In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Coral Way (1963 - 1964 to 2013 - 2014), check out Richard Ruiz and Beth DeFarber's collection of interviews with teachers and students from the original class of 1963-1964. They have also compiled some interesting artifacts and photographs for this continuing project, which will grow over time. The collection includes: Primary source documents (26 items); an oral history collection (14 items); and photographs and memorobilia (104 items). The project is completely open access through the University of Arizona library website and can be accessed here. Worth checking out!
Coral Way Bilingual Elementary School in Miami is considered the nation's first Spanish-English dual-language immersion program. Its unique history is intricately linked with Cuba's revolutionary past, as the first children to enroll in the program had left the island following Fidel Castro's rise to power.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Coral Way (1963 - 1964 to 2013 - 2014), check out Richard Ruiz and Beth DeFarber's collection of interviews with teachers and students from the original class of 1963-1964. They have also compiled some interesting artifacts and photographs for this continuing project, which will grow over time. The collection includes: Primary source documents (26 items); an oral history collection (14 items); and photographs and memorobilia (104 items). The project is completely open access through the University of Arizona library website and can be accessed here. Worth checking out!
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Like California, steam seems to be gathering for district flexibility in determining best approaches for educating English learning children across Massachusetts, a state that, through ballot initiative, adopted an English-only approach to educating English learners. This op-ed, published in the Boston Globe, is the most recent push by education, policy, and legal advocates in Massachusetts to move the state away from rigid English-only policies that have decimated bilingual programs statewide. The argument is not that bilingual education is better than monolingual education, but rather that it should not be ILLEGAL to teach children to read and write in a language other than English, and that districts should have a say in how they address the unique challenges and strengths that English learners bring to their schools.
The LATimes has been reporting recently on the efforts of state senator Ricardo Lara to introduce SB1174, a bill which would restore to districts in California the option to provide bilingual education programs to the students whom they serve. The effort is supported by the California Association of Bilingual Education and Californians together, which is "a coalition of parents, teachers, education advocates and civil rights groups". The issue is entering the public debate, as the LATimes continues its somewhat thin reporting on the issue. Similar efforts have flickered in Massachusetts, which shares a similar law to that of California, but nothing that rises to the level of reporting that the current California initiative is receiving. Maybe this will help Massachusetts lawmakers muster greater political will to restore program flexibility on t
It is refreshing to hear that the American Academy of Pediatrics has endorsed a policy report published by the Society for Research in Child Development that attempts to put multilingualism in an appropriate and research-based context, allowing the authors to debunk many of the myths about multilingualism that are propagated in the US today. The report is available here. There is a lot of discussion about the role of parental language input, vocabulary development, and policy-based recommendations based on the overview presented in the report, and it is followed by commentary by leading scholars in the field of multilingual research.
The New York Times reports on the "worrisome exodus of professionals and middle-class Puerto Ricans who have moved to places like Florida and Texas" in the face of deteriorating economic and social conditions on the island. The upsurge in off-island migration is likened the that of the 1950s "when job shortages on the island forced farmers and rural residents to find factory work in cities like New York and Boston. Today it is doctors, teachers, engineers, nurses, professors who are leaving Puerto Rico behind". The major receiving centers appear to be different then versus now, but the emergence of a new diaspora will have implications on- and off-island.
Claude Goldenberg and his colleagues have a paper in press with American Education Research Journal detailing the results of a comparative study of Spanish reading acquisition in the U.S. and in Mexico. In the U.S., the English approach to teaching initial reading via phonemic awareness is also applied to early Spanish reading instruction. Such is not the case in Mexico, where the syllable is typically the unit of initial instruction. Findings showed that children in Mexico performed significantly below their U.S.-based peers in phonemic awareness in kindergarten (because it wasn't taught), but by second grade the Mexican students either matched or surpassed their peers in the U.S. These findings suggest that applying English approaches to Spanish reading does not make a great deal of sense (at least when it comes to teaching kids to read words) given the orthographic differences between the two languages. The paper is freely available here.
Patricia Gándara and colleagues at the UCLA Proyecto Derechos Civiles have recently released a new report on how educational opportunities can be better structured to support the achievement of Latinas in US schools. This report was commissioned by the actor Eva Longoria's foundation, and focused on specific policy levers that can serve to alter trajectories and outcomes among Latina students in the US. The main findings were:
A new study in Early Childhood Research Quarterly reports on a meta-analysis potential benefits of dual-language education for young children who speak languages other than English. Another finding is that there is very little quality research out there that attempts to explore issues of development among young dual-language learners. A review of the study can be found here.
USA Today reports on a new study in the journal Neurology in which Indian researchers assessed the associations between bilingualism and onset of dementia among 648 patients (391 bi/multilinguals) who were all diagnosed with dementia. Controlling for lots of things like literacy levels, immigration status, education, and gender, the researchers found that onset of dementia was delayed by approximately 5 years among bilinguals as compared with their monolingual counterparts. This study is not particularly novel, but it's interesting because: 1) it's coming out of India and not Canada; 2) it's a naturalistic, not a laboratory study; 3) it takes into account natural variations in the general population like literacy, immigration, etc.; 4) it's messy, with missing data and the like. The analyses are simple and the findings are basic but compelling. Using multiple languages in daily life requires greater cognitive attention and flexibility, resulting in greater mental stamina which delays onset of dementia. Cite for the actual study is: Alladi, S. Bak, T.H., Duggirala, V., Surampudi, B., Shailaja, M., Shhukla, A.K., Chaudhuri, J.R., & Kaul, S. (2013). Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status. Neurology, 81, 1 - 7.
Washington Post article covers heritage language revival attempts by children of immigration11/2/2013 Nice article in the Washington Post magazine profiles a young man named Daniel Chen, a second generation child of Chinese immigrants from Shanghai, and tells the story "about the isolating power of a lost mother tongue and an education spent retrieving it". Like many such stories, it is complex, involving movement, translation, frustration, and determination. The author details the phenomenon of first language attrition, which I have documented in my own research, spends some space on the critical period, and does an overall nice job of linking language development and loss within the larger contexts of immigration and family cohesion. Definitely worth a read.
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