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“Human brains are wired to learn best in social interactions, whether that learning is about language or problem-solving or emotion,” Ms. Lebedeva said, “but language is such a ubiquitous human behavior that studying it gives us an example of how more general learning takes place.”

at the science-oriented Ultimate Block Party held in New York City this month, children of different backgrounds played games in which they were required to sort toys either by shape or color, based on a rule indicated by changing flashcards. A child sorting blue and yellow ducks and trucks by shape, say, might suddenly have to switch to sorting them by color. The field games exemplified research findings that bilingual children have greater cognitive flexibility than monolingual children. That is, they can adapt better than monolingual children to changes in rules—What criteria do I use to sort?—and close out mental distractions—It doesn’t matter that some blue items are ducks and some are trucks.

The launch this year of Google Voice — representing as it does a free alternative or complement to costly language laboratory recording hardware and software — has profound and exciting implications for student engagement in general and the confluence of language instruction and cell phone technology in particular. The proliferation of cell phones among today’s students combined with the development of such new computer-mediated communication tools allows teachers to engage students in new ways in and out of the classroom.

My Google Voice number has served primarily as a messaging service students call (sometimes spontaneously during the instructional period, more often outside of the classroom) to record dialogues, poetry, even song, either individually or in pairs. These recordings are stored on Google servers, but can be downloaded and posted on course management pages (Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, etc.) or podcasting, blogging, or social networking sites (I post particularly good recordings on my Spanish Facebook page).

maximizing student engagement during the class period is essential, as many students work and do not practice outside the classroom setting. Without getting into the debate over the front-end need for considerable comprehensible input, as a practical matter many students see paired work time (particularly in larger classes) as social time, which can lead to student-teacher conflict (no explanation needed).

for lower level classes I can instruct my students to form small groups and, within a given time frame, call my Google Voice number and record a narration of an illustration or picture sequence. In the higher level classes, I can ask groups to come up with a succinct recorded comparison/contrast analysis of two different perspectives (textual and/or auditory) on a given subject. Either way, embracing whole language oral output turns the focus from the particulars of language and writing to whole language and pronunciation. It also allows for efficient instructor identification of common problem points.

It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.

on a post-recording survey of a Spanish 3 class of 21 students, I asked students to respond anonymously to the following survey question:“I practice my Spanish pronunciation before calling Google Voice… not at all once more than once repeatedly”A total of 89 percent of the 21 respondents answered either “b,” “c,” or “d,” with 26 percent responding “repeatedly.” Among the more entertaining and pertinent written comments offered on the anonymous survey were the following: “AHH!! I feel smart because I actually practice a lot before I call.” “It makes me nervous having to record, but I practice a lot to help me get over that.” “I do not do the Google Voice because I don’t want the whole class to hear me.”The final comment clearly referred to my tendency to play recordings for full class feedback — food for thought. Is that a motivating or inhibiting factor? It probably depends on the student.

A student who was frustrated at his performance in Spanish and was beginning to exhibit some anger management issues received the following Spanish translation of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote via text message through Google Voice: Por cada minuto que estás enojado, pierdes sesenta segundos de felicidad. I did not supply a translation

The access that I had to that student combined with the ease and speed of communication presented by Google Voice solved more than a pronunciation problem; it likely helped me head off a building class management issue by engaging that student on his terms outside of the classroom setting.

“I have a student who hasn’t done any homework this quarter, and out of the blue he sent me a goofy text message to my Google Voice number — completely unrelated to Spanish — something like “I hate this rain”— and, being the nerdy teacher, I texted him immediately back in Spanish: “No me gusta la lluvia tampoco.” One day later, he walks in for the first time with his homework and makes a big production about turning it in. I can’t help but feel that the personal connection of texting helped him remember — and actually want to do — the work for my class.”

Surprisingly, these “irredeemably unreachable” students have proven highly receptive to the notion that their cell phones can and should be used for educational purposes. Figure 2, for example, shows a fairly typical SMS exchange on an oral homework assignment for intermediate level students. While not all students will text back when I supply SMS feedback, those that do, like this one, tend to be looking for specifics and positive reinforcement. How is this additional engagement and interaction bad?

Elite schools have spent vast sums of money on expensive language laboratory hardware and software as an approach to active engagement in the language learning process. They have provided their students with the latest and greatest in computer-assisted (language) learning and computer-mediated communication tools, at considerable cost.

five major levels of proficiencyproficiencyOne's functional language ability.: Distinguished, Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice.

Effective instructional practice leads to increased language development and cultural understanding and meets the needs of all students in the language classroom. Integrating technology innovations into instruction is vital to a 21st century learning environment. Various program models and curriculum designs are featured in this category from elementary program dual language, immersion, and FLES, to higher education programs that focus on advanced language proficiency.

If you are a presenter as well as the person submitting the proposal, you must still list yourself as a presenter. As the submitter your name will be included as the “session organizer”, but you must also add your name as a presenter. This is very important otherwise your name will not show as being a presenter on the submission and your proposal may not be considered. Be sure that your presenter information is current – email address, affiliation (school/company), address, etc – in the database.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.

“This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”

Language content makes up about 95 percent of the downloads from the Emory iTunes U site.

the most popular content is audio and video files that were originally developed not for a general audience, but by professors as supplements to college-level coursework,

Because language demonstrations often require audio and sometimes video components (e.g., tutorials on how to write in a character-based alphabet), and students often like to practice while on the move, iTunes is in many ways an ideal vehicle for language-based instructional content.

what we do offer is an online supplement that enhances what happens both in the classroom and in foreign study in the culture — and it is always there as a resource for our students, because it’s online.”

The site is effectively bilingual, thanks to machine translations, and volunteer editors spruce up the translations afterward. Machine translation is quite good, Weyman says, on fairly standard text such as news stories, but still has difficulties handling comments, which tend to use more conversational language. The site also open-sources all its translation data to help the state of the art of translation to move forward.

“let someone in Nebraska see an event through the eyes of someone in Nablus.”

For instance, Meedan partnered with the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted an online webcast with U.S. Ambassador Christoper Hill last Wednesday. The webcast allowed Iraqis and others from the Middle East to ask questions in Arabic, have them translated immediately and get answers back in just seconds.

“The way you teach a language is not about grammar; it's about communication skills,” Yan says. “So that face-to-face aspect has to be there…. It should never be done by students checking out a website and doing drills. That is not my idea of an online course.”

But in general Ruth, who teaches Spanish, says he remains wary of where offering online degrees in relatively low-demand languages might lead. “We don’t want this to leak into the areas where real interest lies and where real instructors are,” he says.