Group items tagged

# In Preschool, children are just beginning to learn about language and how it works. Exposure to multiple languages is advantageous for all children and can be supported by developmentally appropriate teaching practices that make use of songs, rhymes, and stories. # In programs for beginning learners that offer appropriate time and frequency of instruction, students communicate at the Novice-Mid level using memorized language to talk about familiar topics related to school, home, and the community. # After three-six years of study in programs offering the appropriate time and frequency of standards-based instruction, Novice-High through Intermediate-Mid level students communicate at the sentence level creating with language to ask and answer questions and to handle simple transactions related to everyday life and subject matter studied in other classes. # After nine-twelve years of well articulated standards-based instruction, Intermediate-High through Advanced-Low level students communicate at the paragraph level and are able to handle complicated situations on a wide-range of topics.

Does French still matter? If so, why? This roundtable discussion is a response to recent concerns about the status of the study of French and other foreign languages and cultures in U.S. higher and secondary education at a time of increasing globalization. Five leading voices in different fields bring a variety of perspectives to bear in a lively discussion about why French matters today. *Adam Gopnik, writer and essayist for The New Yorker magazine*Charles Kolb, President of the Committee for Economic Development*Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association and Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages, University at Buffalo, SUNY (on leave)*Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia University*Antonin Baudry, Cultural Counselor, French Embassy in the U.S.This event is fully sponsored by the Florence Gould Foundation.

"Create a free class website and let your students build sites too. Look at the sample site at http://cnapolitano.weebly.com/ What can I do with Weebly? Easily create a classroom website & blog Manage your students' accounts Accept homework assignments online Keep your parents up to date We offer a simple interface to let you centrally manage all the Weebly accounts at your school or district. (not free)

"On November 13 the Digital October Center hosted a web meeting with Eli Bildner, one of the Coursera team members. Bildner is responsible for looking for educational partners and translating selected videos into the native languages of the projects's multicultural audience, and shared the results of the first few months of work he has put into localizing the content of the most popular platform for free online education. He discussed: which translation approaches have been tried and how well they have worked from country to country why Coursera settled on working with local partners the statistics on what has already brought about growth in the number of users who do now know English well enough or even at all. Lecture guests also were the first to see how the crowdsourcing platform ABBYY Language Services and the Knowledge Stream team built to translate Coursera content works. This solution at some point in the future may become a universal tool for localizing courses around the entire world. At this point, however, the development is in beta testing."

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

Advice for language learners General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you. Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox? At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure. * Read books in the target language. * Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.) * Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things. * Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it. * Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself. * Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it. * Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends. * Seek out opportunities to work using the language. * Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language. * Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language. * Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.) Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas

In reading tests at school, girls tend to be ahead of boys, in all age groups and in all countries. But in young adults, there is suddenly no longer any difference between men's and women's reading skills. Why is that? Could the answer be in the way the tests are designed?

On May 14, 2012 a 15-second video presented in American Sign Language will appear on the CBS Super Screen at Times Square, where more than 300,000 pedestrians traffic daily. This is possibly the first video placement by a Deaf-run agency at Times Square, one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. This public service announcement is produced by Abused Deaf Women's Advocacy Services and underwritten by Convo Communications. ADWAS wants to thank Convo for making this momentous event possible!

researchers long thought the window for learning a new language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible than first thought and that students who learn additional languages become more adaptable in other types of learning, too.

Black Mass was born in 1963, the brain-child of Jack Nessel, who was the Drama & Literature Director at KPFA in Berkeley, the first voluntarily listener-sponsored non-commercial FM station in the world. (The BBC was compulsorily supported by a government-imposed license system.) Jack suggested the idea to Erik Bauersfeld, who taught aesthetics and philosophy at the California School of Fine Art, and had recently begun to do readings of classic and modern literature for the station. Erik was not wildly enthusiastic, but thought that it might be interesting to search out some of the best stories of the supernatural by first-rate authors who did not normally write within that genre. Obligation soon became obsession.

Watch the Keith Kelly at IATEFL 2008 (1) - Materials for CLIL Video from YouTube :: Videos by MacmillanELT on Mefeedia.com

Watch the Keith Kelly at IATEFL 2008 (2) - Materials for CLIL Video from YouTube :: Videos by MacmillanELT on Mefeedia.com

"It is often claimed that people who are bilingual are better than monolinguals at learning languages. Now, the first study to examine bilingual and monolingual brains as they learn an additional language offers new evidence that supports this hypothesis, researchers say. The study, conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center and published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, suggests that early bilingualism helps with learning languages later in life."

"Dyslexia is a learning difficulty which affects the ability to adopt the automatic reflexes needed to read and write. Several studies have sought to identify the source of the problems encountered by individuals with dyslexia when they read. Little attention, however, has been paid to the mechanisms involved in writing. Sonia Kandel, Professor at the GIPSA-Lab of the Université Grenoble Alpes (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes/Grenoble INP) and her team [1] decided to look at the purely motor aspects of writing in children diagnosed with dyslexia. Their results show that orthographic processing in children with dyslexia is so laborious that it can modify or impair writing skills, despite the absence of dysgraphia in these children. The findings of this study are published in the November 2017 edition of Cognitive Neuropsychology."

"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

"ImTranslator offers a natural sounding text-to-speech system with translation capabilities that quickly translates text and reads it aloud at one click of a button." Thanks to Isabelle for pointing it out in a recent presentation that she has posted on her blog, Supporting EAL Learners in the MFL Classroom, Edge Hill University, Monday 21st October 2013.

"ImTranslator offers a natural sounding text-to-speech system with translation capabilities that quickly translates text and reads it aloud at one click of a button."