We are overjoyed to be back in Salamanca for the 105th AATSP Annual Conference. Salamanca is a perfect place for us to acknowledge history and explore new horizons. Expect renewal, individual professional development, and an enthusiastic celebration of our love of languages and teaching. This annual conference represents unparalleled collaboration with institutions and associations that will offer participants many choices by design. We aim to overload your senses and stimulate your mind.
To stage a conference of this magnitude, the AATSP acknowledges our generous hosts: the Junta de Castilla y León, the Ciudad de Salamanca, and the Universidad de Salamanca, especially Dr. José Miguel Sánchez Llorente, consejero delegado of Cursos Internacionales. We are also indebted to USAL’s Centro de Estudios Brasileños. The AATSP is meeting simultaneously with the VII Congreso Internacional del Español: Español para todos and the First Annual International Summer Institute organized by NABE (National Association for Bilingual Education). Also, the AATSP is beholden to the Escola Superior de Educação, Politéncio do Porto for hosting our exciting one-day symposium in Porto, Portugal, immediately following the conference.
Because the AATSP is US-based, we are delighted and privileged to have the US ambassador to Spain and Andorra, the Honorable Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón, with us at the opening ceremony on Monday morning at 10:00 a.m. Join us! To fully participate in the conference, you’ll need to choose from six plenaries, 400+ sessions, five workshops, numerous receptions, and special events. To do this, examine the program and learn what is on the minds of AATSP members. These questions will be explored, among others:
• Who owns Spanish? For that matter, who owns Portuguese?
• How are new technologies continually redefining our teaching?
• What is new in cultural and literary studies?
• What is new in the ever-evolving linguistic landscape?
• How do we reward, assess, and motivate our students?
• Given the demands of teaching, how can I take care of myself?
• How does language include and reflect our student population?
• How do we address systemic issues through anti-racist practices?
• How do we improve learning for our students through research-driven practice?
• How do we make language learning relevant through careers and opportunities?
• What are OERs (open educational resources)?
• Do they improve language access?
• How should we communicate with each other to articulate and promote language learning?
Participants from the two conferences will come together for a special edition of A Ver y Haber. It will be an informal and lively futuristic exchange about artificial intelligence (AI) and tools like ChatGPT. Two AATSP educators will share the stage with several educators attending VII Congreso Internacional del Español: Español para todos to explore the questions: With the growing popularity of ChatGPT and/or similar tools, is AI a topic of discussion at your institution? Should it be? What opportunities (e.g., classroom applications), if any, do you see in the use of ChatGPT and other AI text-generation technologies in teaching? What concerns, if any, do you have about the use of ChatGPT and other AI text-generation technologies in teaching? Have you or your institution developed any classroom policies about students’ use of ChatGPT or other AI text-generation technologies?
This is truly a moment of nuevos horizontes/novos horizontes because this is my last AATSP conference as executive director. As I anticipate my retirement, I thank you all for your love and support. Dr. María Carreira will succeed me. With her leadership and the unflagging energy, expertise, and commitment of the AATSP’s educators, I expect great things ahead! ¡Todos a una! Todos por um!
Sheri Spaine Long, PhD, is executive director of AATSP.
“I know all these students well. I don’t know their data.”Anonymous
Do you remember taking exams in school? Do you remember the feelings of anticipation, validation, triumph, or sheer horror while looking at your own grades? Those weekly spelling tests on Fridays caused me a lot of unnecessary angst. We’ve been looking at data our entire lives! Especially as educators. Language classrooms are not exempt from conversations centered around student performance, expected outcomes, standards, grades, pass/fail, and the like. Data, a four-letter word, and how it is used (or not) has resonated with me lately. Especially after preparing two school leaders for a data meeting. The quote above is seared in my memory. How is it that we spend so much time doing the work that we miss some of the most important opportunities to do the work better? We need data, not simply for its numbers, percentages, averages, or grades, but as a tool for equitable instruction.
In a recent blog post, Leslie Villegas1 (2023), at New America, provided a pulse check on Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) goals2 for English learners. Are states on track with what they proposed in 2015? My work is centered around and aligned with supporting educators of linguistically diverse learners, K-12 students who are eligible for language support services, in succeeding the goals they set for students. Simple questions with complex answers are what I pose to my partners. Some of those questions include;
What are the intended outcomes?
What data is collected?
What is the data telling us or not?
Is what is being done working for students?
How is English language proficiency / performance data being utilized?
How is the data positioned?
Are students a part of data analysis and related discussions? If not, how come?
Responses vary but most often the answers or attempts to answer lead to requesting more professional learning. Yes, I’m in agreement with more data centered professional learning opportunities for language educators but only if we make the data comprehensible, usable, timely, and empowering. We need to make the data CUTE.
C – Comprehensible: Do we understand what data is being presented and why? Is the data too convoluted and congested? More data is not always part of the answer but rather more of certain types of data such as qualitative data and less common data.
U – Useable: Is the data something we can use to make different / better choices? Does the data provide more context? Do we have data points for all four domains of language? Do we have data that is aligned to and in support of the Language Instruction Educational Programs (LIPM)? How can we include but move beyond demographic data?
T – Timely: How can we collect, analyze, disseminate, and use data more efficiently? The time we dedicate to collecting data is oftentimes nowhere near equal to the amount of time we spend analyzing it.
E – Empowering: Are we using asset-based lenses when it comes to understanding, using, and sharing data? If so, who is being empowered? Is it all gloom and doom or more butterflies and cupcakes? Are students part of and at the center of data based discussions?
Have you asked similar questions to these? I’m interested in hearing more about those conversations and the actions that may follow. In regard to ESSA goals, Villegas states, “how some of these goals were framed reflect a lack of transparency and accessibility in helping the public understand ELs’ progress.” If the data is not CUTE, then it is difficult to use it to make improvements and celebrate student success. Data is not supposed to be another barrier, we have plenty of those. We need the data to be in service of the work educators and students are doing to foster critical thinking, develop autonomous learners and to uphold linguistic justice.
In a recent conversation I asked if students were included as part of reclassification practices. Reclassification, as it is referred to in some learning communities, is when students have reached proficiency in the target language and may no longer be eligible for language support services. This is also known as an “exit criteria” which are most often controlled by states and districts. Someone asked me what that might look like, having students part of these exit criteria discussions. This counter question affirmed the need to include students. Through surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, and exit interviews we could ask students about their own sense of efficacy as multilingual humans. What goals and aspirations do these students have? How have we, as their educators/advocates, supported them? What does this look and sound like beyond an assessment score? See April’s (2023)3 edition of Pass the Mic for more about what students want from their learning communities.
A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to present at Harvard’s Strategic Data Project4 Convening with two colleagues. The conference theme, Battle Lines, is described on the website as,
The public conversation about education is as contentious as ever. What role do data play in our battles, past and present? What are the measurement implications? How do we fight for high standards of data- and evidence-use, and ultimately for the students we serve?
The three-day event was filled with courageous conversations and included educators from early learning to adult education settings. Our session; Bridging the Divide for Multilingual Learners, It’s a Civil Rights Issue, addressed myths and misconceptions around how English language development and English language proficiency data points are incorporated (or not) into leadership coaching practices. Rachelle, who supported a partner in the early stages of building capacity to better support linguistically diverse learners, affirmed the importance of being intentional with a plan and not operating with a spirit of assumptions. Her advice to district and school leaders is also framed around the CUTE model;
Comprehensible – Most data points are on the surface and most conversations about marginalized students land there as well. This is why we are not making the gains to increase literacy and math scores for all students.
Usable – Go deeper with unpacking what the data is showing. Ask the right cognitive questions, such as who is our LIPM working for and who is it not?
Timely – Think about what supporting a leadership team across 8-10 months looks like. In the first weeks the data discovery process to determine if the goals set are adequate and/or need to be adjusted. This helps school leaders move away from assumptions and supports them in getting to the root cause of the inequity.
Empowering- hold space for supporting critical conversations about students not being served and instruction that is not effective. When you effectively identify how to improve instructional practices for your most marginalized, all students benefit from better instruction.
As part of the Science of Reading panel, moderated by Emily Hanford, Panelist Tyra Harrison a Data Fellow Supervisor, explained the importance of using data more strategically by asserting;
“The Strategic Data Project is an important lever for change and innovation in education. The energy and sheer brain power generated at the gathering is an ongoing opportunity to share levers for engaging stakeholders5 at every level around authentic data usage. The biggest lever isn’t the data; its access and “know how”. The conversations answered the ever present “and what?” that tends to linger when stakeholders are presented with data that doesn’t have connection and context. Helping our data experts begin with the end AND end users in mind is the goal. We know literacy is a civil rights issue – we have the capacity and insight to create a new story. It starts with conversations like these.”
One way to begin using language data better is to make it more visible. You can’t address something that is invisible or not easy to see. In a recent data workshop, I posed questions and asked participants to make a pictorial representation of their answer. Can you tell what was
asked from this sketch?
The data sketches generated a rich conversation around what we know and what we’d like to know. Most important was naming the need for professional learning that centers around how to use data more efficiently and not just pedagogical practices. Those practices, of course, are important too but students cannot turn and talk their way to proficiency. How can we cultivate more robust professional learning experiences that are centered around diverse sets of data? How can we make data CUTE?
Ayanna Cooper, EdD, is the Pass the Mic series editor, and owner of A. Cooper Consulting. She is the author of And Justice for ELs: A Leader’s Guide to Creating and
Sustaining Equitable Schools (Corwin) and (co-editor) of Black Immigrants in the United States (Peter Lang).
In the US, “heritage speakers” are students who were raised in homes where a non-English language was spoken and as a result developed some degree of proficiency in that language. Some of these bilingual students can understand only basic conversations in their heritage languages, others can speak about a variety of topics, and still others are able to write in them. The US is home to heritage speakers of many languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Hindi, Korean, and Russian.
There is a large and growing body of research that argues for the following four central tenets regarding heritage speakers.
#1: Separate heritage-speaker courses are necessary When language courses are designed for second-language students who are still in the beginning stages of acquiring the language, proficient heritage speakers should not enroll in them. This mismatch is somewhat akin to an English-proficient student enrolling in an ESL course. The experience frequently results in a lack of student engagement and, perhaps surprisingly, not necessarily the “easy A” that some might expect. Heritage speakers need separate courses specifically designed to address their strengths and needs.
Think of it this way: if you were raised in the US, what did you study in your high school English classes? For this exercise, substitute your country and language: if you were raised, say, in Peru or Mexico, what did you study in your high school Spanish classes? Common answers include reading a wide variety of texts (classic literature, poetry, nonfiction, etc.), writing different kinds of papers, and perhaps some grammar analysis. This is generally understood as language arts. Heritage language courses should draw as much as possible from language arts, having students read and respond to texts that are at their level and interesting to them (middle school and high school teachers will want to look at work by Mike Peto describing the fantastic benefits of well-organized free voluntary reading with heritage speakers).1 This means that conjugating verbs, learning the difference between the preterite and the imperfect, and memorizing extensive spelling lists will not form the nucleus of a high-quality heritage-language course.
#2: Heritage-speaker courses should focus on critical language arts What does critical language arts mean? Unfortunately, many students are erroneously told that their ways of speaking their heritage languages are inferior. Critical language arts involves an exploration of the social, political, and ideological aspects of language. The goal is for both students and teachers to understand that all varieties of language are equally worthwhile and that attitudes about how people use language reflect unequal power relationships. That is, typically lurking underneath criticisms about how a group of people speak are negative attitudes toward their socioeconomic class, ethnoracial group, and other social factors—even if this was not conscious or intentional.
A useful analogy is that of ice cream. Ice cream exists only through its flavors, and language exists only through its dialects.
Everyone speaks a dialect of their language and has an “accent” in it. And just as no flavor of ice cream is “better” than any other, no regional or ethnic dialect is better than any other in any intrinsic way. Also, it would be silly to argue that strawberry ice cream is “incorrect chocolate ice cream” because it is “not following the rules” of chocolate. Strawberry ice cream follows strawberry rules! It does not have to follow the rules of chocolate. Extending the analogy back to language, African American English follows the rules of African American English, and it does not have to follow the rules of any other variety of English. Every variety of every language on the planet follows its own grammar rules, even though its rules may be different from the rules that appear in books that guide users about which ways of using language have more prestige. Students should take pride in how they and their families speak their languages while simultaneously increasing their communicative capacities in their heritage languages.
#3: Teachers must become students of their heritage speakers’ communities Many years ago in a Spanish course, a student told me that her grandmother had gifted her “unas pantallas.” For me, this word meant “screens” (on which one watches a movie or television). I didn’t understand why someone would give her granddaughter multiple screens, so I just moved on. I later learned that in Puerto Rico this word refers to earrings. I missed a great learning moment for myself and for the entire class that day; I should have asked the student what pantallas were for her.
This tenet overlaps with the previous one: we must keep our ears open to know how our students’ families use the heritage language. In addition, people raised in the US usually speak their families’ languages differently than their own relatives do, so we must also pay attention to US varieties of the heritage language. To use another Spanish example, I have seen many sources referring to the use of llamar para atrás to mean “to call back” or librería for “library” as “false cognates.” But what is false about them if some 41 million people use these phrases every day with these meanings? Words mean what their users decide they mean, even if some other people don’t particularly like the way the language is changing. It is of course a valid goal to expose students to words that are more common internationally—which will happen naturally through copious reading and the language arts approaches described above—but the words “incorrect” and “error” should be exceedingly rare in our feedback to students.
#4: Teachers of heritage-speaker courses need specialized preparation When university students decide that they want to become high school English teachers, their campuses require them to make an important decision: do they want to teach English as a second language (ESL), or do they want to teach English language arts (ELA)? ESL and ELA programs are typically housed in different departments and lead to different licenses/certifications. A school principal cannot assign ELA classes to ESL teachers (or vice versa) because they are not legally permitted to teach each other’s classes.
I have just argued that heritage classes should more closely resemble language arts, yet it is unfortunately too common that teachers assigned to these classes were trained solely in second-language (L2) acquisition and pedagogy. There needs to be greater availability of high-quality university coursework that focuses on best practices in teaching heritage speakers. I maintain a list of online and in-person courses, conferences, and other resources for teachers at www.potowski.org/spanish-heritage-language-resources.
Conclusions Far too many heritage speakers are victims of toxic sentiments and feel as this student did:
“I always thought my Spanish was bad because I didn’t follow the rules of my high school textbook.”
We never want our students to feel shame. Our family and community ways of speaking are part of our identities and should be sources of pride.
There is abundant evidence that almost no heritage language in the US is still spoken by the third generation. High-quality heritage language instruction might help curb this loss by encouraging heritage speakers to value their ways of speaking and to develop strong levels of proficiency through well-constructed language arts activities.
We can work with students to expand their repertoires by adding new ways of communicating. We can also help them (and ourselves) understand the racism and classism inherent in the ways that these expectations are established, allowing students to make informed decisions about how they wish to use their heritage languages, granting them the possibility to challenge the status quo. Teachers who use a critical language arts approach have a better chance of encouraging these positive developments.
Kim Potowski directed the University of Illinois Chicago’s heritage Spanish program for 20 years and is the founding director of its national summer study abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico, now in its tenth year. Her advocacy for bilingualism was the focus of her 2013 TEDx talk “No Child Left Monolingual” (www.youtube.com/results?search_query=potowski+ted).
At AATSP Salamanca 2023, Dr. Potowski will be giving a plenary on Tuesday, June 27, and a workshop on Thursday, June 29.
The North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), the second-youngest “daughter” of the legendary Royal Spanish Academy (RAE, founded in 1713), celebrates its 50th birthday this month.
ANLE is part of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), which brings together 23 corporations on four continents, in Spain (Europe), all of America, the Philippines (Asia), and Equatorial Guinea (Africa). It was founded in 1973 in New York by the exiled Tomás Navarro Tomás, famous for introducing research methodology to Spanish language teaching and a member of the RAE who fled to the US in 1939 as Franco was set to win the Spanish Civil War.
Like all its sister academies, it has the mission of studying, developing, and implementing the normative rules of Spanish in its territory. But for geographical and demographic reasons, ANLE has had particular challenges since its foundation, which remain present and are projected to continue in the medium and long term.
“ANLE’s challenge is great because the future of Spanish in the United States is. This academy, created very opportunely a few decades ago, was ASALE’s 22nd. The creation of the previous ones from 1871, when that of Colombia was born, was fundamental for the maintenance of the rare unity that our common language maintained at a time when linguistic fragmentation could have occurred,” explains Darío Villanueva, who was director of the RAE between 2014 and 2018. “The variant of North American Spanish, the result of the convergence of Latinos from our countries and ultimately dependent on the generations already born in the United States, is and should be very rich, but always in terms of that unity that the media and the very mobility of people favor. Today it is easier to maintain this objective than in 1820 when the American republics gained independence.”
“The US has 62 million Hispanics, according to the most recent census. Those who speak it as their first language are approximately 45 million. If we stick to that figure, we would be in fifth place in the world in terms of Spanish speakers, behind Mexico, Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. But demographic projections indicate that by the year 2060 we would already reach second place. It’s more—in a few decades Hispanics will exceed 100 million and 25% of the population, which means that one in four Americans will be Hispanic,” adds Jorge Covarrubias, current deputy director of ANLE.
As well as learning academically, today’s students are learning their place in the world, who they are, and how to make and nurture friendships. They have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended socializing and learning. Now, imagine being a child in the early stages of English language learning.
English language learners (ELLs) account for between 3.8 and 5 million students in our school system (Langdon and Wiig, 2009; Kena et al., 2016; Sanchez, 2017); the overwhelming majority of these ELL students speak Spanish at home as their first language. School districts offer a variety of programs to support these students, but there remain significant issues, particularly in assessment.
Due to the limited development of crucial, validated Spanish-language assessments, the identification of ELL students who would benefit from specialized intervention and educational services suffers from issues of both under- and over-representation (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). Many ELL students are inappropriately classified as having academic disabilities, in part related to limitations in assessments (Garcia-Joslin et al., 2016).
In parallel with academic assessment, there is a welcome drive toward the importance of measuring students’ social–emotional competence skills and well-being in schools. Not surprisingly, there is a gaping absence of technically sound tools for measuring social–emotional skills (e.g., Elias, 2019) and well-being among the ELL population (Halle et al., 2014; Rosselli et al., 2010). Apart from third-party rating scales, there exist fewer than a handful of Spanish-language child social–emotional competence assessments (e.g., Social Skills Improvement System (Gresham and Elliott, 2008) and the Bar-On EQI-Youth (Bar-On and Parker, 2000)).
When Spanish-language tools are available, educators and practitioners are at times faced with the challenge of how to approach assessing ELL students who are developing in two languages. Almost ten years ago, Halle and colleagues (2014) made a very explicit plea for the creation of more child-based social–emotional competence assessments for ELL students in home languages, to complement third-party reports. Yet the assessment industry has been slow to adequately meet this need.
Best practice suggests that we not just translate but adapt assessments into other languages, ensuring cultural appropriateness and validity (e.g., Arestad et al., 2017; Barrueco et al., 2012; Cheung et al., 2017; Meera et al., 2015; Peña, 2007; Smith et al., 2017). The transadaptation process should be professionally conducted via research to ensure accurate measurement of targeted skills (Arestad et al., 2017).
Without such tools, educators and practitioners miss opportunities to properly identify students’ strengths and challenges, monitor social–emotional skill development, evaluate the effectiveness of social–emotional learning curriculum for ELL students, and assess progress toward state social–emotional learning standards. As with academic risks, there are risks associated with mischaracterizing a social–emotional learning challenge because of a language barrier.
Our goals are to highlight the challenges facing ELL students, educators, and practitioners; the need for valid and reliable alternate language assessments or adequate language-routing plans for assessment; and how the absence of alternate language assessment further confounds mental health evaluation in ELL students.
References Arestad, K. E., MacPhee, D., Lim, C. Y., and Khetani, M. A. (2017). “Cultural Adaptation of a Pediatric Functional Assessment for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research.” BMC Health Services Research, 17(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-017-2592-6
Bar-On, R., and Parker, J. D. A. (2000). The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory: Youth Version (EQ-i:YV) Technical Manual. Multi-Health Systems, Inc.
Barrueco, S., López, M., Ong, C., and Lozano, P. (2012). Assessing Spanish– English Bilingual Preschoolers: A Guide to Best Approaches and Measures. Paul H Brookes Publishing.
Cheung, P. P. P., Siu, A. M. H., and Brown, T. (2017). “Measuring Social Skills of Children and Adolescents in a Chinese Population: Preliminary evidence on the reliability and validity of the translated Chinese version of the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS-C).” Research in Developmental Disabilities, 60, 187–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2016.11.019
Elias, M. J. (2019). “What If the Doors of Every Schoolhouse Opened to Social– Emotional Learning Tomorrow: Reflections on how to feasibly scale up high-quality SEL.” Educational Psychologist, 54(3), 233–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1636655
Garcia-Joslin, J., Carrillo, G. L., Guzman, V., Vega, D., Plotts, C. A., and Lasser, J. (2016). “Latino Immigration: Preparing school psychologists to meet students’ needs.” School Psychology Quarterly, 31(2), 256– 269. https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000136
Gresham, F. M., and Elliott, S. N. (2008). Social Skills Improvement System: Rating Scales Manual. NCS Pearson.
Halle, T. G., Whittaker, J. V., Zepeda, M., Rothenberg, L., Anderson, R., Daneri, P., Wessel, J., and Buysse, V. (2014). “The Social–Emotional Development of Dual Language Learners: Looking back at existing research and moving forward with purpose.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(4), 734–749. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2013.12.002
Kena, G., Hussar, W., McFarland, J., de Brey, C., Musu-Gillette, L., Wang, X., Zhang, J., Rathburn, A., Wilkinson-Flicker, S., Diliberti, M., Barmer, A., Bullock Mann, F., and Dunlop Velez, E. (2016). The Condition of Education 2016 (NCES 2016-144). US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2016144
Langdon, H. W., and Wiig, E. H. (2009). “Multicultural Issues in Test Interpretation.” Seminars in Speech and Language, 30(4), 261–278. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0029-1241724
Meera, S. S., Girimaji, S. C., Seshadri, S. P., Philip, M., Shivashankar, N., Morgan, P., and Piven, J. (2015). “Translation of the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire to an Indian Language: A description of the process.” Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 15, 62–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajp.2015.04.013
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017). Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24677
Rosselli, M., Ardila, A., Navarrete, M. G., and Matute, E. (2010). “Performance of Spanish/English Bilingual Children on a Spanish-Language Neuropsychological Battery: Preliminary normative data.” Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 25(3), 218–235. https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acq012
Smith, L., Malcolm-Smith, S., and de Vries, P. J. (2017). “Translation and Cultural Appropriateness of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2 in Afrikaans.” Autism, 21(5), 552–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361316648469
Dr. Nicole Russo-Ponsaran is an associate professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Rush University Medical Center and the research director at Rush NeuroBehavioral Center. Her research spans neuroscience to psychosocial behavioral research, assessment to intervention, and nonclinical to clinical populations. She is nationally recognized for her English and Spanish-language social–emotional assessments.
Dr. Sandra Barrueco is professor of psychology at the Catholic University of America, where she directs the clinical psychology doctoral program as well as the university-wide Latin American and Latino studies interdisciplinary program. Dr. Barrueco’s expertise centers on assessment, methodological, and intervention approaches for young ethnically and linguistically diverse children and families.
Dr. Dominika Winiarski is a licensed clinical psychologist and the director of counseling and psychological services at the College of Lake County, Illinois. Her research and clinical work intersect to address disparities in mental health across various settings including healthcare and education, as well as within the community more generally.
In a special address, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper declared that public education in the state is facing a “state of emergency” as a result of “extreme legislation” in the NC General Assembly that would cripple the state’s public education system and urged North Carolinians to contact their legislators.
“It’s clear that the Republican legislature is aiming to choke the life out of public education. I’m declaring this a state of emergency because you need to know what’s happening. If you care about public schools in North Carolina, it’s time to take immediate action and tell them to stop the damage that will set back our schools for a generation,” said Governor Cooper.
Recently, Republicans have pushed a series of sweeping measures that Cooper claims would cause public schools to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, exacerbate the state’s teacher shortage, and aggravate political culture wars in classrooms.
NC Republican lawmakers are proposing legislation that could divert billions of dollars in taxpayer money into private schools that are not subject to state standards and can be selective over student admissions. Their plan would extend private school vouchers to anyone regardless of income.
Critics fear that by expanding voucher eligibility to any K–12 student, public schools, especially those in rural and poorer counties, will face steep funding cuts, leaving schools without the resources to maintain fixed costs and support students.
North Carolina schools currently have more than 5,000 teacher vacancies. Governor Cooper’s budget proposed an 18% pay raise over two years, but Senate Republicans have responded by proposing to increase veteran teachers’ salaries by just $250 spread over two years. In addition, legislators are proposing an acceleration of tax cuts that are projected to cut North Carolina’s state budget by almost 20%, which could restrict the funding of public education.
Prominent lawmakers have also proposed eliminating core science classes and are pushing to rewrite history curricula, which has angered the governor, who is campaigning across the state against the legislation.
Whenever we hear an educator begin a statement with the words “Research says…,” we must attend with caution. This is because what is said is an interpretation or a translation of research. The interpretation may or may not accurately reflect the findings of specific research studies. In this article, I express concerns about what is lost in translation in the interpretation of what the science of reading (SoR) research says about particular approaches to and strategies for reading and writing instruction from my positionality as a bilingual teacher educator and researcher in dual language education. In the February 2023 edition of Language Magazine, Kari Kurto, SoR project director for the Reading League, defined the science of reading as “a vast interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing.” This expansive definition of SoR includes interdisciplinary studies from the multiple fields that comprise the knowledge base for educating multilingual learners. Research on multilingual students is conducted in the academic disciplines of applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, second-language acquisition, second-language reading, cross-linguistic transfer, and the sociocultural contexts of literacy learning. Additionally, international research on literacy in the languages of instruction of target and partner languages in dual language programs informs multilingual literacy instruction. Studies of how monolingual speakers of a language such as English or Spanish give educators a knowledge base for effective approaches to teaching bilingual learners to read and write in both their first and second languages (Mora, 2016).
A theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that is formulated from a body of evidence that has been repeatedly tested and corroborated using scientific methods and protocols of observation, measurements, and evaluation. In his book titled Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners, Professor Jim Cummins (2021) proposes three criteria for evaluating the legitimacy and credibility of theoretical constructs and claims that are advanced using the analytical processes common to all scientific inquiry (p. 141):
• Empirical adequacy—to what extent is the claim consistent with all the relevant empirical evidence?
• Logical coherence—to what extent is the claim internally consistent and noncontradictory?
• Consequential validity—to what extent is the claim useful in promoting effective pedagogy and policies?
Cummins’s criteria enable educators to distinguish between evidence-free ideological claims and evidence-based, logically coherent, and pedagogically useful claims that support effective instructional practices for multilingual learners. Education researchers observe patterns of findings that suggest some stable underlying principle at work across various contexts with different student populations in search of refined hypotheses with broader explanatory and predictive power. Theories and constructs in research are the products of systematic observations and rigorous empirical evaluation through peer review before they gain legitimacy as contributions to a scientific knowledge base. A research theory is very different from what may be called “just a theory” in the common vernacular.
The two criteria of empirical adequacy and logical coherence apply to all theoretical constructs, while the criterion of consequential validity is context specific. Isolated research findings become relevant for education policy and practice only when they are integrated into coherent theoretical frameworks. The three criteria are also applicable for analyzing claims from journalists and the media about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of certain methods, approaches, and strategies for reading instruction. As an example, let us examine the claim that a strategy popularly known as three-cueing is ineffective and possibly harmful to emergent readers.
Empirical Adequacy According to Hanford (2019) in her podcast titled Sold a Story, “The cueing theory provided justification for not teaching children how to sound out words.” Hanford attributes this theory to Marie Clay, a New Zealand literacy educator, and also to “an influential academic in the United States.” Hanford claims that Clay’s theory is a “debunked idea about how children learn to read.” Subsequently, three-cueing is alleged to be a practice that “runs counter to how the brain processes print and language” (Kurto, 2023). Again, this claim is made without citing any studies or SoR research base. In actuality, cueing is not “Marie Clay’s theory.” It is a construct that is the subject of investigation in multiple academic disciplines by many respected academic researchers. Researchers who find these claims to be problematic are unable to identify any empirical data to examine to either affirm or challenge such assertions. Journalists and other critics of three-cueing fail to articulate a theoretical framework or to reference specific research studies to support their condemnation of its effectiveness as a practice in reading instruction. Consequently, such claims lack empirical adequacy to support the argument that teachers should reject cueing as a tool in their toolkit of instructional strategies.
A clear definition of a construct that is identifiable as associated with a theoretical framework or theoretical model and empirical data base is required before a theory or practice can be declared to be scientifically based. The notion of cueing systems comes from linguistics, where subsystems of language are distinguished according to their roles in meaning making from oral language and written text. Three language subsystems are identified in multiple bodies of research as sources of cues to comprehension of words, phrases, and sentences in reading: graphophonics (letter–sound associations; spelling), semantics (meanings of words and phrases), and syntax (word order and grammar). Clearly, graphophonics cues are the basis for orthographic mapping, the technical term for decoding. But what happens when there is no meaning for the word in the reader’s mental lexicon? Or what does the teacher do when the reader does not understand the word because spelling alone does not provide a cue to its meaning within the sentence? A significant percentage of English words have the same spelling but multiple meanings. Does the teacher simply let the reader wander into a linguistic cul-de-sac without providing any guidance for figuring out the meaning of an unfamiliar word?
The case of the critique of cueing as a “debunked practice” in reading instruction (Hanford, 2019) is particularly problematic from the vantage point of curriculum and instruction for multilingual learners. The theoretical framework for miscue analysis and eye-movement research utilizes these terms to articulate the construct of the sources of knowledge from a text and from background knowledge that enable readers to construct meaning from written language. There are decades of second language acquisition research into the theoretical construct of lexical inferencing. The construct is the product of observations of how readers utilize linguistic sources to derive the semantics of words in the process of meaning making in reading (Wesche and Paribakht, 2009). Lexical inferencing is a cognitive and linguistic process that supports vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension while enhancing bilingual learners’ understanding of syntax and grammar in their first and second languages. Advocates for the science of reading who now criticize teachers for using what is popularly termed the three-cueing system do so without referencing the corpus of multidisciplinary empirical data from which the construct emerged. This omission of reference to a widely utilized theoretical perspective on language and literacy learning processes poses a risk of a loss of credibility of the science of reading for the multilingual learner education research community.
Logical Coherence The second criterion for assessing the legitimacy of claims based on scientific research requires that the claim must demonstrate that it is internally consistent and noncontradictory. To examine the criticisms of three-cueing ostensibly based in theories about literacy learning and neuroscientific studies, we must look at established theoretical frameworks. One is the simple view of reading (SVR) (Hoover and Gough, 1990). Kurto (2023) cites this study in a Reading League article, calling the SVR theory “the research that the framework used to describe the reading process is built upon” (p. 34). The SVR proposes that reading is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. A combination of skills in both processes is needed to comprehend text. Furthermore, instruction that advances skills in either process advances overall achievement in reading comprehension. Decoding instruction and comprehension instruction are not in competition with each other. The empirical data that support the SVR suggest a reciprocity between decoding and comprehension skills development. Consequently, to discourage teachers from using a set of strategies based on the false notion that their use detracts from students’ learning of decoding skills is not supported by scientific reading research. Therefore, claims against the use of three-cueing systems for meaning are internally inconsistent and contradictory to established theory.
There is also neuroscience research to support the assertion that instruction in language-subsystem cueing is an effective practice. The data base from research on reading in the brain is especially informative when combined with related data bases of observations of reading behaviors. A large data base has been generated using eye-movement studies overlayed onto miscue analysis of oral reading performance (Strauss, 2013).
This triangulated data provides detailed descriptions of eye fixations and their relationship to reading miscues to explain readers’ perceptual and informational processing of text. The corpus of eye movement/miscue analysis (EMMA) data confirms that meaning construction relies on psycholinguistic strategies far more efficient and effective than letter–sound conversion instruction. This scientific technology challenges the claim that a meaning-making theorical model of reading is disconfirmed by neurobiological research into brain-region activation in phonological processing.
Through brain imaging (fMRI) technology, a dual route to the mental lexicon, one relying on grapheme–phoneme correspondences and the other on direct lexical access from the visual word form, is supported by neuroimaging data (Strauss, 2013; Strauss et al., 2009). It is misleading to infer that neuroscience has discredited the theoretical framework of meaning centered, psycholinguistic models of reading. On the contrary, neuroscientists argue that emerging concepts from the neuroscientific study of brain function both support and are supported by psycholinguistic research on the reading process.
Consequential Validity It is inconceivable that teachers could be told that it is not aligned with the science of reading to teach vocabulary or grammar during interactive oral reading with their multilingual students. It is unimaginable that teachers would be advised against scaffolding texts to support their English language learners’ comprehension of challenging academic texts because it detracts from their decoding skills acquisition. It is difficult to imagine that the SoR does not promote students’ use of metacognitive strategies to enhance self-monitoring and problem solving during oral and silent reading to comprehend text. Yet this is the inevitable consequence of journalists’ inexpert and uninformed claims, made without clearly identifying the theoretical framework and research foundations for the approach that they condemn. The censure of a common instructional practice popularly known as three-cueing is not valid. In fact, readers’ use of language subsystems as cues in meaning making in reading is essential for comprehension. Alternative theoretical perspectives cannot invalidate the findings from empirical research data bases without establishing a causal relationship between a construct and intervention program outcomes. MacPhee et al. (2021) make this observation about media portrayals of the science of reading: “The media have asserted a direct connection between basic research and instructional practice that, without sufficient translational research that attends to a variety of instructional contexts and student populations, may perpetuate inequities” (p. S145).
It is counterproductive for advocates of SoR to allow the media to create practitioner lore condemning practices associated with theoretical frameworks that are not favored by a certain group of reading scientists. If science of reading advocates seek to maintain legitimacy with the multilingual learner education research community, we must set a very high bar for judging any theoretical framework to be “disproven,” “debunked,” or “wrong.” Educators must not make judgments about the utility of approaches and strategies based on a caricature of typical practice. The full corpus of scientific research on literacy learning must inform instruction, without privileging a narrow range of methodologies or discrediting empirical data bases because of ideological rather than scientific criteria. Professor Cummins (2021, p. 131) warns that theoretical constructs cannot be made the scapegoat for problematic instructional practices or misguided broader policy initiatives.
We academic researchers cannot be held responsible for misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and misapplications of the findings of our studies. Instead, we encourage dialogue with our practitioner colleagues to improve the translation of research findings into effective instruction to ensure that reading and writing programs are accessible to all students.
References Cummins, J. (2021). Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners: A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts. Multilingual Matters.
Hoover, W. A., and Gough, P. B. (1990). “The Simple View of Reading.” Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127–160.
Kurto, K. (2023). “Clarifying the Science of Reading.” Language Magazine, 32–35.
Mora, J. K. (2016). Spanish Language Pedagogy for Biliteracy Programs. Montezuma Publishing.
Strauss, S. L. (2013). “We Need a Paradigm Shift in Research on Reading and Dyslexia: Fundamental problems with fMRI studies of written language processing.” Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 333, e579–e628.
Strauss, S. L., Goodman, K. S., and Paulson, E. J. (2009). “Brain Research and Reading: How emerging concepts in neuroscience support a meaning construction view of the reading process.” Educational Research and Review, 4(2), 21–33.
MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L. J., and Paugh, P. (2021). “Conflict or Conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading.” Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S145– S155.
Wesche, M. B., and Paribakht, T. S. (Eds.). (2009). Lexical Inferencing in a First and Second Language: Cross-Linguistic Dimensions. Multilingual Matters.
Jill Kerper Mora, EdD, is associate professor emerita at San Diego State University. Dr. Mora disseminates her international research and expertise in Spanish language and literacy instruction for dual language educators through her MoraModules website at moramodules.com. Dr. Mora is a member of the California Committee for Effective Literacy.
The Center for American Progress released a report on the importance of providing meaningful language access to those seeking asylum in the US in order to ensure due process for all asylum seekers. The US attorney general sent a memo to all federal agencies on Nov. 21, 2022, asking them to update their language access plans within 180 days, by May 21, 2023.
The report argues that while the languages that migrants and asylum seekers speak have diversified in recent years, the agencies and institutions processing their asylum cases have not adapted at the same pace.
“The increasing diversity of languages spoken by asylum seekers, a shortage of interpreters, and a lack of translated materials, among other factors, have led to a significant failure of the asylum system to ensure that everyone has access to information in their best language,” said Zefitret Abera Molla, a research associate at CAP and author of the report. “In addition to updating their language access plans, agencies should adopt additional measures to address the lack of meaningful language access and enhance compliance with the federally mandated language access requirement.”
The report explains that the lack of language access at various steps of the asylum process can have grave consequences for asylum seekers, including denial of their claims and even immigration detention and deportation.
Immigration is one of the most complex phenomena of our current century. There are many reasons why people, either voluntarily or involuntarily, leave their homelands for the purpose of residing in a foreign land. Research suggests these reasons are divided into “push” and “pull” factors (Bista and Foster, 2011; Mazzarol and Soutar, 2002). Some of the reasons people are pushed away from their countries of origin include wars, political unrest, poverty, natural disasters, gender inequality, and lack of healthcare or employment opportunities. Some of the factors pulling new waves of immigrants into countries include better chances of pursuing higher education, economic growth, greater security, and quality of life. These underlying reasons contribute to there being approximately 272 million current migrants worldwide, with the number increasing significantly every year (United Nations, 2020).
The first generation of these new settlers faces various obstacles such as racial discrimination and limited access to local services, housing, and employment options, as well as language barriers and cultural differences, which also affect the following generations. As research shows, regardless of the country of origin, many immigrant families often struggle with raising families in a language and culture that is still foreign to them while maintaining the desire to hold on to their roots and traditions (Ashtari, 2020; Krashen, et al., 2020). As the children of immigrant families grow up in this new world inside and outside of the household, they are also faced with the challenge of trying to merge this dichotomy and shape their own identities while defining their hyphenated social markers, such as Iranian-American, Chinese-American, Japanese-American, Korean-American, Arab-American, and so forth.
Unfortunately, this inner and outer battle of identities is a long and exhausting one that, according to research, more often than not results in the loss of the heritage language and culture even within one or two generations (Crawford, 1992; Krashen et al., 1998). A heritage language is defined as the language of the parents and ancestors that is not spoken by the dominant culture where the immigrants currently reside (Krashen, 1998).
There are approximately 430 heritage languages (or HLs) in the US, and more than 200 and 300 HLs in Canada and Australia respectively. According to Schumann (1978; 1986) there are ways to predict and explain how language learners acculturate to the target language group in their new countries. His acculturation model considers multiple social and psychological factors that play roles in determining the degree to which immigrants acculturate to the new language and culture.
One of these factors is the social dominance pattern, which states that if the native language and culture of the immigrants is deemed to be politically, economically, technologically, and culturally “inferior” (by personal, local, or global perceptions, news portrayals, etc.), a social distance between the two groups is created, and as a result there will be resistance to learning the heritage language.
Schumann (1986) and Berry (1997) discuss various integration patterns when it comes to immigrant populations: assimilation, preservation, adaptation, and marginalization.
In assimilation, the immigrant gives up their language/culture of origin and identifies and interacts mainly with the new culture. When it comes to preservation or separation, the person maintains their first language (L1) and culture of origin and rejects those of the L2 group. In adaptation, also known as integration or biculturalism, the person keeps and uses both their L1 and the language that is spoken in their new country. There is, however, a sense of total isolation and alienation in marginalization, when the person does not identify with either their L1 or L2 group.
The Next Generation As shown in the table below for the next generations of these immigrants, if the heritage-language group identifies highly with the culture of their current country as well as their country of family origin, we then get the ideal linguistic situation of integration and bilingualism/biculturalism. If, however, the identification with the heritage culture is low but identification with the current culture and language is high, then we get assimilation, which results in giving up the heritage language and culture.
Acculturation model in HL
Identification with heritage culture: High
Identification with heritage culture: Low
Identification with L2 culture: High
Integration (biculturalism)
Assimilation
Identification with L2 culture: Low
Separation
Marginalization
The Ethnic Identity Formation Model Tse (1998) also describes an ethnic identity formation model that paints a picture of how the next generation of ethnic minorities can adapt their identities throughout their lifetimes. The ethnic identity formation model explores four different stages: unawareness, ethnic ambivalence/evasion, ethnic emergence, and ethnic identity incorporation. In the unawareness phase, children of ethnic minorities are not aware of their minority status and see themselves as part of the dominant culture and not different from others.
During the ethnic ambivalence/evasion phase, they develop ambivalent or negative feelings toward their ethnic culture; this usually occurs during adolescence and early adulthood. Ethnic emergence is when these individuals become more curious and begin exploring their ethnic heritage and language, which can sometimes but not always lead to the final stage, ethnic identity incorporation.
During this final stage, they are more open to joining the ethnic minority group within the bigger dominant group and resolve their ethnic identity conflicts by accepting both of their identities. The following is a quote by a Persian bookstore owner in Los Angeles (the city with the largest population of Iranians abroad) that depicts these stages when it comes to Iranian-American families in the US:
“When they get older is when they usually come in. They go to graduate school at UCLA or another university in their 20s and 30s. They realize that they can’t speak their mother tongue; that’s when they start coming to get books or take Farsi classes. They realize that a piece of them is missing” (Ashtari, 2020).
What Can We Do? Smith (1988) hypothesized that for successful literacy development, children need to consider themselves as potential readers and writers, or potential members of the “literacy club.” Similarly, according to Krashen (2008), language acquisition accelerates when acquirers consider themselves as potential members of the group that uses the target language: “When we join a club, or at least feel that we are welcome to join, the affective filter goes down and we acquire those aspects of language that mark us as members of the group that uses that language” (Krashen, 1997). In order for us to achieve more bilingualism and biculturalism when it comes to heritage language learners, we can take simple steps to bring these students’ rich and exceptional backgrounds to the foregrounds of our instruction and teaching activities for them to feel more like potential members of the heritage language club.
Researching the Heritage Language and Culture One of the main challenges of heritage-language acquisition when it comes to immigrant populations is the next generation not feeling fully connected to their heritage language and culture. By having some informal research and exploration opportunities into their heritage language and culture or even sharing the topics of HL languages and cultures among the students in a class and then having them present their findings in the media of their choice, we can develop healthy and enjoyable information-sharing experiences and connections among our students as they get to know more about their heritage languages and cultures. Creating “culture corners” in the classroom is another option, where students bring photos, maps, artifacts, realia, or even food from their heritage cultures to share, enjoy, and learn from and with each other.
Learning More about Family History Exploring identities, accepting oneself as an ethnic minority, and improving one’s self-image are other stumbling blocks for HL acquirers. One option is to provide opportunities for students to be able to investigate their own family histories and ancestral trees.
They can conduct informal interviews with their own family members to learn more about their histories, memories from the homeland, and the ups and downs of immigration. They can share what they learn in a variety of ways, either with other students in class or privately as journal writing or short stories. If some students are not comfortable with researching, interviewing, and writing about their own families, they can choose a prominent figure or any person of their choice from their heritage culture to focus on. These strategies can help with the ethnic emergence and ethnic identity incorporation phases of the ethnic identity formation model (Tse, 1998) described earlier.
Having Virtual Tours of the Home Countries Technology gives us an advantage when it comes to more creative content from around the world, either produced informally by individual travelers or officially by professional companies and businesses. There are a variety of videos and virtual applications available online that create interesting and entertaining input and interactive environments for heritage-language acquirers to explore, even if they cannot go to their heritage countries in person. These kinds of compelling input not only provide an abundance of knowledge about different countries/languages/cultures but also supply captivating visual representations that can help with identifying and connecting with heritage languages and cultures.
Teaching a Word or Phrase of the Day Docendo discimus is a Latin proverb meaning “by teaching, we learn,” or what Vygotsky called “less capable peer” teaching (Vygotsky, 1978). When students work together to teach each other, they collectively create a bond as they try to understand and explain words and phrases in their heritage languages to each other, and both sides simultaneously expand their knowledge. This exchange of words and phrases of the day also aids them in building higher respect and appreciation for their respective heritage languages and cultures.
Using Popular Literature and Media from Home Countries Henkin and Krashen (2015) discuss the importance of using popular literature, including comic books and graphic novels, in second-language acquisition. Self-selected, compelling, comprehensible input lays the foundation for acquiring languages. Popular literature and media from home countries can be excellent tools for combining entertainment and optimal input.
The optimal input hypothesis claims that optimal input needs to be: 1. comprehensible, 2. compelling, 3. rich, and 4. abundant (Krashen, 2020; Mason and Krashen, 2020).
Choosing topics and modes of input that are interesting to students enables them to find materials that meet all or most of the criteria above, enjoy them, and gain more information about their heritage languages and cultures at the same time. This can be in the form of a few minutes of free reading in class or activities such as watching movies or TV shows.
Conclusion There are many ways we can go about incorporating our students’ heritage languages and cultures in our classrooms. In this paper, we mentioned five of them: researching their heritage languages and cultures, learning about their family histories, having virtual tours of the home countries, teaching words or phrases of the day, and using popular literature and media from their home countries. By creating more opportunities for our students to explore their own identities and learn about their own histories, we can help them to become proud members of their own heritage language and culture clubs. They can bring their unique paths into the foreground and paint more colorful pictures of their backgrounds, connect more with their familial roots, and learn more about each other and the beauty of the diversity of the world that we live in. After all, we are all members of the same humanity club, and in the words of Maya Angelou, “we can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.”
References Ashtari, N. (2020). “Heritage Language Classes: The case of Farsi.” NABE Global Perspectives, 44(2), 5–7.
Ashtari, N. (2020). “Reaching Rumi: The accessibility and comprehensibility of Farsi reading materials for heritage language learners.” Language Magazine, 19(9).
Berry, J. (1997). “Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation.” Applied Psychology, 46(1), 10.
Bista, K., and Foster, C. (2011). “Issues of International Student Retention in American Higher Education.” International Journal of Research and Review, 7(2), 1–10.
Crawford, J. (1992). Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of “English Only.” Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Henkin, V., and Krashen, S. (2015). “The Naruto Breakthrough: The home run book.” Language Magazine, 15(1), 32–25.
Krashen, S. (1997). Foreign Language Education: The Easy Way. Language Education Associates.
Krashen, S., Tse, L., and McQuillan, J. (1998). Heritage Language Development: Some Practical Arguments. Culver City, CA: Language Education Associates.
Krashen, S. (2008). “The Comprehension Hypothesis Extended.” In T. Piske and M. Young-Scholten, Input Matters in SLA, Multilingual Matters, pp. 81–94.
Krashen, S., Lu, H., and Ashtari, N. (2020). “Heritage Language Development: Expectations and Goals.” Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology Journal, 3(1), 1–3.
Krashen, S. (2020). “Optimal Input.” Language Magazine, 19(3), 29–30.
Mason, B., and Krashen, S. (2020). “The Optimal Input Hypothesis: Not all comprehensible input is of equal value.” CATESOL Newsletter, May 19, 1–2.
Mazzarol, T., and Soutar, G. (2002). “The Push-Pull Factors Influencing International Student Selection of Education Destination.” International Journal of Educational Management, 16, 82–90.
Schumann, J. (1978). The Pidginization Process: A Model for Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House Publishers.
Schumann, J. (1986). “An Acculturation Model for Second Language Acquisition.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 7, 379–392.
Smith, F. (1988). Joining the Literacy Club. Heinemann.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.
Nooshan Ashtari, PhD, has spent the last two decades teaching languages and graduate/undergraduate courses and conducting research in various countries around the world. She believes in fairness. Once, in a Taekwondo competition, she was yelled at furiously by her coach because she thought her opponent had excellent technique and deserved to win.
Québec’s new commissioner of French says a boom in the number of temporary migrants is threatening the status of French, citing “significant repercussions.”
In the first report of his new position, Benoît Dubreuil addresses concerns over the rise in the use of English in the homes of immigrants to Canada. Critical of the report, the Québec Liberal Party are arguing that governments have no business in policing the languages that people speak at home.
Dubreil also uses the report to comment on immigration statistics, particularly concerning those in transit or residing temporarily in Québec.
The report, delivered to the National Assembly says “Recent polling data shows that in 2021, French was less in use than English among non-permanent residents,” – “We can consider that this strong use of English in the workplace among non-permanent residents (34.6%) is having significant repercussions on the situation of French in Québec.”
In May, Immigration Minister and member of the Coalition Avenir Québec party Christine Fréchette announced a potential plan to increase the total number of full-time immigrants to Québec to 60,000 a year by 2027. However, she made it clear that this plan would not include temporary workers and there would be no limit on their number.
The Coalition Avenir Québec government has faced criticism from some opposing parties for not including temporary workers in its overall immigration plan – which at its core, is increasingly being tailored to protect the French language.
The Parti Québécois, a long term advocate for sovereignty for the province of Québec, argues temporary migrants should be a factor in the debate because their total number undoubtedly has an impact on the status of French.
At a recent news conference, PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon acknowledged Dubreuil in echoing his party’s message and accusing the government of focusing only on a business lobby for more temporary workers.
St-Pierre Plamondon explained to reporters “For us, it’s black and white—there needs to be a plan for temporary immigration.”
Dubreil examines uses of French across Québec in his report, referring back to a book he co-authored in 2011 Le remède imaginaire: Pourquoi l’immigration ne sauvera pas le Québec on the matter of French spoken at home. The book argues that the language spoken at home by immigrants to Canada is a “relevant factor” for measuring the status of French.
As of 2023, the number of native French-speakers in Québec has dropped from 77.1% to 74.8%, and the number of home French-speakers has declined from 79% to 77.5%.
Liberal leader Marc Tanguay continues to bring opposing arguments to the forefront and repeated his belief for freedom of linguistic choice at home. At a recent news conference, he said “Trying to convince people that they are a menace because they are not speaking French at home should not be part of the debate,”.
As of June 2023, a new language law in Québec means all commercial contracts that “are not subject to the Charter” must be drawn up in French or provided simultaneously in French and another language.
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