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Barbara Lindsey

NEA: World Languages - 0 views

  • "The fact that our students study a language from grade one not only teaches them how to learn languages, it gives them the mindset that languages are just as important as any other subject," says Janet Eklund, now in her 20th year at Glastonbury, where she's one of two Russian teachers.
  • "All along, we're working to make them not just language proficient, but culturally aware," says Oleksak. "We always remind them that they have to learn more than just the words to relate to people from other cultures."
  • "There's a Chinese saying, that if three people pass by, one of them is your teacher. We learn from just about every experience we have," says Wang. "Then we make sense of it through our language."   
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  • Asia Society's Shuhan Wang cautions against a "language of the month" approach for districts working to build their language programs. It's more important, she says, to build on community resources and to do what you can to make language learning real-world and relevant to them.
  • Presidential candidate Barack Obama hit on some deep-seated anxiety when he remarked in July that we should emphasize foreign language learning from an early age.
  • "The U.S. will become less competitive in the global economy because of a shortage of strong foreign language and international studies programs at the elementary, high school, and college levels," the Committee for Economic Development stated plainly in a 2006 report. "Our diplomatic efforts often have been hampered by a lack of cultural awareness," the report went on to say. The world is becoming so interrelated, if we don't teach our young other languages and cultural values, says Wang, "We are denying them access to the new world. It is just plain and simple. If we continue to view language learning as for the elite, for the "smart ones," or for the family who can afford to pay for it, we are really widening the gap."
  • What does it say about America that we are the only industrialized nation that routinely graduates high school students who speak only one language? Frankly, it says that if you want to talk to us—to do business with us, negotiate peace with us, learn from or teach us, or even just pal around with us—you'd better speak English.
  • "The norm is still either no foreign language or two years in high school," says Marty Abbott, director of Education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
  • Foreign language programs are often among the first things cut by urban school administrators desperately adding math and reading classes to raise test scores.
  • "It's time to reassess what 'basic skills' really means for the 21st century," says Asia Society's Wang.
  • Not only will students learn new vocabulary in the target language, but they get to work on the concepts they need to master for other classes, and yes, for high-stakes tests. That's how they do it in Glastonbury, says Oleksak: "We pre-teach, co-teach, and post-teach what's going on in the elementary classroom."
  • The kids reason out what you get when you add three butterflies plus four butterflies: Seven, yes, but really it's practice in Chinese and math, as well as a reminder that caterpillars turn into butterflies.
  • Right now, districts like Glastonbury—with an articulated, sequential program spanning grades 1–12, state-of-the-art language labs, and all the support an administration could give—are the exception.
Patrick Higgins

How Global Language Learning Gives Students the Edge | Edutopia - 9 views

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    In fact, some of the greatest obstacles to world-language education are parents who recall their own miserable experiences. Many Americans were introduced to foreign languages in middle school or high school classes that emphasized conjugation of verbs and other dull grammatical tasks rather than relevant communication skills. "Language teaching in the U.S. has been ineffective," Stewart says. "We start it at the wrong age. Teacher skills are not great. There's a focus on grammar and translation." The result: "Adults who took three years of French don't speak a word," she states.\nBut the trend toward competency and away from conjugation is helping create a new generation of language learners, one that gains real-world skills with many practical applications.
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    the key here lies in the paragraph I clipped: the focus should be on competency rather than on conjugation.
Lauren Rosen

World Language Careers | Ohio Department of Education - 2 views

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    A downloadable list of careers that benefit from employees having a 2nd language and a number of videos on the topic as well
Claude Almansi

The World A.T. Ways » About wATw - 0 views

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    Around the World in A.T. Ways constitutes an episodic text in which two language educators circumnavigate our educational world via emerging technologies. Above all, Dr. Kevin Gaugler, Associate Professor of Spanish at Marist College and Barbara Lindsey, Director of the Multimedia Language Center at the University of Connecticut, will explore the topic of online technologies in support of language learning and teaching, intercultural competencies and all things global
Fiona Joyce

LangMedia: Resources for World Languages - Five College Center for the Study of World L... - 7 views

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    Cultural and language resources for MANY different languages. Includes videos on many areas of daily life from many different countries.
Andrew Jeppesen

World Stories - 9 views

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    World Stories is a growing collection of stories from around the World. The collection includes retold traditional tales and new short stories in the 21 languages most spoken by UK children.
Marcela Summerville

Bilingualism is essential to diversity  |  Daily Sundial - 2 views

  • Multilingualism is an undeniably powerful tool in today’s world—in more ways than one.  Not only can the knowledge of one or more foreign languages assist in boosting one’s resume, it also opens communication with an entirely new world.
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    " Multilingualism is an undeniably powerful tool in today's world-in more ways than one. Not only can the knowledge of one or more foreign languages assist in boosting one's resume, it also opens communication with an entirely new world."
Barbara Lindsey

News: The Web of Babel - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Some adventurous professors have used Twitter as a teaching tool for at least a few years. At a presentation at Educause in 2009, W. Gardner Campbell, director of the academy of teaching and learning at Baylor University, extolled the virtues of allowing students to pose questions to the professor and each other — an important part of the thinking and learning process — without having to raise their hands to do so immediately and aloud. And in November, a group of professors published a scientific paper suggesting that bringing Twitter into the learning process might boost student engagement and performance.
  • But while Lomicka and her tech-forward peers are not advocating that every college go the way of Chapel Hill, they are finding out that some relatively novel teaching technologies that are used by academics of all stripes, such as Twitter and iTunes U, are particularly useful for teaching languages.
  • At Emory University, language instructional content is far and away the biggest export of its public repository on iTunes U, where visitors from around the world have downloaded more than 10 million files since Emory opened the site in 2007.
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  • 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.”
International School of Central Switzerland

The World Wide Lexicon Translator - Firefox addon - 0 views

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    The World Wide Lexicon Translator makes browsing foreign languages sites easy and automatic. Simply open a URL. It detects its language and translates using human and machine translations. With it you can view and create translations for any website.
Barbara Lindsey

The World A.T. Ways » In which we present 'Around the World in A. T. Ways' - 0 views

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    We would love your feedback on our new blog. Thank you!
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    A blog specifically focused on guiding world language instructors in integrating socially mediated technologies into the curriculum and creating a shared community of practice. We would love your feedback!
Cindy Marston

Culture Crossing - 0 views

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    CultureCrossing.net is an evolving database of cross-cultural information about every country in the world. This user-built guide allows people from all walks of life to share essential tips with each other about how to navigate our increasingly borderless world with savvy and sensitivity.
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    CultureCrossing.net is an evolving database of cross-cultural information about every country in the world. This user-built guide allows people from all walks of life to share essential tips with each other about how to navigate our increasingly borderless world with savvy and sensitivity.
Patrick Higgins

eufeeds - over 1000 newspapers, updated every 20 minutes - 0 views

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    Every newspaper in the EU in it's native language. Awesome for World Languages and current events. Google Translator works well too.
anonymous

Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong : NPR - 0 views

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    Neat article on the insights into language, linguistics, and how our language shapes our world
M Jesús García San Martín

Stop and Learn English: Languages in the world - 1 views

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    B2 ESL learner's viewpoints on languages in the world.
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