs are able to see new opportunities like earning a high school diploma or GED, getting better jobs, and even aiming for secondary education. More importantly, these blended learners are less likely to drop out, since they experience incremental success.

Statistics show that a 1% rise in literacy-skill scores can boost U.S. labor productivity by an estimated $225 billion per year.3 We are on the cusp of a revolution in providing mobile, flexible, and affordable education for adults with a desire to learn English. If we can deliver effective instruction to more adult ELLs, we can improve our economy—and help individuals reach their full potential and live the American dream.

https://web.learningupgrade.com/why-learning-upgrade/proven-breakthrough-growth/
http://digitalpromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/designing-for-adult-learners.pdf
http://adultliteracy.xprize.org; see “Finding the X Factor,” Language Magazine, December 2016

Vinod Lobo ([email protected]) is the founder and CEO of Learning Upgrade, a differentiated, app-based curriculum featuring songs, videos, and games in 300 English and 600 math lessons. He tweets @learningupgrade.

myON Launches New Data Reports Allowing Educators to Measure Reading with Reading

myON, leading provider of digital literacy solutions, has enhanced its reporting capabilities to include opportunities for goal-setting, reporting, and literacy emojis. The new features are designed to inspire students to develop a love for reading, support their reading goals by providing a personalized pathway to success.

The real-time, actionable data allows teachers time to provide students the necessary guidance they need to make progress. myON’s original reporting features (such as time spent reading, number of books opened and completed, and Lexile® growth) are still available, along with additional reports to measure reading habits, word count, project involvement, news article consumption, and more.

With the embedded Literacy Toolkit, students can now use emojis to mark passages in the text to express their thoughts and feelings. The codes help students remember connections they’ve made to the text, or respond to the text in a personal way. For example, students can place a star on a passage that is important or a heart to confirm what they thought.

Administrators and teachers can Measure Reading With Reading™ rather than just test scores by setting goals for up to 14 different data measurements, including average minutes read per week, time spent reading outside of school, Lexile® growth, and more. Goals are highlighted on the student and teacher dashboards and can be analyzed in myON’s reporting platform to ensure that students stay on track. This data can also be used to celebrate reading success as students reach their goals.

Sir Ken Robinson @ FETC

Language Magazine favorite Sir Ken Robinson will be delivering the opening keynote address at next month’s FETC (JANUARY 23 – 26, 2018, ORANGE COUNTY CONVENTION CENTER, ORLANDO, FL) so we’re offering a SPECIAL BONUS: Use Promo Code LM11 to save an extra 10% — combined with $100.00 Early Bird Savings, that’s up to $189 off the on-site rate!

Early Bird Savings expire 12/22/17.

As well as Ken’s insight into Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education From the Ground Up, other highlights include:

  • Keynote with educator, researcher and innovator, Dr. Ayanna Howard
  • Tech Share Live — a fast-paced look at the most exciting ed tech gadgets, apps, hardware and software
  • 400+ sessions covering current and emerging technologies and best practices
  • 170+ intensive training workshops that delve deeply into the hottest ed tech topics
  • FETC Expo with 400 of the world’s most innovative ed tech companies

Register now at www.fetc.org and use promo code LM11

California’s Crossborder Cooperation

Today, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson went to Mexico to meet with leaders of Baja California’s education system, to increase cooperation, and better serve California students who end up attending school on both sides of the border.

Torlakson and his counterpart Miguel Ángel Mendoza González, the Secretary of Education for the State of Baja California, discussed making it easier to share student records, encouraging more teachers in both nations to be trained in bilingual teaching, and expanding teacher exchanges between Mexico and California to promote bilingual education.

“It is so important at this time to let the people of Baja California and Mexico know that we are extending the hand of friendship,” said Torlakson. “By working together, we can improve the education of students who formerly attended schools in California and may eventually return to California. We can also help meet the needs of Mexican born children attending school in California,” he said. “We are a strong team together! Somos un equipo fuerte!”

Over 50,000 U.S. citizens are attending school in Baja California, of which the majority are from California. These students returned with their families for economic and familyreasons, including deportation. This figure looks set to rise, as deportation orders increased by 31% from February through July nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Many of these students are not literate in Spanish and are unfamiliar with Mexican culture.

California has an estimated 300,000 students who are undocumented, while another one million students live with one parent or guardian who is undocumented.

Torlakson has supported the “Safe Haven” movement, designed to reassure students and parents that they are welcome at school, regardless of immigration status, and has made efforts to inform them that the law does not allow schools to divulge student immigration status, except under limited circumstances.

Torlakson wants to expand the California Department of Education (CDE) teacher exchange program, which places Spanish-speaking teachers from Mexico and other nations in California public school classrooms. Demand for bilingual instruction is projected to increase because last year the state  approved Proposition 58, which removed outdated barriers to bilingual and multilingual instruction.

Torlakson toured two schools in Tijuana and met with teachers, students, and administrators. The visit was a follow-up to his meeting earlier this year with education leaders in Mexico City.

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