SUBSCRIBE

Tell the President how to improve US immigration

President Obama has issued a new directive for his Administration to seek out ways to modernize and streamline the U.S. immigration system within existing authorities. This Presidential Memorandum directs the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security to lead an effort across government, in consultation with stakeholders, to identify new actions that would:

  • Streamline and improve the legal immigration system — including visa processing — with a focus on reforms that reduce government costs, improve services for applicants, reduce burdens on employers, and combat waste, fraud, and abuse in the system.
  • Ensure that the government issues all of the immigrant visas that Congress provides for every year, consistent with demand.
  • Modernize the information technology infrastructure underlying the visa processing system, with a goal of reducing redundant systems, improving the experience of applicants, and enabling better public and congressional oversight.

These recommendations are due back to the President on March 22, and public input is being requested. The Departments of State and Homeland Security have just released a Request for Information in the Federal Register to give the public an opportunity to inform the Administration’s next steps in modernizing the U.S. immigration system. The objective is to ensure thorough input from all stakeholders: employers, visa applicants, policy advocates, and the public at large.

China to train 30,000 overseas language teachers by 2017

Xiamen Wuyuan Bridge
Xiamen Wuyuan Bridge

Earlier this month, plans to train about 30,000 overseas Chinese teachers by the end of 2017 were announced at the Third World Chinese Language and Culture Education conference, which attracted about 600 representatives from about 50 nations and regions.

Better curricula, improved textbooks and standard testing for students are also on the agenda, Qiu Yuanping, head of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council told the conference in Xiamen. Qiu said her office will help establish 100 demonstration schools by the end of 2017 and support another 200 that are emerging.

Click here for full story

Music to All Ears

Donna Stoering explains how cross-cultural music offers an excellent teaching tool
for K–12 students of languages, literacy, and diversity

It is intriguing to realize that at times there is little distinction between spoken languages and musical ones. Consider, for instance, the complex rhythms and slight tonal variations of some Aboriginal tribes who communicate through clicking sounds; non-native Mandarin and Cantonese speakers who have to tune their ears to differentiate between the all-important but subtle changes in pitch inflection that determine very different words and meanings; and travelers who often describe the Italian language as being “extremely musical” with its “melodic” cadences and vowel combinations.

To read the full story, click here.

Free Understanding Language MOOC

78726889Stanford University Graduate School of Education and University of California Davis are offering a free, new MOOC: “Seven Essential Practices for Developing Academic Oral Language and Literacy in Every Subject” is now open for registration.

“Seven Essential Practices for Developing Academic Oral Language and Literacy in Every Subject” is a collaborative course offered by the Academic Language Development Network (ALDN). It will be co-taught by Language Magazine contributors Susan O’Hara (REEd), Jeff Zwiers (Stanford University), and Robert Pritchard (Sacramento State University).

This course facilitates the practical exploration and expertise-building of seven essential ALD (academic language development) practices that have been identified as being powerful for developing school language and literacy across grade levels and content areas and for supporting the implementation of new standards. The course focuses on three “high-impact” practices: Using complex texts; Fortifying complex output (written and oral); and Fostering academic interactions. These are supported by four essential practices: Clarifying; Modeling; Guiding; and Designing instruction. This course looks closely at the development of “language for content and content for language.” It organizes a massive collaboration of educators who wish to support students, particularly English Language Learners, in developing their abilities to use complex language.

The overall goal is for participating educators to better understand and develop the academic uses of language in school-based learning and apply what they learn in the future. The MOOC will begin on January 14 and end on June 14, and is open to educators in all states of the USA.

Click here for more information

A Pun-thology of Christmas Songs

Richard Lederer gives us a pun-per-minute twist on the holiday classics

A set-up pun is a conspiracy of narrative and word play. In set-up punnery, the punster contrives an imaginary situation that leads up to a climax punningly, cunningly, and stunningly based on a well-known expression or title. In a good set-up pun, we groan at the absurdity of the situation while admiring the ingenuity with which the tale reaches its foreordained conclusion.

Now it’s time to be a groan-up while admiring the following narratives as they lead up to the Christmas punch lines:

Rudolph, a dedicated Russian communist and important rocket scientist, was about to launch a large satellite. His wife, a fellow scientist at the base, urged Rudolph to postpone the launch because, she asserted, a hard rain was about to fall. Their collegial disagreement soon escalated into a furious argument that Rudolph closed by shouting, “Rudolph, the Red, knows rain, dear!”

To read the full story, click here.

Turkish at Crossroads between Europe and Asia

2013 Gezi Park Protests, Istanbul. Credit: EnginKorkmaz
2013 Gezi Park Protests, Istanbul. Credit: EnginKorkmaz

Last week, Turkey’s National Education Council voted to make the teaching of Ottoman Turkish compulsory in high schools. In 1928, Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, modernized the Ottoman language, replacing its Arabic alphabet, in use for than a thousand years, with Latin script. He also purged the language of many of its Arabic, Persian, and Greek words to create a new “pure” Turkish closer to the language people actually spoke.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan supports the highly symbolic move which has enraged secularists who claim he is pursuing an increasingly Islamist agenda, and that his vow to reintroduce Ottoman turkish “no matter what they say” was another bid to roll back Ataturk’s secular reforms, which were based on a strict separation between religion and state. This led to Erdogan’s prime minister insisting that learning the language would not be mandatory.

Click here for full story

Making the Most of Playtime

Stuck for a last-minute gift? Consider these educational toys and games

ChineseCUBES: Where Characters Are Center Stage
Students and teachers will tell you that there’s a ceiling many learners face at some point while learning Chinese — learning the beautiful yet difficult and elusive written language, Chinese characters or hanzi. For many, learning to speak is good enough. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change, and so learning the written characters is almost an entirely separate and tedious task that hasn’t gotten any easier over the past several centuries. ChineseCUBES is trying to change this…

To read the full story, click here.

ELLs ‘Disconnected’ from Mainstream Content

Research that explores the relationship between school-district infrastructure in new-immigrant destinations and the marginalization of English-language learners (ELLs) in those districts shows that in many schools, the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) and the teaching of academic subjects are separated and disconnected, which can cause ELLs to fall behind academically.

“Organizing Language Instruction in New Immigrant Destinations: Structural Marginalization and Integration” was presented at the Segregation, Immigration, and Educational Inequality Conference in Ghent, Belgium, by Megan Hopkins of Pennsylvania State University and Rebecca Lowenhaupt of Boston College.

Click here for full story

Russian Revival?

St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Spasskaya Tower

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 20 years ago, the importance of Russian as an international language has dwindled. However, over the last few months, there seems to have been a resurgence of interest in the language of Pushkin, perhaps as a consequence of the conflict in Ukraine where the Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili has forced Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to make Russian the working language at governmental meetings.

According to the Ukrainian edition of Glavcom, Yatsenyuk had to use all his language skills at the first government meeting, The open part of the meeting was held in Ukrainian, but when the government passed to the closed part of its meeting Yatsenyuk had to speak different languages. At first he started speaking English and finally passed to Russian. Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili, an ethnic Georgian, who lacks Ukrainian language skills made the premier take this step, the newspaper reported.

In the U.S., a new resolution passed by the House of Representatives calls on the President and the State Department to increase media influence on Russian speakers in their native language.

Resolution 758, overwhelmingly passed by the US House of representatives, condemns Moscow’s “aggressive” policy towards Ukraine and calls to isolate Russia from many international co-operation opportunities .

The resolution “calls on the President and the United States Department of State to develop a strategy for multilateral coordination to produce or otherwise procure and distribute news and information in the Russian language to countries with significant Russian-speaking populations which maximizes the use of existing platforms for content delivery.”

In October, the Belarusian parliament ratified the treaty on Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) the day before its first three members – Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan – were due to hold discussions in its working language – Russian.

When the EEU comes into operation, on 1 January 2015, it will be the most advanced organization for regional cooperation the former Soviet bloc has seen. Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are expected to join the Union soon.

The Estonian government has decided that it will give 4 million euros ($5.5 million) to the National Broadcasting Company ERR to produce 20 hours of Russian-language programming a week.

Margus Allikmaa, board chairman of ERR, said that ERR offered the government a choice between three options – minimum, maximum, and optimal service – and that the government chose the optimal one.

The optimal service package will include about 20 hours of own Russian-language production a week including a morning show and evening infotainment as well as general-interest programming, two news programs a day, and at least one entertainment program on the weekend.

Under current plans, the channel will be launched in September 2015.

While in Moldova, situated between Ukraine and Romania, the Russian language is a key election issue. Moldova is holding parliamentary elections that could decide whether the former Soviet nation continues on the path it has followed for the last five years, towards the European Union (EU), or turns back towards Russia. Polls suggest the vote will be close, with the latest showing the pro-EU parties holding a slim majority. Arcadie Barbarosie, executive director of the Institute for Public Policy, a Chisinau-based thinktank, said: “The percentage of undecideds is very high, so it’s difficult to predict the results.”

Moldova, home to a population of 3.5 million, is often described as the poorest country in Europe. A quarter of the country’s GDP is estimated to come from remittances of Moldovans working abroad, most of them in Russia.

The official language is Romanian, but many Moldovans’ first language is Russian and, like Ukraine, the country is divided between those who feel they are more European and those who feel closer to Russia. Moldova even has its own breakaway self-governing region in the east, Transnistria, where 1,500 Russian soldiers are stationed, the legacy of a 1992 civil war.

In June, Moldova, alongside Ukraine and Georgia, signed an association agreement with the EU allowing for greater economic relations and visa-free travel across Europe. Members of the governing coalition saw it as the latest step towards full EU membership, but not all Moldovans were happy. A recent report by the Institute of Public Policy found that more Moldovans (43%) would like to join the (Russian-backed) EEU than the EU (39%).

 

Learning Languages Modifies Brain Network

517097293According to a Sino-American study published recently in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, learning a new language changes your brain network both structurally and functionally.

“Learning and practicing something, for instance a second language, strengthens the brain,” said Ping Li, professor of psychology, linguistics, and information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State University. “Like physical exercise, the more you use specific areas of your brain, the more it grows and gets stronger.”

The study followed 39 native English speakers’ brains over a six-week period as half of the participants learned Chinese vocabulary. Of the subjects learning the new vocabulary, those who were more successful in attaining the information showed a more connected brain network than both the less successful participants and those who did not learn the new vocabulary.

The researchers also found that the participants who were successful learners had a more connected network than the other participants even before learning took place. A better-integrated brain network is more flexible and efficient, making the task of learning a new language easier.

The efficiency of brain networks was defined by the researchers in terms of the strength and direction of connections, or edges, between brain regions of interest, or nodes. The stronger the edges going from one node to the next, the faster the nodes can work together, and the more efficient the network.

Participants each underwent two fMRI scans — one before the experiment began and one after — in order for the researchers to track neural changes. At the end of the study period, the researchers found that the brains of the successful learners had undergone functional changes — the brain network was better integrated.

Such changes, the researchers suggested after reviewing a number of related studies, are consistent with anatomical changes that can occur in the brain as a result of learning a second language, no matter the age of the learner, as they reported in a recent issue of Cortex.

“A very interesting finding is that, contrary to previous studies, the brain is much more plastic than we thought,” said Li,. “We can still see anatomical changes in the brain [in the elderly], which is very encouraging news for aging. And learning a new language can help lead to more graceful aging.”

Meanwhile, the team has begun working on interactive ways to teach language using virtual 3-D-like environments with situation-based learning to help the brain make some of those new connections more effectively. Such studies hold the promise that the process of learning a second language as an adult can in fact lead to both behavioral and physical changes that may approximate the patterns of learning a language as a child.

Yang, J., et al., Neural changes underlying successful second language word learning: An fMRI study, Journal of Neurolinguistics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2014.09.004

1...276277278...332Page 277 of 332

Subscribe for exclusive content

Language Magazine is a monthly print and online publication that provides cutting-edge information for language learners, educators, and professionals around the world.

Subscribe

LanguageMagazine 2023

Language Magazine