I came across this article on dual-language education in D.C. a few weeks ago, and it reminded me of a presentation by Amelia Tseng I saw at a conference this past Spring, the 4th Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language. The article brought up some of the same issues as the talk, including the changing demographics of neighborhoods with dual-language or Spanish immersion schools, and how the Hispanic populations are being displaced, therefore losing access to the programs.
Both the talk and the article make me think of other dual-language programs I've heard or read about. I remember learning about the HoLa dual-language charter school in Hoboken, NJ from Jennifer Austin, who is also a trustee on their board. Though Hoboken has an ample population of Hispanic immigrants who could benefit from enrollment in the program, the school struggles to get them to apply, so they fall short of the 50/50 split of native English/native Spanish that dual-immersion schools (like Oyster-Adams in the article) maintain. I've looked at some of the websites for dual-language programs in Minnesota, of which there are a pleasantly surprising amount. Windom in Minneapolis tries to keep a balance, though I couldn't track down a mention of how. The website for Northfield's Compañeros program specifically mentions creating a lottery if necessary to "ensure a balance of native English and native Spanish speakers." On the other hand, the Moorhead Spanish Immersion program specifically excludes native Spanish speaking students, though for the life of me I can't figure out why. There seem to be a couple not necessarily opposing aims, but aims that don't entirely align with each other. On the one hand, dual-language education allows non-native English speaking students to learn important academic content in their native language while they also learn English. On the other hand, dual-language programs provide the opportunity for native English speaking children to become bilingual in a way that formal L2 middle and high school classes cannot. I am in support of both of these outcomes. I identify with the latter from my own upbringing, and I understand the importance of the former, both for academic and cultural reasons. A problem arises, of course, when dual-language education loses touch with heritage language maintenance goals and becomes primarily a driver of middle class white economic opportunity. Therefore, I feel conflicted. I'd love for my kids some day to be able to attend any kind of immersion school. My preference would be Spanish, for obvious reasons, and dual-immersion, for the diversity in cultural and linguistic exposure. But articles like the one above, and my anecdotal knowledge of other schools, activate a sense of preemptive guilt that I'd then be contributing to the displacement problem. Ideally, we continue to extend and grow these programs, so that everyone interested in or benefiting from bilingual ed (which c'mon, would be everyone, right? we need a lot more multiculturalism and multilingualism in the U.S.) would have the space and resources to pursue it.
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A science piece from the New York Times a week ago describes research recently published (yay, open access!) by PLOS One on how exercise improves L2 learning, so of course it caught my eye.
In short, students learned new L2 vocabulary words in one of two conditions: sitting at a desk (control) or pedaling on a stationary bike (experimental). There may have been some methodological details lost in translation to news report. The NYT write-up makes it seem like the participants biked for 20 minutes before the lessons and then through the lesson itself. But in reading the methods section of the article itself, the authors say participants "pedaled... for two minutes... as a warm up activity" 20 minutes before the learning phase, which doesn't sound like as much pre-learning exercise. In discussing the results, the NYT article correctly points out the exercising group "performed better" on vocabulary recognition ("does this picture match the L2 word?") and semantic judgment ("does this L2 sentence make sense?") tasks, but they didn't mention that they were better on both accuracy and response time, which is interesting. Also of note, specifically for the semantic judgment task, the response times shrank more over time for the exercise than the sedentary group, which to me suggests an improvement in automaticity. In addition to the discussion section, where the authors consider the effects of exercise on brain plasticity or increase certain brain chemicals that facilitate learning, the NYT comments section provides some insightful thoughts as to the mechanism of this effect. Perhaps exercise provides desirable stress, which prompts deeper memory traces. Interestingly, there were competing theories that the exercise (1) allows one to focus more, or (2) distracts the conscious focus from the lesson, allowing subconscious processes to take over. This kind of study of course prompts many more questions than it answers. Is it necessary to be exercising during the learning, or would it be as effective to be active adjacent to the learning (e.g. would the walk across campus to class count)? What's the requisite intensity to see benefits? How does the effect change if the activity is repetitive (biking/walking) vs. something that would require more attention (e.g. a dance class, yoga)? Does the benefit extend from receptive to productive skills? Should we start having class meetings at the gym? Additionally, especially given the shortcomings of the NYT write-up in relation to the full article, the teacher in me thinks this would be a fitting component to a course on scientific literacy in regards to language learning. I've already developed a sample syllabus for a prospective course on Bilingualism in the News, which looks at the way bilingualism is presented in popular media, comparing the news coverage of research to the research articles themselves. This article would make a great addition to a companion course: SLA in the News. Are these findings a reason to acquiesce to student pleas to "have class outside"? Would they still be interested if the stipulation was they'd have to walk laps or do aerobics instead of lounging in the grass? Who's up for bootcamp language learning? Burn calories and learn Spanish, win-win! I'm so conflicted about this post shared by AATSP recently. I agree with much of what Kauffman is saying here by way of reasoning (reading over flashcards for language learning) but I disagree w/the conclusion ("memory is not that big a factor in language acquisition"). I'm all for encouraging pleasure reading/listening and forgetting (or at least downplaying) flashcards, but rejecting "memory," and by extension spaced repetition, seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've written before about my opinion that language is spaced repetition and how that can translate into the language classroom. Reading/listening is in itself providing spaced repetition, as words reoccur within and across texts--that's spacing--and every time words are correctly processed and comprehended in context, that's a repetition. Restricting the interpretation of spaced repetition to essentially flashcards organized with a computer algorithm (as fancy as the algorithm may be, for instance the half-life regression Duolingo designed to improve their content cycling) and then rejecting it because flashcards are boring or overwhelming seems a bit straw-man. Something about the headline and subheading of the piece rubbed me the wrong way, and it wasn't until the last paragraph that I understood why. Kauffman ends the piece by saying reading/listening will serve him better in learning new languages "than any deliberate memorization." Perhaps in an attempt to find a pithy tag-line, there is a conflation of memory with memorization. My sense of the argument greatly improves if I imagine the latter in place of the former, e.g. "I feel increasingly that memorization is not that big a factor in language acquisition." That's an argument I can get behind. Cool short video about simultaneous interpretation and how complex a task it is. It reminds me of a question I remember getting (that I imagine other people get) when telling friends/relatives I was majoring in a foreign language: "So what are you going to do with that, interpret?" No, well-meaning friends and relatives, interpretation is a whole separate skill set from knowing more than one language. The only (sporadic) interpreting work I've ever done was all for parent/teacher conferences when I worked in the bilingual literacy program of a Minneapolis elementary/middle school. With little to no training, each semester (I think) for one afternoon and the next full day, all the bilingual teachers and associate educators in the building ran around with walkie talkies. I noticed that teachers would rattle off for over a minute if given a chance, then turn to me expectantly like I was supposed to remember everything that was said. So I started (pseudo)interrupting every time they took a breath to break what they were saying into phrases instead of paragraphs. That's the closest to simultaneous interpretation I've gotten. I always ended those days with a headache; any kind of interpretation is mentally exhausting work.
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June 2019
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