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Marvel Celebrates Free Comic Book Day in Spanish

¡Feliz día del cómic gratis!

May 2nd is national Free Comic Book Day, and Marvel is offering for the first time a free, multi-story, Spanish language edition, continuing a goal of connecting to a more diverse readership. Last year Marvel teamed up with iVerse Media to release the Marvel Global App that allows fans to download older comics in 12 different languages: Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi, German, Italian, Portugese, and Hebrew. The Spanish language releases on Free Comic Book Day however, will come out on the same day as the English language versions, removing the usual delay caused by translation.

The Washington Post reported, “A sizable generation of American-born Latino youngsters walk in both worlds, speaking English in school and Spanish at home. For some Spanish-speaking parents, it can be hard to keep up with their English-speaking kids as the next generation dives into American pop culture. For those who like to take the commercial-culture journey with their kids but have a language barrier, these comics could be the first step to sharing a fun universe with their [children].”

Marvel is not only trying to cater to its growing international readership but slowly adapting to the reality of the US population. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the US after English, and since 1980 the number of Spanish language speakers has increased by 210%. From the introduction of Miles Morales, the new half-black half-Latino Spiderman, Ms. Marvel, the Muslim Pakistani American superhero, to the introduction of a female Thor, and soon to be released all-female Avengers, Marvel has been shifting its titles to be more inclusive of various languages, ethnicities, genders, and faiths.

 

The Spread of Survival Spanish for Police Officers and Firefighters

453510783From online Spanish courses in Illinois to mandatory classroom sessions in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and California, police officers and firefighters in largely Spanish speaking areas are learning the second most widely spoken language in the US. Controversy arose when last month the Jackson Mississippi Police Department announced mandatory Spanish language classes four times a year as a condition of employment. Police Chief Lee Vance told Fox News Latino, “The purpose of this program is for our officers to learn basic commands. We’re not looking to make anybody fluent.”

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Marvel Celebrates Free Comic Book Day in Spanish

Disney Acquires Marvel Comics For $4 Billion¡Feliz día del cómic gratis!

May 2nd is national Free Comic Book Day, and Marvel is offering for the first time a free, multi-story, Spanish language edition, continuing a goal of connecting to a more diverse readership. Last year Marvel teamed up with iVerse Media to release the Marvel Global App that allows fans to download older comics in 12 different languages: Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Hebrew. The Spanish language releases on Free Comic Book Day however, will come out on the same day as the English language versions, removing the usual delay caused by translation.

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Stories Bring It Home

Kate Nguyen and Nile Stanley research resilience in language learners and its relationship to storytelling

International students who study a second language abroad may experience more adjustment problems than their domestic peers (Narra-Tumma & Claudius, 2013). The challenges they face can include problems with immigration/visa status, separation from family, limited financial resources, isolation due to difficulty speaking a new language and learning unfamiliar customs, and negotiating a new educational system. Di Maria and Kwai (2014) explored the attitudes toward foreign students of staff members in student-affairs offices at colleges and found that as many as 64% said their offices were not doing anything specifically to accommodate the international student population, and 90% said they wanted more training on how to help such students be successful. The researchers concluded that the conversation for international educators should shift from recruit.

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Are Arabic Schools in France Really Hotbeds for Radicalism?

175725797Secret report accuses French heritage-language programs of ghettoizing and radicalizing French-born youth

French conservatives are in an uproar over a 2013 report that recently surfaced accusing a nearly 40-year-old after-school heritage language program of teaching “Islamic catechism” and radicalizing young French students from immigrant families. France’s now-dissolved High Council on Integration (Haut Conseil à l’intégration, or HCI), which was a government council concerned with how foreign-born people living in France integrated into French society, wrote a confidential report to the Prime Minister on the Teaching of Language and Culture of Origin Program (ELCO), criticizing the program for fostering communitarianism among third- or fourth-generation immigrants and their heritage communities instead of promoting assimilation. In the French media, the scandal is not just because of the report’s recommendations, but also that the report remained a secret for nearly two years.

The ELCO program was established in the 1970’s and is the fruit of bilateral agreements between France and Algeria, Croatia, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Serbia, Tunisia and Turkey to educate the children of migrants in their mother tongues and cultures to complement their French educations. The HCI’s report slams ELCO as an anachronism that serves students who are not the children of migrants temporarily in France, rather of immigrant families who have made France home.

One former member of the HCI, Guylain Chevrier, remarked, “Before as part of temporary immigration, ELCO could be justified. Today amidst permanent immigration in a context of ghettoization and community disintegration, the priority should not be to maintain contact with the culture of origin, rather on integration.”

Most troubling to the authors of the HCI report are cultural texts that mention Islam or promote Islamic values for classes full of French-born students. The vast majority of the today’s ELCO students, about 76,000 of 86,000, are studying Arabic (60,000) or Turkish (16,000). Proponents of the ELCO program point to the lack of Arabic-language education available at French public schools, and fear that dismantling ELCO will prompt parents to put their children in faith-based programs that will further segregate them and “radicalize” them. The authors of the study insist that in order to prevent young French students of Turkish and Arab descent from being ghettoized, that the government should emphasize the importance of the French language and culture.

France has been experiencing a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, which could explain the scathing report on ELCO’s after-school program grounded in speculation. An Ipsos survey from January revealed that 66% of the French believe that France has too many foreigners, and 59% believe that immigrants do not try hard enough to integrate.

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Are Arabic Schools in France Really Hotbeds for Radicalism?

175725797Secret report accuses French heritage-language programs of ghettoizing and radicalizing French-born youth

French conservatives are in an uproar over a 2013 report that recently surfaced accusing a nearly 40-year-old after-school heritage language program of teaching “Islamic catechism” and radicalizing young French students from immigrant families. France’s now-dissolved High Council on Integration (Haut Conseil à l’intégration, or HCI), which was a government council concerned with how foreign-born people living in France integrated into French society, wrote a confidential report to the Prime Minister on the Teaching of Language and Culture of Origin Program (ELCO), criticizing the program for fostering communitarianism among third- or fourth-generation immigrants and their heritage communities instead of promoting assimilation. In the French media, the scandal is not just because of the report’s recommendations, but also that the report remained a secret for nearly two years.

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Protesting the Common Core

476463411Some states, such as Utah and California, very clearly allow students to opt out of annual testing for any reason, according to a research brief published by the Education Commission of the States. Others, such as Oregon and Pennsylvania, allow students to be excused from testing to accommodate religious beliefs. However, widespread protests against the Common Core-aligned standards began last month when states began administering exams created by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) consortium. Thousands of students walked out on Common Core related testing. Peggy Robertson, an administrator of the national United Opt Out group explains, “Opt-Out is an act of civil disobedience. The one way we have to vote for saving public schools is by refusing these tests. The truth is it doesn’t matter [what the state policy is]. It’s an act stating we reclaim our public schools. Opt-out allows us to vote in that way.”

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Oklahoma Senator Reintroduces the English Language Unity Act

453396333This week, Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, reintroduced the English Language Unity Act. The legislation would mandate that the federal government use the English language when conducting all official functions and proceedings, including naturalization exams and ceremonies. The English Language Unity Act was originally proposed in 2005, but Senator Inhofe first introduced the Act in 2011.

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An Increase in Foreign Language Support For South Korea’s Multicultural Families

110925391According to South Korea’s Gender Equality Ministry and municipal governments, more language support programs will be launched for multicultural families in 2015. There were about 204,000 multicultural children in Korea as of last year and immigration is slowly but steadily on the rise. In order to encourage bilingualism for multicultural children in both their parents’ mother tongues and the Korean language, these new programs will include classes for the migrant’s spouse and Korean in-laws on the importance of bilingual education, as well as separate sessions for foreign-born parents on how to support their children in a bilingual household.

According to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, 76.1% of children whose foreign-born parents were from North America and Europe were learning their parent’s native language on top of Korean, while only 10.4% of those whose parents were from Cambodia and Vietnam were doing the same in 2012. One of the reasons behind the statistics has to do with the lack of support from the children’s Korean parents and relatives. According to NGOs, many foreign-born mothers are encouraged by their Korean spouses or in-laws to only speak in Korean with their children.

“Many Korean in-laws believe that when a child is exposed to two languages at a young age, he or she would end up not being fluent in either of those languages,” said a worker from Multicultural Children’s Library Modoo in Seoul, “but having a bilingual environment only betters a child’s linguistic development and cultural understanding.” The ministry will establish 20 more pre-school classes for multicultural children, up from the current 80 nationwide, and increase the number of Rainbow Schools, a special educational institution for young foreign-born children, to 17 from the current 12 across the nation.

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Tonal Languages Use Both Sides of the Brain

523016973Language learning and processing is usually dominated by the left side of the brain, which is adept at tasks that involve logic and analytical thinking. However, in a recent study that mapped brain information flow while processing intelligible speech in English and Mandarin Chinese, it was found that in Chinese speech comprehension there are neural dynamics between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Speakers of both English and Mandarin Chinese both showed brain activity in the brain’s left hemisphere. However, Mandarin speakers also showed brain activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, a region important for processing music through registering different pitches and tones. English speakers do use tones to communicate emotional information, but not to convey anything about the meaning of a word. In a tonal language like Mandarin, the same basic sounds can refer to vastly different meanings depending on its accompanying tone.

Although the implications of whether or not the world looks different in different languages are still unclear, the study supports one emerging theory – connectionism – which proposes that knowledge is distributed across different areas of the brain. Gang Peng, deputy director of the Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the recent study told Quartz, “Pitch processing is crucial for music, but also crucial for tone processing of a tone language. Based on our current results, it is reasonable to hypothesize that all tone languages use both hemispheres.”

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