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Sixth Spanish Language Conference

“El español en el libro” (The Book in Spanish) will be the slogan of the VI International Congress of the Spanish Language, which will be celebrated in October in Panama City. José Ignacio Wert, Spain’s minister of education and culture; Lucy Molinar, Panama’s minister of education; Victor García de la Concha, director of the Cervantes Institute; and José Manuel Blecua, director of the Real Academia Española, met at Madrid’s Cervantes Institute in June to announce the slogan and other information regarding this triennial meeting about Spanish. They were joined by academics, ambassadors, members of parliaments and representatives from different sectors of the publishing industry.

García de la Concha summarized the history and achievements of the Congress of the Spanish Language, from the first meeting in Zacatecas, Mexico — where Gabriel García Márquez polemically declared “Jubilemos la ortografía”— to the most recent meeting in Valparaíso, Chile, which took place on the internet due to the devastating earthquake that took place two days before it was due to begin.

He also announced that the Institute Cervantes would set up a complementary virtual Congress through which anyone interested in the language could participate.

Manuel Blecua stressed the importance of the congress’s agenda to delve into all facets of the world of books in Spanish, including authors, libraries, teaching, education, literacy, intellectual property, digital books, and new readers.

To Molinar, Panama’s hosting of the congress is not an act of generosity, rather “an act of extreme selfishness” given the enormous benefits that will come along with it. It will, for example, “take a significant step towards improving Spanish-language instruction” in schools, thanks in part to the storytelling festivals that the Panamanian educational centers will host.

Finally, Ignacio Wert asserted that Spanish “is a legacy, and above all it is a future to defend and promote.” The minister of education and culture has outlined the cultural and economic wealth that the book industry generates.

Wert sees education as the foundation for a “love of reading and for literature,” so children should learn the literary importance of the language that brought modernism to Latin America and that exploded in the literary boom of the 1960s.

The congress is organized by the Cervantes Institute, the Real Academía Española, the Academic Association of the Spanish Language, and the government of Panama. Both the king of Spain and the president of Panama plan to attend.

Will France Amend Constitution for Tahitian?

church on Moorea
Church on Moorea, French Polynesia

French Polynesia’s territorial assembly has passed a resolution, asking France to change its Constitution and recognize Mahoi or Tahitian as a language that can be used in Parliamentary debates. Despite a local assembly and government, French Polynesia is a French overseas collectivity, so the local government has no competence in justice, education, security and defense, which are directly provided and administered by the Government of France, the Gendarmerie, and French military. The highest representative of the State in the territory is the High Commissioner of the Republic in French Polynesia. Its 300,000 people send two deputies to the French National Assembly and one senator to the French Senate, and they vote in the French presidential elections.

The resolution calls on the French president to amend the constitution, possibly as soon as in two weeks when the French legislature is convened for its Congress.

The bid follows last month’s French supreme court ruling to strike out two local laws about pension provisions because not all of the debate in the French Polynesian assembly had been in French.

The pro-independence opposition abstained from the vote, with one member rejecting the notion that Tahitians need to ask France to be allowed to use their own language.

Its leader, Oscar Temaru, added that he would prefer that French was banned in the assembly.

Currently, all debates in Tahiti have simultaneous translations and all records are kept in French.

July 2013

July 2013 Cover

Recognizing U.S. Spanish
Armando Guerrero recommends decisive action to stop the exclusion of the American Spanish vernacular in the classroom

Cutting to the Common Core: Decoding Complex Text
Rebecca Blum-Martínez offers a strategy to help English learners cope with the more complex language requirements of the Common Core

Teaching to the Letter of the Law
Arlene Ortiz and Shirley Woika examine the legal obligations to educate English language learners in the U.S.

Seeing with Spanish Eyes: Spanish Audiovisual Recommendations
Musetta Reed and Lauren Rovin use film and TV to bring authentic content into the classroom

Brazil Beckoning
As the Brazilian economy booms, opportunities for Portuguese speakers abound, and picking it up may be easier than you think

Destination Bahia
Clara Ramos explains why so many American students choose Salvador to learn Portuguese

Portuguese for Spanish Speakers
Overcoming Portuñol/Portunhol

In Search of Duende / Spanish Schools Offering Flamenco
Daniel Ward believes that flamenco is key to understanding the passion of Spanish

Reviews Lebanese Expressed

Last Writes Richard Lederer looks to the heavens for explanation

Hecho en México

Language Magazine is the media partner for a very special evening of film, music, and food at Hollywood’s Ford Amphitheater on Friday, August 23, 2013. Hecho en México is a film that celebrates the cultural vibrancy of contemporary Mexico.

Hecho_en_Mexico_26Sponsored by the Mexican Tourist Board in Los Angeles and Aeromexico, the event will feature musical performances by artists from the film, a conversation with the film’s director Duncan Bridgeman, and the screening of this inspiring movie that showcases the cultural and artistic diversity of the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country.

Mexico’s rich musical heritage, from traditional music to pop and rock, is highlighted in the film resulting in an inspiring cross-country road trip. Bridgeman, the Grammy® nominated producer of One Giant Leap, weaves a cinematic tapestry of original songs, conversations and reflections in this documentary, featuring some of Mexico’s most iconic artists and performers.

For tickets, visit http://fordtheatres.org/en/events/details/id/580.

EMC Languages: New Online Learning Platform

Increasing student fluency in world languages and providing educators with innovative technology are the goals of a new ten-year partnership between EMC Publishing, a division of New Mountain Learning, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). This collaborative partnership will build EMC Languages, a new online environment for teaching and learning world languages in K-12 classrooms. The partnership between EMC and the CEHD Learning Technologies (LT) Media Lab is part of an exclusive agreement that includes collaborative design and development, K-12 classroom integration and support, and ongoing design-based research.

EMC Languages builds upon and extends research-based language learning platforms created by the LT Media Lab by leveraging EMC Publishing’s world language instructional content in an easy-to-use environment designed to drive educator effectiveness and student fluency. Students will discover languages and cultures, expand their knowledge beyond the textbook and written test, and perform what they’ve learned in order to achieve proficiency.

EMC Publishing will pilot EMC Languages in the fall of 2013 and the full environment will be available in early 2014.

“This is a unique partnership for our LT Media Lab and an example of the kind of technology transfer the University is committed to creating,” said U of M CEHD Dean Jean Quam. “We are proud to see our research-based design and development work reaching the marketplace and serving the public good.”

For the past year, EMC and the LT Media Lab have collaborated on the re-design, technology expansion and K-12 specific development of two video-based platforms created by the Lab: Avenue and Flipgrid. Avenue allows an educator to conduct a one-to-one assessment of a student’s performance via webcam by creating custom tasks based on EMC’s rich library of curricular media to capture, evaluate, archive and visualize progress. Flipgrid is a more informal, video-based discussion platform that encourages students to discuss and reflect upon questions and topics sparked by their educator.

“EMC Languages is not about simply extending textbooks into an online environment,” said Charles Miller, associate professor and co-director of the LT Media Lab. “Avenue and Flipgrid take educator feedback and classroom collaboration to a new level and give teachers a better way to connect with and earn the trust of their students. It’s all about bringing kids from the back of the class to the front row.”

“As a nation, we face a series of challenges related to our world language deficit. Our focus will be to help world language educators meet these challenges by providing them with a simple and engaging learning environment that’s easy to use and builds student competency,” said Eric Cantor, chairman and chief executive officer of New Mountain Learning. “The future of fluency depends on motivating students to practice and perform, and to learn in ways that transcend vocabulary words and verb conjugation. The long-term goal of our partnership is to keep students engaged in world languages beyond the basic requirements.”

EMC Languages will be intuitive and flexible and fully integrated to flow with any approved curriculum. Educators can subscribe to the entire suite or only those elements most relevant to their classrooms. The platforms are simple to use, enabling an educator and student to create and complete a task in three minutes.

www.emcl.com.

 

 

 

Project to Research How English is Learned

Why do students from certain countries learn English more easily than students in other places? Why do the most effective strategies for teaching English to Russian and Chinese students differ greatly from those used to teach native speakers? Could a better understanding of what influences the mastery of core English skills help educators design more effective ways to teach? EF Education First (EF) and faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) will attempt to answer questions central to English language acquisition through an examination of language learning methodologies.

The collaboration will begin by focusing on how students acquire written English proficiency. Associate Professor Paola Uccelli and her PhD students from HGSE’s Language & Literacy Program will access written works submitted by Russian, Chinese, and Native English speakers who have studied with EF. The team will contrast the essays, chronicle recurring differences in the prose, and attempt to understand which academic approaches worked best in developing written English language proficiency.

This collaboration is an opportunity for a private international education organization to offer HGSE researchers potential access to unprecedented amounts of data which could reveal new approaches for making English language learning easier for people in every corner of the world.

“We are proud to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation in language education,” said EF co-chairman Philip Hult. “Our research project with the HGSE team is exciting and may reveal how a data-driven assessment of language learning can help students learn English more effectively in the future.”

EF and HGSE researchers are considering additional topics for future study, including the effectiveness of regional pedagogy on spoken English language proficiency, the impact of experiential learning over traditional textbook approaches, and the potential to utilize “Big Data” from millions of EF students to identify new approaches to teaching English.

“This collaboration has the potential to offer important findings to inform research-based assessments and pedagogical approaches to support adolescents as they learn to become skilled writers of academic English in different countries,” said Dr. Uccelli.

 

Conjugating Kids

Thmu050613UniGrammar23e sound of small children chattering away as they learn to talk has always been considered cute  –  but not particularly sophisticated. However, research at Cornell University has shown that toddlers’ speech is far more advanced than previously understood.

Dr Cristina Dye, a lecturer in child language development from the UK’s Newcastle University, found that two to three- year-olds are using grammar far sooner than expected.

She studied fifty French speaking youngsters aged between 23 and 37 months, capturing tens of thousands of their utterances.

Dr Dye, who carried out the research while in the U.S., found that the children were using ‘little words’ which form the skeleton of sentences such as a, an, can, is, an, far sooner than previously thought.

The research team used advanced recording technology including highly sensitive hidden microphones placed close to the children, to capture the precise sounds the children voiced.  They spent years painstakingly analyzing every minute sound made by the toddlers and the context in which it was produced.

They found a clear, yet previously undetected, pattern of sounds and puffs of air, which consistently replaced grammatical words in many of the children’s utterances.

Dr Dye said: “Many of the toddlers we studied made a small sound, a soft breath, or a pause, at exactly the place that a grammatical word would normally be uttered.”

“The fact that this sound was always produced in the correct place in the sentence leads us to believe that young children are knowledgeable of grammatical words. They are far more sophisticated in their grammatical competence than we ever understood.

“Despite the fact the toddlers we studied were acquiring French, our findings are expected to extend to other languages. I believe we should give toddlers more credit – they’re much more amazing than we realized.”

For decades the prevailing view among developmental specialists has been that children’s early word combinations are devoid of any grammatical words. On this view, children then undergo a ‘tadpole to frog’ transformation where due to an unknown mechanism; , they start to develop grammar in their speech. Dye’s results now challenge the old view.

Dr Dye said: “The research sheds light on a really important part of a child’s development. Language is one of the things that makes us human and understanding how we acquire it shows just how amazing children are.

“There are also implications for understanding language delay in children.  When children don’t learn to speak normally it can lead to serious issues later in life. For example, those who have it are more likely to suffer from mental illness or be unemployed later in life. If we can understand what is ‘normal’ as early as possible then we can intervene sooner to help those children.”

El Día E

Logo_DiaE_PortadaThis Saturday June 22, the Instituto Cervantes will celebrate the annual Día E (Español) – the party for all Spanish speakers – in its 78 centers in 44 countries spread across all five continents. The party will start with a “shower of words,” where balloons emblazoned with Spanish words are poured out of each center’s windows, and carry on with cultural events open to the public all day. For more, click here

Kids’ Summer Food Program

The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was established to ensure that low-income children continue to receive nutritious meals when school is not in session. Free meals, that meet Federal nutrition guidelines, are provided to all children 18 years old and under at approved SFSP sites in areas with significant concentrations of low-income children.
Click here to earn how to become a SFSP site or sponsor and serve free summer meals to hungry children in your community.
Call 1-866-3-HUNGRY or 1-877-8-HAMBRE (for Spanish speakers) and a live operator will tell you where the closest sites serving free, nutritious summer meals are located . Or visit www.whyhunger.org/findfood to locate sites using an online map.

June 2013

June 2013 Cover

L’ Histoire de Notre Succès
Benoît Le Dévédec reveals why New York’s French Heritage Language Program has been such a success

Closing the Vocabulary Gap
Alex Rappaport argues that word acquisition may be the easiest way to close the achievement gap

Dot Ur Ize
Margarita Melendez suggests resources for teaching writing in the Digital Ages

Preventing War with Words
Rachael Tolliver explains how U.S. Army cadets are making the world a safer place through a cultural and linguistic program

The U.S. Foreign Language Deficit
Kathleen Stein-Smith tells it like it is — why it matters and what we can do about it

Teach French in NYC

French Immersion

Some Words for Bullying

Last Writes Richard Lederer serves up tidbits of haute cuisine

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