Language Magazine - January 2018

Improving Literacy & Communication

January 2018

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Contents

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Comparing Child Languages

January 2018

Clifton Pye suggests a comprehensive approach to crosslinguistic research

6 8 9 12 14

24

Busting Myths, Telling Truths Matt Renwick recommends a grounded approach when it comes to technology in the classroom

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Editorial Letters News Source World as We Speak 17 Indigenous Languages 44 Resource 46 Last Writes

Fulfilling the Technological Promise Language Magazine asks luminaries in the EdTech landscape what to expect and what we can hope for in 2018

as 39 Literacy a 21stCentury Survival Skill

Brooke Foged and Jenny Hammock share their insights into fighting generational illiteracy with the engaging power of technology

40 Advancing DualLanguage Education Jenny MuĂąiz summarizes the latest recommendations

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January 2018 Vol. 17, No. 5 The Journal of Communication & Education Publishing Editor Daniel Ward Assistant Editor Kristal Bivona Creative Director Leanna Robinson Proofreading Stephanie Mitchell Office Manager Tania Ruiz Book Reviews Karen Russikoff Last Writes Richard Lederer The Word Peter Sokolowski Marketing Emma Sutton

Contributors Steve Bevilacqua Brooke Foged Lisa Frumkes Lori Gracey Jenny Hammock Jenny Muñiz Clifton Pye Matt Renwick Pia Sundqvist Liss Kerstin Sylvén

Subscriptions 310-455-7193 National Offices 21361 B. Pacific Coast Hwy Malibu, CA 90265 Webmaster Claudio Valenzuela Distributors Delta Systems, Inc.,1400 Miller Parkway, McHenry, IL 60050 1-800-323-8270 Retail Ingram Periodicals, Inc. 1-800-627-MAGS Language Magazine (ISSN 1537-7350) is an editorially independent publication of Language Magazine, LLC. Opinions expressed by contributors and/or advertisers in Language Magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the Publishers nor the Distributor. © 2016 Language Magazine, LLC. Language Magazine (ISSN 1537-7350) is published monthly for $28.95 per year (US/Canada) and $59.95 (Overseas) by Language Magazine LLC, 21361 B. Pacific Coast Hwy Malibu, CA 90265 . Application to mail at Periodicals Postage Rates is pending at Los Angeles, CA. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to LANGUAGE MAGAZINE, 21361 B. Pacific Coast Hwy Malibu, CA 90265 Visit languagemagazine.com and click on

Resources for research references.

6

The Disintegration of Our Schools

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rowing up in a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual environment is the basis for the establishment of the integrated society that most of us claim to want for our children.

Many of us would prefer a multilingual and religiously diverse environment as well, as it may provide the best chance for survival in an increasingly radicalized world. However, the desegregation of public schools in the U.S. is faltering and may even be on the decline. Unfortunately, federal education policies are set to accelerate this decline unless action is taken to reverse it soon.

The U.S. public education system is based on the core principles of equality and inclusion; however, schools are about as segregated today as they were 50 years ago. While racial segregation plummeted between the late 1960s and 1980, it has steadily increased ever since, mainly due to school districting, demographic shifts, and private preferences. The result is that 37% of our public schools are one-race schools— nearly all white or all minority (“Brown at 62: School Segregation by Race, Poverty and State,” UCLA Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, May 2016).

Many policymakers argue that public schools are failing, especially in urban areas, and parents are just exercising their right to seek the best education for their children, so they move to areas with better schools or seek out charter schools. However, the reality is more complex, as there is little evidence to support the claim that charter schools are more successful than other public schools and plenty of examples of for-profit charter school failure in economically disadvantaged areas.

A federally backed school voucher system would exacerbate the problem.

Voucher supporters argue that school choice will allow low-income and minority children to go to a school with their more affluent white peers, but David Berliner and

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Gene Glass have shown that school choice increases segregation, leaving minority students in under-funded public schools (50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, 2014).

New research from the Albert Shanker Institute (“Public and Private School Segregation in the District of Columbia,” September 2017) suggests that private schools are a major factor in the segregation of children in Washington, DC’s public schools. So much so, in fact, that if segregation between black and white students within public schools were completely eliminated, over half of total segregation would still remain, specifically because of how segregated the student populations are between public and private schools.

Another report (White Growth, Persistent Segregation: Could Gentrification Become Integration?), released last month by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, shows that DC’s most rapidly gentrifying areas have seen a decline in racial segregation, more so in traditional public schools than in charter schools.

America’s public school system is one of the nation’s greatest achievements because it is for every child, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, language, income, or legal status.

By encouraging states to implement voucher systems to fund enrollments in private schools which are not subject to the same standards and free to exercise religious or cultural bias, the administration may not only undo decades of progress in social integration, it may undermine the cohesive fabric that bonds together this country’s disparate mix of races, ethnicities, and religions.

Daniel Ward, Editor

January 2018

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LETTERS

SEND TO: feedback@languagemagazine.com SUBJECT LINE: Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor Duolingo: Not ‘Fantastic’

Before accepting the statement that “Duolingo is a fantastic out-of-classroom supplement” to foreign language classes (“Pearson Partners with Duolingo,” Sept.

2017), readers may want to look at my short review of Duolingo: Krashen, S. “Does Duolingo ‘Trump’ University-Level Language Learning?” International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 9, no.

1 (2014): 13–15 (free download at ijflt. com and www.sdkrashen.com, section on language acquisition).

My conclusion: Despite its claims, Duolingo has not been shown to be superior to traditional university-level language teaching.

Stephen Krashen Professor Emeritus University of Southern California

Congress Advised of Critical Need to Boost Language Study (March 2017) Congress needs to abolish teaching of foreign languages because in America, you speak English. Anyway, how can you learn about technology and science if you’re wasting time & money on useless subjects?

Frank Smith

When I first read this article, I was thinking “You are preaching to the choir.”

I thought, those who are reading it are probably already firm believers in everything the article states. Then I read Frank Smith’s comment. Frank missed the whole purpose of this article, that purpose being to emphasize the importance of teaching languages as an ESSENTIAL need for students to keep up with the requirements of the 21st century. Frank provides a case in point of the views of the majority of Americans, whose beliefs were largely handed down by their parents and grandparents who grew up in an isolationist society whose economy, history, geography, and monolingualism made that possible. With more global

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interactivity, we cannot hope to compete (survive?), economically, if we do not prepare students differently.

We have been dropping behind when American education is considered against other countries, in spite of the fact that we have been emphasizing the areas Frank is promoting throughout most of the last generation (science and technology). If that is all we do, we will only see more of the same results. If you want the results to change, you have to change the way you do things. This article makes a good argument for what those changes should be—although I fear Frank and too many others like him will fail to embrace those recommendations.

Sams_pa@yshoo.com

CLARIFICATION: The Amazing Case of El Biblioburro (Nov 2017)

Thank you to Hal German for pointing out that CNN Heroes receives thousands of nominations from the public each year. More than nominated, Luis Soriano was recognized as a CNN Hero (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn. heroes/archive10/luis.soriano.html).

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Beware: Ravenous Ravens

The noun raven (pronounced \RAY-vin\) and the verb raven (pronounced \RAHvin\) are completely different words, with different roots, different pronunciations, and different meanings. That they are homographs is simply a coincidence.

The noun is much more common, meaning “a large, glossy-black bird” that resembles a large crow. A related adjective means “shiny and black” (as in “raven hair”).

It comes from an Old English word. The verb means “to feed greedily” or “to devour greedily,” “to prey” or “to prowl for food,” and, more figuratively, “to plunder.” It came to English through French from Latin.

Ravening is sometimes used to mean “greedily feeding” or “plundering,” as in “ravening wolf.” More commonly encountered is ravenous, meaning “very hungry.” They both derive from the Middle French verb raviner, meaning “to rush forward” or “to stream.” This sense was applied to water, and the word ravine meaning a “a small canyon usually worn by running water” came directly from this French term.

When not applied to water, the Middle French raviner could mean “to rush” and “to take by force.” The oldest English word derived from this root is the archaic noun ravin, which means “plunder” or “something seized as prey.” Ravenous went from meaning “devouring with voracious eagerness”—used of animals seizing another animal as prey—to meaning just “very hungry.” The notion of appetite has been retained over time without the notion of violence, such that ravenous is today welcome in polite company at dinner parties, unlike so many of its etymological cousins, such as ravish, rape, rapine, and rapacious. Ravishing as an adjective has come to mean “very beautiful.” So, although a raven could be described as ravenous, the words are unrelated.

And keep in mind that ravenous and ravishing are not interchangeable: you may send mixed messages— or at least be reasonably accused of confusing your appetites—if you use ravenous (“hungry”) to mean ravishing (“beautiful”). The fact that these words come from the same source but have developed to mean very different things shows that, for practical purposes, sometimes a word’s history is etymological water under the bridge.

Follow Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, on Twitter @PeterSokolowski.

January 2018

NEWS

Parents’ Accents Affect Babies

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new study reveals that multi-accent language exposure affects word-form recognition in infancy. The study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, found that babies raised in homes where they hear one language spoken with different accents recognized words dramatically differently from babies who heard little variation in accents. This demonstrates that daily exposure to multiple accents strongly impacts infants’ linguistic skills and word-form recognition.

It only makes sense that multiple accents help develop language skills in infants.

For babies to be able to recognize certain words, it is important for them, for instance, to understand those words across different contexts. That could be extended to hearing words across accents. Researchers ask, “What does that mean for children who are routinely exposed to multiple variants of their

native language? Imagine, for instance, a child born to an American English–speaking mother and an Irish English–speaking father.

“While her mother may label the yellow vehicle that takes her big brother to school as a bus, her father’s pronunciation will sound more like boss, leaving the child to deduce that mother’s bus and father’s boss refer to the same object even though her mother’s pronunciations of bus and boss label two separate referents. How does language development in this child differ from that in a child growing up in a family where both parents speak in the same accent?”

The researchers took two groups of monolingual English-learning 12.5-montholds. One of the groups was exposed to the dominant regional accent, while the other group was exposed to multiple variants of accent. The amount of English that the babies heard was the same across the two

Massachusetts Restores Bilingual Education

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assachusetts’ Republican governor Charlie Baker has signed the LOOK Bill into law, which will allow the state’s schools to offer bilingual and dual-language education.

According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, there are more than 90,000 English language learners (ELLs) in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts House and Senate earlier voted overwhelmingly to approve the LOOK Bill and endorse the Seal of Biliteracy.

Under the bill, school districts can maintain the current immersion programming or choose an alternative that meets federal and state standards. The legislation expands the role of parental advisory councils and allows parents the flexibility to choose programs that best meet their children’s needs.

“After 10+ years working on this, we have legislation that will guarantee all students learning English will be taught in strong programs tailored to fit their needs,” House Ways and Means chairman Jeffrey Sanchez, one of the bill’s longtime proponents, tweeted.

Since 2000, the number of English learning (EL) students has doubled to more than 90,204 students, or 9.5% of the student population, according to Democratic legislative leaders, who added that while “statewide graduation rates for students have risen over the past ten years, the achievement gap between EL students and their peers persists.”

The bill also requires better tracking of student performance and reviews of school programming and directs the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to develop additional guidelines and supports for districts.

January 2018

groups. The children heard words typically known to that age group, such as daddy, diaper, kitty, cup, and shoe, along with nonsense words such as shammy, kie, koddy, and koth.

The researchers measured the infants’ recognition by monitoring their head movements, since children will often turn their heads when recognizing words in their languages. The results indicated that the children who heard just a single accent reacted to the real words only, while the group that heard multiple accents turned their heads at both real and nonsense words.

This suggests that children who hear multiple accents are learning words at the same rate as those who are hearing only one accent, but they need more contextual information to recognize words because they do not assume all words will be spoken in the local accent.

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9

NEWS

Reading Literature More Than a Pleasure

J

ust in case anyone needs another reason to encourage the reading of literature, researchers at Stanford University have come up with more proof that it is good for you. In an innovative interdisciplinary study, neurobiological experts, radiologists, and humanities scholars are working together to explore the relationship between reading, attention, and distraction with the help of Jane Austen.

Surprising preliminary results reveal a dramatic and unexpected increase in blood flow to regions of the brain beyond those responsible for executive function, areas which would normally be associated with paying close attention to a task, such as reading, said Natalie Phillips, the literary scholar leading the project. During a series of ongoing experiments, functional magnetic resonance images track blood flow in the brains of subjects as they read excerpts of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Experiment participants are first asked to leisurely skim a passage as they might do in a bookstore and then to read more closely, as they would while studying for an exam. In both instances, Philips noticed an increase in blood flow that exceeded “just work and play.” In the case of more critical reading—the type one would engage in while writing an essay or preparing for a test—blood flow increased beyond executive function regions, or those areas responsible for problem solving.

Phillips said the global increase in blood flow during close reading suggests that “paying attention to literary texts requires the coordination of multiple

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complex cognitive functions.”

Blood flow also increased during pleasure reading, but in different areas of the brain. Phillips suggested that each style of reading may create distinct patterns in the brain that are “far more complex than just work and play.” So both leisurely reading and close reading benefit us neurologically.

The experiment focuses on literary attention, or more specifically, the cognitive dynamics of the different kinds of focus we bring to reading. This experiment grew out of Phillips’s ongoing research about Enlightenment writers who were concerned about issues of attention span, or what they called “wandering attention.”

This research is “one of the first fMRI experiments to study how our brains respond to literature,” Phillips said, as well as the first to consider “how cognition is shaped not just by what we read, but how we read it.”

Critical reading of humanities-oriented texts is recognized for fostering analytical thought, but if such results hold across subjects, Phillips said it would suggest “it’s not only what we read—but thinking rigorously about it that’s of value, and that literary study provides a truly valuable exercise of people’s brains.” However, Phillips warned against “adopting a kind of historical nostalgia, or assuming those of the 18th century were less distracted than we are today.” Many Enlightenment writers, Phillips noted, were concerned about how distracted readers were becoming “amidst the print overload of 18th-century England.”

Spanish Media Lacking Diversity

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LAAD, the pressure group for acceptance of the LGBTQ community, has released its second annual Spanish-language media report, Still Invisible/Todavía invisibles (https://www.glaad.org/stillinvisible-todaviainvisible). The bilingual report analyzes the LGBTQ characters in primetime scripted television airing in the U.S. between July 1, 2016, and June 30, 2017, and finds that only 3% (19) of the 698 characters seen in primetime (7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.) were LGBTQ. Of these characters, 30% died and six did not have motivations of their own and only served to further other characters’ storylines.

“As the Trump administration continues its attack on marginalized groups, it’s more important than ever that television share the stories of those groups onscreen,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD president and CEO. “Still Invisible shows a severe lack of LGBTQ representation in Spanish-language programming—something sorely needed in a time when the country’s Spanish-speaking and immigrant populations are more at risk than ever.”

Still Invisible also found a severe lack of diversity among the LGBTQ characters. Of the 19, 13 were gay men, three were lesbians, two were bisexual women, and one was a transgender woman. No series offered any trans or bisexual men.

To accompany the report, GLAAD also launched the #PantallaInclusiva/#InclusiveScreens campaign, which calls for more inclusive, nonstereotypical representation across multiple identities on all media, especially Spanish-language media. The campaign also includes artwork from ten Latinx LGBTQ artists to illustrate messages related to the report and other elements to spark a call for and conversation about the need for more inclusive representation.

“Like a lot of Latinx people, I love Spanish-language media. I love the voices, the points of view, the way it makes me feel connected to my native Uruguay,” noted GLAAD’s director of Spanish and Latinx media representation, Monica Trasandes. “But, like a lot of Latinx people, I’m tired of being invisible. I want to sit down like I did as a kid and watch TV with my family and not roll my eyes or walk away annoyed at seeing yet another stereotypical portrayal.”

Still Invisible comes on the heels of GLAAD’s English-language television report Where We Are on TV (https://www.glaad.org/whereweareontv17), which found that despite an increase in the number of LGBTQ characters, nuanced and complex stories were still lacking.

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January 2018