SUBSCRIBE

Cornish Making a Comeback

In the UK’s South West, efforts to revitalize Cornwall’s indigenous language Kernewek are stronger than ever. 

The ancient language can be traced back 4000 years and was considered a dead language as long ago as 1777—a plaque remaining in the village of Mousehole commemorates one of its last native speakers, Dolly Pentreath. 

Kernewek, or Cornish, is derived from Common Brythonic, a Celtic language spoken by native Britons that eventually split and became Welsh, Breton (still actively spoken in Brittany, France), and Cumbric—spoken in the North of England, Scottish Borders, and Southern Scotland until approximately the 12th Century.

The isolated Cornish peninsula allowed the language to flourish, and as many as 38,000 people (out of a total population of around 50,000) spoke Kernewek at its peak in the Middle Ages.

Now thanks to online learning programs, community initiatives and apps, Kernewek is being learned by more than 4,000 pupils in 23 schools across the county. The language has also gained a boost in popularity due to the success of Welsh-Cornish singer Gwenno and Cornish comedian Kernow King.

Cornish was officially recognized by the UK government under Part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, in 2002. Currently, UNESCO’s Atlas of World Languages reports Cornish as “critically endangered,” reclassifying the language from “extinct” in 2010. 

Will Coleman, artistic director of Golden Tree Productions—a theater and arts company focused on promoting Cornish language and culture, said: “It’s pretty amazing that our little patch of the planet has its own language, which has roots dating back at least 4,000 years, and yet it’s just 20 years since our language officially got recognition.” He added “Since then we have been able to engage with our language, celebrate it publicly, and do some great stuff with children and young people as well.” 

The Cornish Language Office—a local governmental organization aiming to increase the use of Cornish as a community language, has estimated that approximately 400 speakers are at an advanced level of proficiency, and 2,000 are conversational. Many thousands more have some knowledge of the language. 

Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek or The Cornish Language Fellowship is a registered charity promoting the use and conservation of the Cornish Language. Coordinator Emma Jenkin told the BBC “In the five years that I’ve worked at the Cornish Language Fellowship, we’ve seen a massive shift towards people learning and speaking Cornish,”—”I was in the pub in Truro just last night, where our language group meets a few times a month to speak only in Cornish.”

The charity also saw a significant surge in signups for Cornish language lessons offered by Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek during the Covid-19 lockdown, and now they currently have more demand than there are teachers.

As the revival of the language gains momentum, linguistic experts now face challenges on language standardization. Coleman explained that Cornish is often subject to the “spelling wars,” a debate between different groups over spellings of the language. 

Despite logistical teaching issues and gaps in funding, there is much promise for a full revitalization of the Cornish language. In 2022, Councillor Carol Mould expressed, “This is our identity, this is our heritage. In the last 20 years the language has come a long way to being reintroduced into our communities.”

English Literacy for Multilingual Learners: Voices from the Field


Moving at the Speed of Light

Literacy is at the heart of the educational enterprise. It is therefore not surprising that researchers, teachers, parents, and policymakers are highly invested in ensuring that all children grow up learning the critical skills of effective communication, orally and through reading and writing.

Most recently, we have heard a lot about the science of reading—a body of research that draws from different cognitive research traditions (including the neurosciences, psychology, linguistics, and educational studies) and aims to understand how children learn to read from a cognitive science perspective. While this research does not address the broader social and cultural context of literacy (including writing and multimodality), understanding what happens cognitively when children read is important for teachers.

Unfortunately, what we have seen nationwide is that the media, parent groups, and policymakers have selectively taken this research and have rapidly turned it into strict state mandates for professional development, curriculum and materials, and teacher preparation requirements. These efforts, better referred to as the science of reading movement, unfortunately misrepresent much of what the reading research indicates and rarely do justice to the nuances and complexities that are integral to language and literacy teaching and learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020).

In fact, the public conversation about teaching reading and the perceived reading crisis is too frequently reduced to how best to teach phonemic awareness and phonics. This crisis perspective commonly has resulted in a narrowed emphasis in classroom practice, relegating learners who are experiencing reading difficulties to reductionist methods of teaching reading.

In this article, we want to expand the current conversation about reading—and particularly the conversation driven by the science of reading movement—to be explicitly inclusive of one of the fastest-growing populations in the US—that is, children who grow up knowing a language other than English at home, or multilingual learners (MLs).

Shining Light on Multilingual Learners

Public school classrooms in the US reflect significant levels of linguistic diversity. Across the country, more than five million students (10.4%) are classified as English learners (ELs). In twelve states, at least one out of every ten students is an EL/ML, and in an additional 22 states ELs/MLs comprise 6–10% of total enrollment (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022). Many school districts have populations of ELs/MLs that far exceed the national average. For example, learners in one rural Midwestern school district speak 45 different home languages and account for 46% of the student population.

The Reading League recognizes the need for a “more intentional focus on ensuring the right of literacy for our nation’s multilingual citizens and students” (Kurto, 2023).

It further indicates that practices that prevent students from developing skilled literacy are at the heart of the urgency in the science of reading movement. This is certainly true and would call for a review of scientific research that has been conducted specifically with EL-designated students.

The lack of attention to MLs unfortunately and dangerously leads to an assumption of universality that is not supported by research. Both research on second-language literacy development (August and Shanahan, 2006; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2017) and other research (e.g., Guilamo, 2021) clearly point to fundamental differences between monolingual children learning to read in their native languages and bilingual children learning to read in their second languages.

Moreover, a recent systematic review of the science of reading research identified two glaring gaps: research on cross-linguistic connections and research on reading comprehension (Kittle et al., in press; cited in Budde, 2023).

Listening to and Amplifying ML Teacher Voices

Follow any conversation from the many teacher groups that have popped up on social media and you will hear themes in the comments of educators attempting to apply the science of reading within the contextualized realities of their unique spaces.
Although many teachers appreciate being informed about the existing research base on how the brain learns to read, they are left to grapple with disjuncts between instructional practices promoted, cautioned, and/or discouraged by the science of reading movement and the language, literacy, and socioemotional needs of learners. In this section, we highlight three of the most common themes, weaving in the voices of three teachers in three different districts (both urban and rural settings) as they entered into conversation with us regarding their experiences with teaching reading.

The Realities of the Science of Reading Movement

  1. Phonics is not the/a magic bullet
    There is little doubt that phonics instruction is important in the process of learning to read in English. The hyperfocus on phonics and phonemic awareness mandated by policies passed in the name of the science of reading has greatly undermined teachers’ abilities to meet their students’ diverse needs and, more specifically, to provide their MLs with access to effective instruction.
    Phonics instruction stands out among teachers for the intensity of focus and the time spent. They struggle to see the applicability of instruction hyperfocused on foundations, especially when such foundational skills for reading are approached from a sequential perspective (with prerequisites) rather than a simultaneous one.

    One challenge the teachers identified, for example, is the overreliance on testing for phonics and fluency. Passing these tests has become a prerequisite for students to be “allowed” to engage in other reading-related activities. Not passing the test means more instruction exclusively directed at isolated phonics instruction designed for students who are already fluent speakers of English. Progress in literacy skills development by ELs/MLs often is determined solely by utilizing tools designed to capture advances made by monolingual learners. Given the pressure to increase scores and make benchmarks on tests that “matter,” other methods of gathering evidence of incremental gains are underutilized. The result is an endless cycle of students failing to make sufficient gains on standardized assessments, with the interventions used to “differentiate” their subsequent instructio­­­n reflecting the same types of limitations as those evident in the core instruction. As one teacher attested, “the kids felt defeated even before they began to read.”
  2. One size does not fit all
    Researchers aligned with the science of reading assert that differentiation of instruction is key to meeting the individual needs of the learner. I­­n practice, states and districts purchase scripted programs that ask teachers to adhere to a systematic, timed, and rigid plan for reading instruction, assuming universality of appropriateness for all learners. This undifferentiated, “one-size-fits-all” approach fails to recognize the diversity in today’s classrooms. As one teacher participant explained,

    “The focus is on a blanket reading curriculum that every kid needs to fit. And oh, well, this curriculum says some ELL options down here at the bottom. So we’re going to call that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ thing, you know?… A student who one: struggles with the language, and then two: also struggles to read is never going to pass a phonics screener. And so, they give them [ELs] these phonics screeners. Well, of course, he bombed the thing.”

    Experienced ML teachers note that these programs fail to sufficiently attend to oral language development, comprehension, and reading to achieve meaningful goals (e.g., pleasure, exchange of ideas, self-expression, participation in the life of a literate community). One teacher commented on the insufficient opportunities to use language for authentic communication. She shared,

    “I didn’t see a lot of opportunity for kids to have the academic discourse. To really practice the language. And just to fall in love with reading because it [the curriculum] was again really fast-paced [so] the kids just felt that, okay, it’s a task. It was very much pressured and like I never saw that enjoyment.”

    A fellow participant similarly expressed her desire to use both the science of reading and her knowledge of theory- and research-based literacy practices to reach learners in more effective ways:

    “Taking what I know about [the] science of reading and combined with what I also know about needing to have rich language and being exposed to rich text, umm, trying to figure out, how can I combine both to try something brand new? That hasn’t been done… so that… we aren’t just giving students the exact same thing that they’ve gotten their entire elementary career when we know it’s obviously not working.”

    Teachers, through their daily interactions with students, are poised to be responsive to the needs of individual learners as they apply the science of reading. The comments of these teachers raise questions about whether the science of reading is being maximized in ways that benefit all learners.
  3. Students Need Asset-Based, Meaningful Learning
    Advances in neuroscience and psychological and educational research demonstrate the need for teachers to engage the whole child. An emphasis on rigid instructional cycles that decenter the learner leads to literacy instruction that becomes lifeless and devoid of relevance, meaning, and joy.
    Reading is intended to open doors to communication, idea generation, and perspective taking. The science of reading movement has led many teachers to feel pressured to retreat from utilizing instructional methods and strategies designed to leverage learners’ assets, experiences, and knowledge systems (home, community, and school). Doing so leaves teachers and students to operate from a deficit perspective, as learners are not provided the opportunities to make public and utilize what they know and can do. As one teacher described,
    “They came to just read this book that didn’t make any sense to them, and they… had that idea in their mind already, like ‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything’… Rather than getting them excited and helping them realize that they do. They bring a lot to the table. They do know. They do know a lot.”
    This discrepancy in what knowledge and ideas matter for literacy development results in tension for teachers as they make daily decisions between doing what is right for learners (as evidenced by gains in learning, language, and literacy) and staying within the prescribed boundaries for instruction. Teachers’ comments reveal the reality that they experience limited autonomy to apply their knowledge of the students they serve in order to reach the shared literacy goals.

Concluding Thoughts

The research represented by the science of reading (scholarship) makes an important contribution to the knowledge base surrounding the reader’s cognitive processes. However, the picture represented by this research, particularly as the science of reading has been taken up through the media and by politicians, is only one dimension of all that is involved in becoming a literate citizen of the world. Missing from the current conversation are considerations such as the following:

  • Research-driven understandings that reading and becoming literate are additionally a social act, not merely an individual’s cognitive process
  • Insights from research that is inclusive of cross-linguistic phenomena (bilingualism/multilingualism), oracy, and language comprehension
  • Allowance within systems for research that is grounded in alternative and innovative methodologies that bridge between the science of reading and what is known about the emergent bilingual/multilingual learner
  • Feedback and insights from experienced ML teachers who observe both the positive and negative impacts of limiting reading instruction methods and curricula for MLs and their access to high-quality and appropriate instruction

The science of reading movement has been allowed to hijack the more nuanced research base that informs the science
of reading. It also has positioned teaching as a simplistic technical act and teachers as technicians who are expected to implement what has been given to them.

We know teaching is more than that and teachers’ feedback and voices need to be heard. We urge policy makers and practitioners to engage in a critical dialogue which ensures that reading instruction keeps the ultimate goal of education and literacy front and center: “learning to communicate, read, and write as a means of expression to gain knowledge by accessing stories, information, and voices across time and across the world” (National Committee for Effective Literacy, 2022, p. 3; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020).

References
August, D., and Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Washington, DC.
Budde, C. (2023). “The Science of Reading and Multilingual Learners.” Presentation, CCSSO-ELL/ELA Collaborative. Virtual Conference.
Darling-Hammond, L., Flook, L., Cook-Harvey, C., Barron, B., and Osher, D. (2020). “Implications for Educational Practice of the Science of Learning and Development.” Applied Developmental Science, 24(2), 97–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2018.1537791
Guilamo, A. (2021). “The Science of Reading in Dual Language.” Language Magazine. www.languagemagazine.com/2021/04/20/the-science-of-reading-in-dual-language
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) (2017), Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures. Washington, DC.
Escamilla, K., Olsen, L., and Slavick, J. (2022). “Toward Comprehensive Effective Literacy Policy and Instruction for English Language Learner/Emergent Bilingual Students.” National Committee for Effective Literacy. https://multilingualliteracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/21018-NCEL-Effective-Literacy-White-Paper-FINAL_v2.0.pdf
Schwartz, S. (2022). “The ‘Science of Reading’ and English Language Learners: What the research says.” Education Week. www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-science-of-reading-and-english-language-learners-what-the-research-says/2022/04

Socorro G. Herrera is a keynote speaker, district consultant, and trainer of trainers, as well as a professor in the College of Education and director of the Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy (CIMA) at Kansas State University. Her K–12 teaching experience includes an emphasis on literacy development, and her research focuses on literacy opportunities with culturally and linguistically diverse students, reading strategies, and domestic and international teacher preparation for diversity in the classroom.

Ester J. de Jong is professor and program leader in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education program at the University of Colorado Denver. Prior to UC Denver, she was the director of the School of Teaching and Learning and professor in ESOL/bilingual education at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She has published extensively on dual language education and general education teacher preparation for English language learners. Dr. de Jong was president of TESOL International Association (2017–2018).

Both authors want to express a deep-felt thank-you to the three teachers who dialogued with us and helped us understand the realities on the ground. We are grateful for their time and ongoing efforts to engage others in advocating for effective literacy practices for MLs. They wished to remain anonymous for the purpose of this article.

Ghana: Increase in Chinese language learning

Chinese language learning in Ghana is at an all-time high, according to Emelia Agyei-Mensah, registrar of the University of Ghana. 

Speaking at a recent language contest and showcase held by the Chinese language department the Confucius Institute at the University of Ghana, Agyei-Mensah stated that increasing numbers of students are opting to major in Chinese language study at undergraduate level, with over 1000 students currently enrolled in the course. 

“Here at the University of Ghana, efforts have been made to augment the study of Chinese by creating more combined major programs which include Chinese as a subject. Currently, undergraduate student enrollment in the Chinese language is well over 1,000. I know that similar efforts are underway in other public universities in the country with the establishment of more Confucius Institutes,” she said. 

The popularity of Chinese language studies is not limited to the University of Ghana, as Agyei-Mensah acknowledged similar efforts at other public universities in the country. 

Nor is the growing interest limited to Ghanaian students. The increased uptake in Chinese courses reflects growing Chinese-African political and socio-economic relations, and extends widely across the continent. 

At the Confucius Institute’s recent contest, students showcased their language proficiency and knowledge of Chinese culture through singing, choreography, and martial arts performances. They also explained their reasons and enthusiasm for choosing Chinese language studies. Julia Duncan, a Chinese major, explained that she had chosen to learn Chinese to pursue a career in international relations, confident in the rapid development of Chinese-African cooperation. 

Other Confucius institutes across Africa recently made headlines by celebrating UN Chinese Language Day on April 20. Exhibitions in Chinese typography, martial arts and theater were held alongside language contests and demonstrations at the University of Johannesburg, the University of Lagos and across Djibouti, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe.

Gabriel García Márquez Is Most Translated Spanish Writer This Century

Gabriel García Márquez Is Most Translated
Spanish Writer This Century

According to the Instituto Cervantes, which promotes Spanish language and culture around the world, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez has overtaken Miguel de Cervantes as the most translated Spanish-language writer of the century thus far. 

Cervantes, author of Don Quixote however remains the most translated writer in Spanish over the previous eight decades.

The findings were announced with the launch of the institute’s new World Translation Map tool (Mapa Mundial de la Traducción, which was recently unveiled at the IX Congreso de la Lengua – the ninth National Spanish Language Congress in Cádiz.

The new tool was created in collaboration with the Spanish government’s directorate for Books and Reading Development and the National Distance Education University’s Digital Humanities Laboratory, using metadata to form a clear picture of which Spanish-language writers are being most widely translated into different languages. It works additionally to trace the history of Spanish translations between 1950 and 2022. 

Primarily focusing on 10 different languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish,the institute consulted the Online Computer Library Center’s WorldCat database, which contains 554,858,648 bibliographic records in 483 languages, using this data to build a picture of which Spanish-language writers were being translated. 

By monitoring trends in translation, the World Translation Map provides accurate data on the Spanish-language authors who have made the biggest impact on global readership.

Data from the years 2000 to 2021 shows that Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges are the top three most translated Spanish-language authors, with Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa following closely behind.

The map is searchable and takes into account various genres and dates in literary movements. The specific start date takes  into account el boom – a time when Latin American writers including García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar gained worldwide notoriety throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Raquel Caleya, head of culture at the Instituto Cervantes, said the map would eventually be  enlarged to hold as many languages as possible.

“The idea was to distill all that data to make that information available and searchable for the public,” she said – adding “We wanted to help researchers – and anyone else – to analyse and visualise large quantities of information in a more efficient way. It will allow us to know what people are reading, what they’ve read – and to pay tribute to the all the translators who are working to disseminate books translated from Spanish since 1950.”

UN Spanish Language Day 2023

The 23rd of April was observed as Spanish Language Day, officially designated by UNESCO in 2010. Celebrations acknowledge Spanish as an official and intercontinental language, along with its surrounding history and culture.

Originally celebrated on the 12th October to celebrate the Día de la Hispanidad in some Spanish-speaking countries, commemorating the discovery of American continent.The day was later changed to the 23rd April in line with more educational values and to pay tribute to Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, who died on the 22nd April 1616. Coincidentally, English playwright William Shakespeare also died on this day, and his works, legacy  and the English language share commemorations.

The second most spoken language in the world, Spanish is also one of the UN’s six official languages. According to UNESCO, the UN has always found creative ways to promote all the languages in its spheres of work of which Spanish “could not be missing”. 

There is additional support for the Spanish language in the organization ‘Grupo de Amigos des Espanol’ or ‘The Group of Friends of Spanish’ – a team founded in 2013, comprised of the 20 Spanish-speaking Member States to conserve and promote the Spanish language within the UN network. 

Currently there are approximately 450 million native Spanish speakers worldwide, and roughly 75 million who speak Spanish as a second or additional language. 

Celebrations were held across the Spanish speaking world and individually in cities and towns with a large Spanish diaspora. 

A day largely focused on literacy, events and activities focused on Spanish authors are observed around the globe, including readings from Miguel De Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’, or works from other Spanish authors such as Julia Alvarez, Carlos Fuentes, and Rosa Montero.

Language Diversity at Risk

New research accompanying the launch of a grammar database, has revealed a potential loss of significant, global linguistic diversity.

Postdoctoral researcher Hedvig Skirgård and Associate Professor Simon Greenhil from the Australian National University and the University of Auckland respectively, have launched ‘Grambank’ – an extensive database allowing researchers to explore specific questions about language diversity and grammatical structures.

Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database to-date, and holds over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages. 

“We’re thrilled to release Grambank into the world. Our team of international colleagues built it over several years by reading many books about language rules, and speaking to experts and community members about specific languages.” – the team said. 

Despite promising advances in linguistic technology, the team have already noted their findings as a “crisis” and want to draw awareness to gaps in teaching and globalization. 

“Our findings are alarming: we’re losing languages, we’re losing language diversity, and unless we do something, these windows into our collective history will close.” – they said. 

Using Grambank’s library, researchers studied more than 2,400 languages – including two signed languages, to answer 195 questions. Results were plotted on a map, using dots and color coding to identify each language. 

Explaining their system, the team said “Each dot represents a language, and the more similar the color, the more similar the languages. To create this map, we used a technique called principal component analysis. It reduced the 195 questions to three dimensions, which we then mapped onto red, green and blue.” Adding – “The large variation in colors reveals how different all these languages are from each other. Where we get regions with similar colors, such as in the Pacific, this could mean the languages are related, or that they have borrowed a lot from each other.”

Addressing the alarming findings, the study’s abstract states, “An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world.” 

The team noted that most frighteningly, South America and Australia are expected to lose all of their indigenous linguistic diversity without immediate intervention, due to the threatened nature of all indigenous languages in these areas. 

Acknowledging a threat to Indigenous and minority languages, the team also set out to explore additional impacts on grammatical diversity. Studying rules and structures across a variety of languages, provides an insight into cognitive ability and logic, and how the concept of meaning is transferred. In this instance, the researchers used grammar to explore linguistic history in context and how our future may be affected.

All findings point to a desperate need for Indigenous language preservation and revitalization, and the team have included references to the UN’s Decade of Indigenous Languages as well as more localized grassroots movements in their published works. 

 “Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.” – the study concludes.

Cognitive Skills Linked to Language Learning


New research into child language acquisition has made strong links between cognitive skills and language learning, challenging long-term beliefs that children develop language skills independently of cognitive function relating to abilities such as spatial awareness.

Professor Mila Vulchanova, who is head of the language laboratory at the Norwegian University of Technology, conducted the study over several years – challenging ‘linguistic assumptions’ and demonstrating clear correlation between language development and cognitive skills. 

Cognitive skills are a collective term for the ability to concentrate, retain information, learn and perceive our environment, as well as logical reasoning and problem solving.

Working in partnership with the University of Melbourne, Vulchanova and a team of researchers from NTNU and the University of Oslo based their work on data from the largest cohort study conducted in Norway and conducted a series of verbal and non-verbal comparisons. Giving the team a large body of data to work with, The Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), facilitated by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, is one of the world’s largest health surveys, with data from 114 500 children, 95 000 mothers and 75 000 fathers. 

Focusing on language comprehension and development in typical and atypical scenarios, Vulchanova’s work analyzed and catalogued language acquisition and difficulties, using examples of language development from 500 8-year old participants. 

Results found that three main cognitive factors including: Verbal Cognition, Processing Speed and Memory – and additionally and Non-Verbal Cognition, contributed significantly to individual variation in language abilities. 

“We analyzed extensive data on the language and cognitive status of children with language difficulties and compared them with children who have typical language development. The analyses show that the severity of the language difficulties can also be predicted based on cognitive markers. These are discoveries that pave new paths for research in this field,” said Vulchanova.

The balance between verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills in relation to language skills, is a field that has been relatively unexplored in the past and this study acknowledges scope for more research. Additionally, it is not well yet known which cognitive measurements and methods best predict the severity of language disorders in children. 

With their findings, the team stress the importance of early intervention in delayed or disordered language acquisition and suggest the help of a speech therapist when necessary. 

Vulchanova concluded “Our findings support the importance of measuring both verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills. In this way, we can identify which dimensions are affected and require special attention in children with language difficulties,”

“Our findings also point to the potential for training cognitive skills as a strategy to support language skills,” she said.

New Tool Launches: “Undocumented Student Communities of Practice” Network and Directory

The Presidents’ Alliance of Higher Education and Immigration and partners TheDream.US and Immigrants Rising are proud to announce the launch of the first national “Undocumented Student Communities of Practice,” a new online tool and directory that aims to share effective practices, host topic-specific meetings and working groups, and facilitate connections for those who work with undocumented immigrant students. More than 100 experts from more than 25 states have already joined the network.

According to Luz Bertadillo Rodriguez, Project Manager for Presidents’ Alliance of Higher Education and Immigration: “We are thrilled to have launched The Undocumented Communities of Practice Directory & Network! We plan to utilize this tool to build a national network of practitioners and advocates who are working towards increasing the access, success and retention of undocumented students in higher education. This community of practice will allow us to dive deeper into issue areas and challenges that campuses face and together find ways to advance change for and with undocumented students.”   

Hyein Lee, Director of Programs and Evaluation at TheDream.US said: “The Communities of Practice Directory is a powerful tool for individuals committed to college and career equity for undocumented students nationwide. Oftentimes, we find this work is siloed to an individual or department within a college or university. The Directory connects practitioners, advocates, and students across institutions and states to build communities of practice. In sharing and developing promising practices more globally, we hope institutions can more readily address the barriers and challenges facing undocumented students in completing college and launching their careers.” 

Nancy Jodaitis, Director of Higher Education at Immigrants Rising said: “Individuals that support undocumented students within college and universities can often feel isolated and are eager to connect with colleagues to address common challenges and share innovative solutions. The Communities of Practice Directory & Network is going to be an incredibly powerful tool that will elevate promising practices and foster mutually beneficial relationships across institutions to increase the academic achievement of undocumented students nationwide.”

Conversation Starters

Your students, invigorated by your passion for learning a foreign language and developing cultural competency, move to the foreign country where their target language is spoken, live and study in full immersion, achieve fluency in no time, and become self-actualized global citizens full of empathy and social awareness.

That’s the dream, right?

Well—as we educators certainly know— this picture-perfect scenario turns pretty fraught once we think realistically about the obstacles: English as lingua franca, students drawn in too many directions to compete in the ever-growing college pool, the often tyrannical demands of curriculum and standardized testing, the accessibility of international programs to a widening demographic of students with diverse means… the list goes on and on, and language educators know its tune pretty well.

However, take heed, language educators—all is not lost! The advent of telecommunications, the rising popularity of content creation on the internet, and the popularity of user-friendly communication systems have carved a new path through the obstacle course of language education. These advances have allowed educators to do the impossible: give students authentic interactions with peers from abroad and create structured, safe opportunities for real language practice and cultural exchange, all from the comfort of their classrooms.

I love to take students to Italy, but that’s not always possible. And even when it is possible, I can’t force my students to get into conversations with people and practice their language skills on a touristic-style trip. However, through telecollaboration, or virtual exchanges, I can remotely pair my students with another class and have them communicate with each other, learn together, and collaborate on projects. The concept—a techy reboot of the classic pen pal class project of our youths—now comes with all the benefits and advantages of the internet, but also with all the challenges.

I began my journey into virtual exchanges by getting to know the various options available to me and my colleagues. There were so many companies that allowed me to shop around for other educators interested in partnering their classes. E-Pals was one of those companies that stood out because it proved simple enough to allow teachers to find each other by country, ages taught, and languages sought. I connected with a few educators in Italy and Argentina. The E-Pals website offers a user-friendly interface so that teachers like me need not fear the technological aspect of the experience. When it comes to security concerns, the site also keeps students largely anonymous and protected by login credentials. And E-Pals offers different online courses that give students readings, videos, and content to which they can react and which they can discuss with one another.

E-Pals helped me get started with the virtual exchange process. I very quickly connected with other educators and then started talking shop. Almost immediately, most of the teachers in Italy also wanted to implement a real, in-person exchange, but obviously that would take more time and commitment. The website did offer some stock courses that my class could take alongside the partner school, but nothing specific to Italian culture or language. Instead, I experimented with having students write to one another on the platform about their communities, schools, and lives as students and include pictures and cultural details about their daily lives. As one can guess, this got pretty stale after two or three back-and-forths. As we were nearing the holidays, I suggested that we utilize the calendar to fuel conversations. Our students could describe how holiday celebrations take place in their respective communities; in January, my students could talk about the Super Bowl; in February, the Italian students could tell us about Carnevale; and so on. However, without a real structure or a goal, my endeavors to sustain a pen pal exchange fizzled out.

Upon reflection, I could see that this sort of exchange bears obvious strengths and weaknesses. For one, a platform like the one I was using gives educators very little control over curriculum, and the communication between students languishes in either the simplistic messaging platform or the punctilious specificity of the premade curriculums offered. While I might have enjoyed a break from having to create original assignments for once, the topics did not relate to my classes and may not really coalesce with other educational programs either. Furthermore, platforms such as these operate more like message boards, so while my students get to practice reading and writing in the foreign language, their other two core skills of listening and speaking remain largely untouched. However, admittedly, these sites aim to recreate the pen pal experience and therefore make no false promises about their offerings to educators.

On the other end of the telecollaboration spectrum lie the real-time conferencing applications, which make real conversation happen instantly and incredibly easily—applications like Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and even social media platforms like Instagram Live Rooms, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp video. I was lucky to already have found several partners in Italy, so it was not hard to invite them and their students to give one of these platforms a whirl for a live meeting. However, teachers and students alike by now can probably guess the educational pitfalls and shortcomings I faced with my experience of these systems.

First, language learners may not yet have the skills to hold sustained conversations in real time. Certainly, this was the case for my students when they realized that—surprise!—the kids in Italy could speak English very well while they themselves had a pretty novice-level proficiency in their second language. Then, of course, time zones and scheduling can easily lead to a logistical nightmare—as they did for me. With a rotating schedule, time differences, and special schedules and vacations, I think I was only successful in getting about half a dozen of these virtual meetups off the ground. Finally, these platforms lack security for the students and don’t easily allow for teachers to supervise their pupils or give much feedback. I resorted in most of these cases to having one large Zoom meeting between classes, but that made hearing one another pretty challenging, due to ambient noise and seating arrangements, as well as the cutting in and out from connectivity issues—all this on top of the fact that the students were trying to understand what was being said in a language other than their own.

While real conversations between students in classrooms across countries is probably the closest surrogate for actual international immersion programs, the structure of the educational program relies heavily on the teachers. Conferencing applications make dialogue between classes easy with breakout rooms or chat functions, which can allow for a variety of smaller conversations and interaction using more of the core skills; however, that’s all the application is—a video conferencing software. The actual language education must come from elsewhere. Thus, all these extra tasks now strain the teacher under a yoke that might not stand the test of time, since nearly every aspect of the actual language learning must now depend on the educator to plan, orchestrate, and execute. In my experience, the topics need to be pretty approachable to expect adolescents to actually have conversations with other adolescents about them. Letting the kids talk about what they know (or what they think they know) seems to be the better avenue, since they no doubt are already struggling with conversing in a language other than their own.

After these experiences, I wondered if there was a middle ground in the widening field of telecollaboration that educators can utilize to bolster their students’ language education. I believe there is, arguably, in systems like asynchronous video exchanges. AFS Intercultural Programs—Erasmus, United Planet, and Level Up Village, to name a few—offer great opportunities for students to participate in meaningful virtual exchanges.

Level Up Village (https://levelupvillage.com) stood out to me as unique for several features that navigate the aforementioned problems. First, LUV offers a secure platform for students, protectively identified only by first name and last initial, to post videos which get approved by the teacher before they’re viewable by the partner school. I didn’t really utilize this last feature because, after watching a handful of videos that my students prepared, I was relatively satisfied with the nature of their friendly but professional tone. However, I can see this being a concern if a teacher was paired up with an educator they didn’t know, and not every teacher can trust their adolescent pupils not to be rascals!

LUV offers premade courses with prompts that teachers can edit, rewrite, translate, or simply utilize as they are to engage the students in meaningful dialogue about subjects that relate to curriculum. Because the focus of these courses lies in cultural and language exchange, it was incredibly easy for me to adapt them to what we were already doing in class. Whether the topic was climate change, job prospects, or family and community, I was able to supply relevant vocabulary lists and find accompanying work in our textbook because of the universality of the themes as custom-made for the language classroom. The prompts were thoughtful in that they helped me facilitate conversations about how the experience for our students might differ from that of their international peers, and therefore how to approach certain situations in the conversation. And certainly my students had a boatload of questions every time new video messages came in, questions that could only be prompted by a glance at how young people live in another country.

These conversations were worth their weight in gold, since these are the moments when the magic of teaching cultural competency happens, and matters. My students, I could tell, wanted to make good impressions and have meaningful conversations, so they were receptive to learning more about cultural differences. For me as their teacher, it was a dream come true to have them so hooked on acquiring knowledge.

The company also handles the pairing, but will take on existing partnerships as well if educators already have connections abroad. The exchange courses they offer can be tailored in length, content, and frequency so that teachers can make the experience less harrowing for themselves and their schedules. I opted for a four-week program, which gave us a few back-and-forths without really causing the fatigue that I had experienced the times I had tried to engineer my own exchanges. These features really met our needs and, after the other options I had tried, resolved some of the issues I had with virtual exchanges in my classroom.

My experience isn’t the one that matters, however. The students themselves gave the most glowing reviews. While the one-off Zoom meetings were interesting, and the pen pal–style exchanges were fun, I think giving students clear prompts and asking them about themes that were already tied into our Italian class facilitated and grounded the virtual exchange experience for them as a harmonious parallel to an already dynamic language class. I received a lot of feedback from the students; namely, they enjoyed talking to the other kids and getting to know them over a month, and they had a lot of fun creating their videos. I had encouraged them to get creative and challenge themselves to produce interesting and engaging content— the kind they might also watch for fun— and it worked. It helped them express themselves and their personalities and made the whole experience much more fun for them.

Of course, getting students to travel internationally, immerse themselves in a culture, cultivate relationships, and become better human beings through the power of language, culture, and travel remains the holy grail of language educators. So, we must pull together some semblance of that narrative from the tools we have around us. While the disruption of the recent pandemic caused great challenges and made terrible lacerations in the fabric of education at large, it has, in some fashion, allowed us to assess the strengths and weaknesses of our ways. Truly, while no telecollaboration can ever substitute for in-person learning, it can open new avenues for getting our students out into the world.

In fact, in ways to which I have already alluded, virtual exchanges may actually be better than traveling with students. In a virtual exchange, you, the educator, can isolate the learning you want to conduct, set up experiences that can’t often be orchestrated in real life, and be the educator in between. Even at their best, many students are not strong enough linguistically to sustain conversations in their target language without help.

Students get discouraged at their own lack of ability to communicate when, after years of build-up, they finally visit the country where their second language is spoken only to be addressed in English because they can’t keep up. These disheartening moments happen too often because we lack the stepping stones to prepare students beyond simulating conversations with them and among them. These gaps in what we educators can provide them within the walls of our classrooms are where we can neatly fit in virtual exchanges—a simulacrum of international immersion, parsed out in short spurts with plenty of help from the sidelines.

Dan Pieraccini was born in Northern Italy but was moved to the US at the age of six. Dan’s BA in English and MA in Italian literature have opened the door to over a decade of teaching high school and college students their second (and in some cases first) language. It is likely that his having traveled through 82 countries, 48 US states, and three disputed territories somehow factored into the decision to make Dan Delbarton School’s first director of Global Programs. In his spare time, he manages events at his local Elks Lodge, helps feed the hungry at a handful of food pantries, writes and performs rock-and-roll songs with his band Forget the Whale, plays in a Dungeons and Dragons game, and occasionally goes out to brunch.

Kyiv Rejects Russian

According to a survey, 33% of Kyiv’s residents have switched from speaking Russian to Ukrainian since Putin’s invasion a year ago. About 46% said they had been speaking Ukrainian for a long time, while 13% remain predominately Russian speakers. Until last year, Kyiv was a bilingual city, where Russian was heard slightly more than Ukrainian.

In January, Ukraine’s leading liberal university, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, banned the Russian language from its campus. The president of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, Serhiy Kvit, told BVS Ukraine, “There will be no punishments for using the Russian language in the academy, despite the ban prescribed in the updated rules of the internal procedure. This is not a question of punishment, but of cultural change. The point is not to punish, but to change our internal corporate culture. No one will eavesdrop on the students, but the internal public opinion will be such that it will contribute to Mohylyanka being a fully Ukrainian-speaking university.”

“We will pay attention to the language issue—we will do social advertising. The academic conference voted unanimously because it considered it a problem. We believe that the Ukrainian language should be heard in our university,” added Kvit.

Prohibition of the Russian language does not extend to the educational process and scientific research, so unique Russian-language scientific sources can be used, as can sources related to the study of modern processes in Russia and its politics.

Rector Kvit, a former education minister, said the decision was taken after internal academic discussion. Eight students and staff members have so far died on the frontline, he said. Their framed photos hang in the corridor next to his office.

The university was founded in 1615, shuttered by the Soviets in the 1920s, and reopened in 1991 after Ukraine’s independence. “The decision isn’t about penalties. It’s about culture within our learning community. Language is a frame for culture,” Kvit said. English will now be added as a working language.

In Russian-occupied areas, Ukrainian has been banned from schools and universities, and Ukrainian teachers have been forced to follow Russian curricula. Ukrainian-language books have been removed from libraries and sometimes burned. Children are now being taught a Kremlin-approved version of history. It asserts Ukraine was never a state or a sovereign nation. According to Ukraine’s culture minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Russia’s removal of Ukrainian books is part of a wider assault on national heritage. He said 1,500 cultural objects had been destroyed over the past year, with museums deliberately shelled and vandalized and objects looted.

1...323334...332Page 33 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