Birds, dolphins, and bees are all well-known within the scientific community for their ability to communicate in ways that resemble human language in one manner or another. Now, scientists can add another species to the list of animals with complex communication faculties: the naked mole rat.
According to a paper recently published in Science, naked mole rats showcase considerable dialectal variation in their “soft chirp” vocalizations, which communicate membership to a shared colony—comparable to the way a human’s regional accent or dialect can tell us a little bit about that person’s geographic background.
“With a simple vocal greeting, humans convey individual identity (distinctive voice) and cultural identity (dialect usage),” the paper reads. “Here, we show that naked mole-rats also signal social membership with dialect usage.”
For many decades, scientists have been interested in language-like communication between animals for its potential to shed some light on the evolutionary pathways that have led to the development of complex human language. While animal communication is considerably less expressive and creative than human language, studying examples of animal communication that resemble language can allow researchers to better understand our own linguistic faculties and where they came from.
Young mole rats who are raised in a different colony from the one they are born in produce the chirp associated with the adoptive colony—not their native one, indicating that these vocalizations are memorized behaviors. According to the paper, the soft chirps are unique among other forms of mammal vocalizations in that they are not innate, genetically inherited traits, but rather, learned behaviors that are developed early on in the mole rat’s life. Naked mole rats are the first rodents documented to undergo such behavior.
First, the researchers used more than 35,000 recordings of chirps from mole rats across seven different colonies to develop an algorithm that was able to successfully analyze the acoustic features of individual chirps in order to predict which colony it came from. In order to test that the mole rats actively tune into these differences, the researchers then conducted a place preference experiment. Individual mole rats were placed in two interconnected chambers with different recordings of chirps playing inside them. The mole rats showed a significant preference for the chambers in which the chirps most closely resembling their native colony were playing.
“Unlike other rodents, the almost blind, highly social, yet xenophobic, naked mole-rat has a colony specific greeting that is learned in early life and facilitates recognition of colony members and thereby helps maintain colony cohesiveness,” writes researcher Rochelle Buffenstein in a synopsis of the research for Science.
The Academy of the Hebrew Language has announced that they will build its next global center in the National Quarter in Jerusalem. The Academy, which was established by the Israeli government in 1953, held a design competition in collaboration with the Association of Architects and Urban Builders in Israel to choose which architect will design the new center according to the Jerusalem Post. Over 100 architects put in bids to design the next structure. The panel of judges reviewed the anonymous submissions and selected 5 design proposals from the initial 100 submissions to advance to the next stage. This was the pool that ultimately yielded the winning proposal.
President of the Academy, Professor Bar-Asher, told the Jewish News Syndicate that choosing the architect and design is a milestone in the establishment of the new center for all the key stakeholders, including the Government of Israel, the Municipality of Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem Development Authority.
According to the academy’s website, “The Hebrew language serves as a major gateway connecting Jews in Israel and the Diaspora; the new Center will broaden and enlarge this gateway. Its planned location, a short walk from so many national attractions, positions it well to become a prominent cultural destination of Israelis and tourists from abroad alike.”
In a post-pandemic world, the Academy hopes to welcome more than 200,000 visitors a year at the global center. The Academy seeks to raise $50 million to build the New Center. The Academy has already raised a considerable amount (nearly $3 million) from Israeli philanthropists, demonstrating just how deeply the Hebrew language touches the Jewish soul.
To protect students who are learning English from being forced into schools for the sole purpose of testing, and to enable parents to withdraw them from testing if they do not feel safe sending their children to school, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), TESOL, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and several other organizations sent a letter to then-president-elect Joe Biden’s education transition team before his inauguration. The letter asks for the prioritizing of issuing guidance for state and local education agencies to make sure all students can maintain their health and well-being.
The groups are asking the education transition team to:
• Develop and provide clear guidance for state and local education agencies describing an opt-out protocol for English learner students who cannot take tests like the WIDA ACCESS safely;
• Make certain that those who opt out of in-person proficiency testing will not suffer any consequences;
• Use other appropriate and reliable information to measure an English learner student’s proficiency for placement;
• Not seek sanctions against any state or local education association for failing to administer English proficiency tests to students who opt out; and
• Allow state and local education agencies to postpone testing until the beginning of the 2021–22 school year, if necessary.
“No student should be forced to choose between their health and well-being or taking a test that will determine their proficiency in learning the English language, especially during an unprecedented pandemic,” said David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “These tests can wait. Students of color, who comprise the vast majority of English learner students, have already been disadvantaged by remote learning and are under immense levels of stress. We cannot accurately gauge their progress right now by forcing them into schools that have been closed due to health risks.”
Beyond the imminent health risks imposed on English learner students and their families and teachers during in-person assessment, the pandemic’s compounding stressors also adversely impact these students’ learning, which may influence their assessment results. In addition, many schools have moved to remote learning as a result of the pandemic. Forcing students to attend schools that have been closed due to health risks solely for testing will likely only raise stress levels for students, impacting the validity and reliability of their assessment results.
“LULAC knows firsthand the significant obstacles Latino English-learner students are facing during this pandemic,” said Sindy Benavides, LULAC chief executive officer. “Throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, COVID-19 is ravaging our communities while parents are struggling to make ends meet. We must do everything possible to protect students’ health and not expose them unnecessarily to COVID-19.”
Next weekend, the Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center (Tech Center) in the College of Arts, Languages & Letters at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa will be hosting its own virtual version of the popular TV show Shark Tank, in which five first-time entrepreneurs will be vying to create the best new product to fill a need in world language education. The 2021 LaunchPad competition, now in its fourth year, will be decided on February 20, during a live, virtual event running from 3–4:15 p.m. HST, hosted by radio personality Burt Lum, of Hawaiʻi Public Radio.
The five startup companies are based in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. During the competition, the finalists will pitch their innovation. A panel from a wide variety of fields, including Language Magazine editor Daniel Ward, will provide feedback, and ultimately select the winner. Audience members will also cast their votes for a People’s Choice Award.
The finalists are: • eKidz.eu (Germany)—eKidz democratizes language development by providing easy access to its platform through mobile devices, and by tailoring experiences to specific needs of children from different cultural and social backgrounds. • FabuLingua (Texas)—FabuLingua helps kids learn languages through interactive children’s stories by writers and illustrators all over the world. It maximizes comprehensible input through magical stories, enabling subconscious development of listening, comprehension and reading skills. • ImmerseMe (New Zealand)—ImmerseMe is about virtually stepping into a beautiful and authentic location to learn a language. Choose from more than 3,000 interactive scenarios across nine languages: German, Spanish, French, English, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Greek and Indonesian. • Buddy.ai (California)—A voice-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) tutor of English as a foreign language for kids, this mobile app helps children practice their spoken English by conversing with a virtual AI-powered cartoon character—Buddy the robot. With its engaging virtual character, speech technology and adaptive learning, Buddy is making tutoring and speaking practice affordable for children worldwide. • Syngli (Canada and California)—Syngli’s core product is an intelligent tutoring system, derived from interactive novel learning algorithms, an adaptive knowledge database and an online collaborative user community.
Both winners receive an honorary plaque, and all finalists will receive exposure and access to thousands of language educators, successful companies and The Language Flagship international network.
“One of the underlying ideas of the LaunchPad is to intersect the expertise of learning professionals with technology entrepreneurs during the nascent development of innovative and impactful learning technologies,” explained Richard Medina, project lead and specialist at the Tech Center. To register and for more information, visit the Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center website.
A study on word learning recently published in Neuropsychologia is shedding light on the age-old question of how language learners’ minds store the target language.
Researchers at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile found that new words in the native language and the target language are stored in largely overlapping regions of the brain; however, L2 words triggered more activity in the primary auditory cortex, suggesting increased phonological processing efforts.
“Our results shed new light on the neural representation of two languages in the bilingual brain, by examining newly learned words that participants had no prior experience with,” the paper reads.
As the researchers point out in the paper, research on bilingualism has long sought to better understand how two languages are represented in the brain—either as one single language system or as two separate systems. To investigate this question with regard to the lexicon (as opposed to other aspects of language learning, such as grammar rules or orthography, for example), the researchers conducted fMRI scans on 20 bilingual speakers of Spanish and English during a semantic categorization task.
The study focused on the acquisition of unfamiliar lexical items in both the native language (Spanish) and the second language (English), by presenting made-up nonsense words (half of which were phonotactically similar to Spanish words while the other half were similar to English words) to the participants during a training session and having them associate each word with a specific semantic meaning, as if they were learning genuinely new vocabulary items.
After two training sessions in which the new words were memorized, participants performed a vocabulary test (including both the new words and a set of familiar real words) while an MRI scanner measured their brain activity. For the most part, overlapping regions of the brain were activated during the task; however, portions of the brain involved in speech processing were more active for the English (L2) cues, indicating that the brain is attuned to the phonological differences between the native language and the target language.
Planet Word, the world’s first museum dedicated to language and its first voice-activated museum, opened its doors to the public on October 22.
Planet Word founder and CEO Ann Friedman hosted a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony, which included appearances by mayor of Washington, DC Muriel Bowser, former president Barack Obama, singer-songwriter Paul Simon, fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, and former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg. The ceremony also featured recitations by spoken word artist Charity Blackwell and poet Naomi Shihab Nye and performances by hip-hop artist and multi-instrumentalist Christylez Bacon and opera singer Renée Fleming.
In her closing remarks, Friedman said, “If Planet Word was an idea whose time had come in 2013, it is even more relevant and central to conversations about who we are as humans in 2020, which is one reason that, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic to opening anything to the public right now, I wanted to move ahead and open before the election if it could be done safely.” To minimize the risk of COVID transmission, Planet Word is limiting capacity to support social distancing, distributing stylus pens for use with exhibit screens, and requiring visitors to wear a face covering at all times. Future programming at Planet Word includes a weekly workshop called We Love Word Games, in which participants will have the opportunity to explore word games and word puzzles.
The museum will also host a monthly program called DIVERCITIES, in which participants will explore the relationship between language and city.
The first installment of DIVERCITIES, entitled “Street Art around the World,” will feature conversations with muralists and graffiti artists from Mexico City, Berlin, and Kabul. The second installment, entitled “The Universal Language of Comedy,” will feature a panel discussion with comedians from Los Angeles, Dallas, and Kigali. To learn more about Planet Word, visit https://planetwordmuseum.org/.
The fourth chapter of ‘Rumi in the Language Classroom’ revolves around a poem in ‘Masnavi-e-Manavi’ which tells the story of a teacher whose students were tired of his classes. After a while, his students planned to drop the class but, because that was impossible, they decided to pretend that their teacher was sick and needed a rest. So, when they entered the classroom, they told him that he looked pale and they thought he was sick. When the teacher heard it from all the students he started feeling ill. He went home and told his wife to prepare his bed and make him soup. His wife was surprised and complained that he was not sick, but he refused to accept that. His wife, who didn’t want to discuss it further, gave in. When students’ parents came to visit him, he was completely red and sweating (because he was under the blanket), and they thought that he was really sick. They went home and asked their pupils not to go to school for a while.
The story clearly illustrates the concept of the “placebo effect.” The effect, first articulated by John Haygarth in 1799 (Booth, 2005), refers to the effectiveness of a perceived therapy which helps a patient to improve even though it has no physical benefit. In fact, it is a complex human experience that integrates expectations, hopes, and beliefs. We have all seen some patients who felt better after believing so. The opposite is also imaginable as is the case in the Rumi’s story. So, how does it help me as a teacher?
Faking praise in order to facilitate students’ learning and development can act as a placebo. As a teacher, we can praise our students generously instead of noticing their mistakes and pointing them out. It can encourage them to speak more in class which is a determining factor for improving language. It is a fact that praise is retained longer in human memory and we mostly remember the teachers who praised rather than the ones who criticized us. Enabling students to feel that they are improving can have a placebo effect which can have a real impact on the student’s learning in the long term.
Booth, C. (2005). The rod of Aesculapios: John Haygarth (1740–1827) and Perkins’ metallic tractors. Journal of medical biography, 13(3), 155-161.
Man working with a computer, net neutrality text and a lock on the screen, office background
Last October, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3–2 to reaffirm its 2017 repeal of net neutrality. The vote is a response to Mozilla v. FCC, a 2019 court ruling that found the FCC’s decision to repeal net neutrality was “unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service” and ignored the government’s duty to protect public safety, digital equity, and broadband competition.
In February 2020, the FCC announced a short public comment period to address the ruling and the court-ordered remand, or do-over, of the net neutrality proceeding. The Open Technology Institute (OTI) filed comments in this proceeding, but first responders were overwhelmed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and couldn’t meet Chairman Pai’s arbitrary deadline. The first responders—including the very firefighters whom the Mozilla court admonished the FCC for ignoring in 2017—asked for more time. The FCC refused to grant this reasonable request.
OTI is a litigant in Mozilla v. FCC and has consistently pressed the FCC to restore strong, enforceable net neutrality rules. “A federal court ruled the FCC was ‘unhinged from reality’ when it repealed net neutrality in 2017. Sadly, today’s vote is even more unhinged. Millions of people are suffering through the pandemic without internet access, and it’s hurting our economy, our schools, and our ability to combat the virus. Yet the Trump administration chose today to give another gift to the telecom industry while continuing to do nothing to help people stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. The FCC needs to restore net neutrality, expand internet connectivity, and get its priorities straight. We will continue fighting for these urgent priorities,” argued Joshua Stager, senior counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute.
Net neutrality is fundamental to enable, ensure, and expand online diversity of languages and cultures.
The U.S. Department of State has launched a new website, languages.state.gov, with the intention of developing a “new generation of critical language speakers.” The website aims to be a one-stop platform for U.S. government language program resources, where U.S. Americans can take a quiz to identify language programs that fit their goals and explore U.S. government scholarships and other resources. The website will categorize the language programs offered by the U.S. government by several criteria, including course length, location, and audience.
The focus is on enhancing the ability of U.S. Americans to study critical languages, which in turn will help the U.S. meet national security goals. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo accompanied the launch with an opinion article in Newsweek (Oct. 15, 2020), where he argued, “we should follow the example set by our farsighted predecessors. That’s why I’ve directed the State Department to ramp up critical-language study, beginning with Mandarin but also encompassing other critical languages such as Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and Farsi.”
Pompeo continued, “Deeper knowledge of languages—and of the peoples and nations who speak them that such knowledge brings—can illuminate otherwise unseen threats and lower the likelihood of open conflict. It can bring into focus hidden opportunities for cooperation and enhance appreciation of a nation’s internal politics. Additionally, among friends, it can expand the trust and broaden the sympathies that already exist, which are crucial to an effective partnership.” According to Pompeo, his department is expanding programs in advanced Mandarin and increasing the incentives for diplomats to pursue extra years of study, including increasing the number of U.S. Americans studying Chinese outside of China once travel restrictions are lifted.
The secretary also called on Congress to pass legislation that would create ROTC-style college tuition vouchers for critical-language study, which he described as a “national imperative.”
The article concluded with a call to action: “One often-overlooked form of influence is the vigor and finesse in foreign affairs that comes from understanding our strategic competitors, as well as friends and partners, in the languages that formed their opinions, outlooks, and plans. There’s no time to waste.”
There are enough myths about emergent bilinguals to drive English learner (EL) educators crazy trying to correct them all. We’ve gathered six of the most common myths and looked to see if, by dispelling them, we might uncover truths about teaching and learning that extend beyond the EL classroom to offer insights for teachers of any subject.
Have Faith in Your Students and Engage Them Doris Chávez-Linville: This tip is based on the myth that students must begin learning a second language early or they will never master it. Late starters often bring a lot more to the table than younger emergent bilinguals. They already have quite a bit of knowledge in their own language, after all. They may never sound exactly like a native speaker, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of learning and making connections and becoming just as competent in the understanding and use of the language as anyone else. There’s research showing that adults outperform children in initial language learning.1 Long-term, early starters may have a better accent, but early on, late starters seem to do better.
Carol Johnson: Earlier in my career, I taught adults English at a community college. They ranged in age from young adults fresh out of high school to senior citizens in their 80s, and they collectively spoke nearly any language you could name. People who were developing skills unique to their careers had a particular focus that helped them progress faster than those picking up more general language skills. People can learn languages or anything else at any age, but they’ll make better progress if they understand how the material is relevant to their lives.
Don’t Be Afraid to Challenge Kids Carol Johnson: There’s a myth that learning two languages will confuse a child, but most teachers know that if you challenge a child, they will often rise to that challenge.
A quick survey of the research will confirm that children are not confused by learning two languages. We don’t need research, however, to tell us that students are more likely to excel when we ask them to show us what they are capable of, instead of setting limits on what they can achieve.
Doris Chávez-Linville: When my nephew came to the U.S., he was five years old and only spoke Spanish. His teacher told him they only spoke English at school and wouldn’t let him speak Spanish. He told his mother that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep up with his classmates unless he focused on learning English only. And that’s exactly what he did. Now he understands Spanish, but he’s functionally lost the language. Instead of telling him what he couldn’t do, that teacher might have tried saying something like, “It’s great that you already speak Spanish! Now we’re going to build on that and you’re going to learn to speak English too!”
Assess to Find Strengths and Weaknesses Carol Johnson: Trying to guess what’s harder to learn and what’s easier to learn is not the most productive way to help students fill gaps in their emerging language. There’s a common myth that English is “more complex” or harder to learn than other languages. When you ask people what they mean when they say this, they usually can’t explain what makes English harder except for some spelling exceptions. The truth is that all languages are equally complex, but in different ways.
Doris Chávez-Linville: English, for example, has pretty complex spelling and a lot of vowels. Spanish, on the other hand, asks verbs to do a lot of work through complex rules about how those words change according to their use in a sentence. Deciding what’s hard or easy for students is less productive than monitoring their progress and assessing to determine where they’re excelling and where they need additional support.2
Help Students Feel Welcome Carol Johnson: There’s a myth that bilingual children never feel at home within either language, and that they’ll always be caught between two worlds. This myth likely has more to do with how society traditionally sees some kinds of students than how they actually feel about themselves. If we welcome students—into the culture, into the language, or into math or any other subject—those students will feel welcomed.
Doris Chávez-Linville: Believe it or not, someone once asked me if we rode around on donkeys in Mexico or if we had cars. I’m from one of the largest cities in Mexico, so the question felt more like an insult than a welcoming attempt to learn more about me as a person. Asking me how transportation was different in Mexico would have been a more inviting question and would have given me room to respond as an individual, rather than putting me in a position to correct a stereotype and making me feel uncomfortable.
Build on What Students Bring to the Classroom Carol Johnson: Many people believe that the best way to promote English literacy is to immerse students in English-only instruction.
Researchers Thomas and Collier found that emergent bilinguals were more successful in learning to read English over time in dual language programs than in English-only programs.3 That’s no surprise because strong literacy skills in a second language build on strong literacy skills in a first language. All learning sticks to learning that came before, so as students learn more in their first language, it just gives them more to stick the second language on to.
The takeaway: build on the learning that students bring with them to the classroom.4
Don’t Build Silos Doris Chávez-Linville: The final myth is the idea that language needs to be taught separately from other content areas. You can see that this myth continues to be widespread by the prevalence of the pullout model for ESL programs around the country. The idea is that we’ll take students out of class to give them English, and then put them back in to learn all the other content areas.
As Dana Hardt points out, all teachers are language teachers, helping students learn and access specialized language for math or biology or economics, among other subjects.5 It goes the other way, too. Background knowledge has a great effect on reading comprehension. Learning takes place wherever people are, and language learning is no different. Don’t be afraid to reach across the curriculum and help students find the ways math connects with biology or economics relates to history, even if you’re not a math or economics teacher.
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