Mariachi and Spanish speaking English learners: District initiatives,models, and education policy

ABSTRACT

Districts nationwide are challenged with how best to address the needs of an increasing number of non-English or limited-English speaking students. These young people are similarly challenged as they face new environs, unfamiliar cultural settings, and significant communication issues. Findings have indicated that an arts-rich education can assist limited English speakers, many of them considered to be at-risk students, to achieve at higher levels. This article examines a number of districts with growing Hispanic populations that have implemented standards-based mariachi programs and found success in engaging Spanish speaking English learners, their parents, and the Hispanic community at large in the process. Some of these districts had considerable issues needing to be resolved but innovative solutions have led to student success. One district that serves as a model to be replicated is chronicled in detail due to how its creative program implementation subsequently informed policy. School climate data is also provided by another district, which broke down its reporting according to subgroup. Although the data do not measure only those who were enrolled solely in mariachi courses, the major findings are significant in that they indicate how music coursework impacts Latino students specifically. The impact of participating as an active music-maker in any ensemble by any participant cannot be overlooked, but for Spanish speaking English learners, the standards-based mariachi program provides a culturally familiar and welcoming setting, facilitates new patterns of learning, and addresses the priority of attaining English language proficiency.     

Gas Law for the Classroom

The author provides information on how science teachers can write science literacy objectives that help English language learners (ELLs) develop the scientific literacy needed for academic success in the science classroom. The article offers suggestions on how teachers can determine the vocabulary, language functions, and sentence structures that their students need to engage in critical thinking in science. An approach for collaboration with students' English as a second language (ESL) teacher is discussed.     

Visual immersion for cultural understanding and multimodal literacy

ABSTRACT

When considering inclusive art curriculum that accommodates all learners, including English language learners, two distinct yet inseparable issues come to mind. The first is that English language learner students can use visual language and visual literacy skills inherent in visual arts curriculum to scaffold learning in and through the arts. Second, in facilitating a sense of belonging for students whose home language and cultural aesthetic may be different from those of the dominant school culture, an authentically developed multicultural art curriculum can guide self-efficacy and inclusiveness. Both aspects of teaching art for English language learners can have the added benefits of facilitating collaborative learning opportunities and increasing worldviews for all students.     

Bilingual beginnings to learning words

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.     

The intergenerational transmission of Australian Indigenous languages: why language maintenance programmes should be family-focused

By 2050, the majority of Australia’s surviving Indigenous languages are likely to become extinct. The intergenerational transmission of languages in which children acquire languages from their parents and grandparents is a key mechanism for reversing language shift, but many Australian children whose parents speak an Indigenous language do not speak that language. Using a unique, national survey of Australian Indigenous children, I identify factors associated with the successful intergenerational transmission of Indigenous languages within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. Results highlight the importance of parents’ language use. Although community-level characteristics account for some of the variance in successful language transmission, parents who use Indigenous languages at home, speak them as well as they speak English, and do not also speak a creole language are more likely to pass those languages onto their children.     

Main Ingredients for Success in L2 Academic Writing: Outlining,Drafting and Proofreading

Spanish undergraduates of English Studies are required to submit their essays in academic English, a genre which most of them are not acquainted with. This paper aims to explore the extralinguistic side of second language (L2) academic writing, more specifically, the combination of metalinguistic items (e.g. transition and frame markers, among others) with students’ writing strategies when composing an academic text in L2 English. The research sample conveys a group of 200 Spanish undergraduates of English Studies; they are in their fourth year, so they are expected to be proficient in English academic writing but their written production quality varies considerably. Results are analysed following a mixed methodology by which metalinguistic items are statistically measured, and then contrasted with semi-structured interview results; SPSS and NVivo provide quantitative and qualitative outcomes, respectively. The analyses reveal that undergraduate students who produce complex sentences and more coherent texts employ a wider range of writing strategies both prior and while writing, being able to (un)consciously structure and design their texts more successfully. These high-scoring students make more proficient use of complex transition markers for coherence and frame markers for textual cohesion; their commonly used (pre-)writing strategies are drafting, outlining, and proofreading.     

医学实验动物学专业英语教学方法初探

本文结合作者参加医学实验动物专业英语教学和在美国访问学习经历,介绍了几种在专业英语教学中强化学生综合运用语言能力的方法,希望能够起到抛砖引玉的作用,为促进学生掌握该专业英语语言特点,提高学习效率和实际应用能力提供有益的参考。     

Infrared Photography

Although literacy plays a large role in elementary science classrooms, one thing that offers a challenge for educators is meeting the linguistic needs of English language learners (ELLs) while also meeting their content needs. An additional challenge is ensuring that academic literacy extends beyond the classroom. This article presents ways of extending classroom literacy into the home. The suggestions and activities emphasize literacy strategies appropriate for ELLs as well as English-speaking students.     

"Quit Talking and Learn English!": Conflicting Language Ideologies in an ESL Classroom

This article addresses the relationship between educational theory—as manifested in particular ideologies of teaching and learning—and classroom practice. Based on an ethnographic study of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learning at a Canadian senior public school, I outline a conflict between two language ideologies that give shape to, and are shaped by, the classroom practices of the ESL teacher, his assistants, and the students. I discuss the implications of this ideological conflict in terms of the opportunities ESL students are given, and that they create for themselves, to practice speaking English. I end by outlining how these findings can be used to shape educational policy as it relates to ESL classroom curricula in order to create a more equitable learning environment for ESL students.     

Sweet Science for ALL! Supporting Inquiry-Based Learning Through M&Ms Investigation for English Language Learners

This article describes a series of inquiry-based lessons that provide English language learners (ELLs) with opportunities to experience science and engineering practices with conceptual understanding as well as to develop their language proficiency in elementary classrooms. The four-lesson sequence models how various types of instructional strategies for ELLs can be embedded through science lessons with thoughtful consideration of ELLs’ diverse cultural backgrounds. The cross-curricular science lessons provide ELLs with opportunities to apply and enhance their mathematics, reading, writing, and communicating skills while investigating the properties of M&Ms.     

Contributions of infant word learning to language development

Infants learn the forms of words by listening to the speech they hear. Though little is known about the degree to which these forms are meaningful for young infants, the words still play a role in early language development. Words guide the infant to his or her first syntactic intuitions, aid in the development of the lexicon, and, it is proposed, may help infants learn phonetic categories.     

The evolutionary language game.

We explore how evolutionary game dynamics have to be modified to accomodate a mathematical framework for the evolution of language. In particular, we are interested in the evolution of vocabulary, that is associations between signals and objects. We assume that successful communication contributes to biological fitness: individuals who communicate well leave more offspring. Children inherit from their parents a strategy for language learning (a language acquisition device). We consider three mechanisms whereby language is passed from one generation to the next: (i) parental learning: children learn the language of their parents; (ii) role model learning: children learn the language of individuals with a high payoff; and (iii) random learning: children learn the language of randomly chosen individuals. We show that parental and role model learning outperform random learning. Then we introduce mistakes in language learning and study how this process changes language over time. Mistakes increase the overall efficacy of parental and role model learning: in a world with errors evolutionary adaptation is more efficient. Our model also provides a simple explanation why homonomy is common while synonymy is rare.     

Purposefully poetic

ABSTRACT

Arts education has no firm place in Hawaii's public school system. Even the Board of Education plan and the State Department of Education's plans differ in how they refer to and make recommendations about the place or purpose of arts education. This article reviews examples of competing policy to suggest how arts-integrated style teaching could both bridge the gap and extend strategic goals. The article provides examples of how drama-integrated style teaching has positive social and academic benefits for English language learners that specifically build their self-efficacy, helping such students to become better learners. Using these examples, the article suggests potential strategic plan revisions.     

The digital origin of human language--a synthesis

The fact that all languages known are digital poses the question of their origin. The answer developed here treats language as the interface of information theory and molecular development by showing previously unrecognized isomorphisms between the analog and digital features of language and life at the molecular level. Human language is a special case of signal transduction and hence is subject to the coding aspects of Shannon's theorems and the analog aspects of pattern recognition, each represented by genotype and phenotype. Digital language acquisition is late in evolution and postnatal development and requires a neural reorganization by a mechanism of somatic network programming in response to the environment. Such a mechanism would solve the Chomsky conundrum of how children can learn any language without knowing rules of grammar too numerous to be encoded genotypically.     

Language policy,language ideology,and visual art education for emergent bilingual students

ABSTRACT

In 1968 the Bilingual Education Act marked the first comprehensive federal intervention in the schooling of language minoritized students by creating financial incentives for bilingual education in an effort to address social and educational inequities created by poverty and linguistic isolation in schools. Since that time federal education policies related to language instruction for emergent bilingual students have undergone a number of shifts that reflect changing ideological perspectives on language and citizenship. These shifts, in turn, frame seemingly neutral educational requirements for preservice and practicing art educators related to language and visual art instruction, implicating art educators in ideological stances toward students and families who primarily speak languages other than English. This article reviews the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in its most recent reauthorization as the Every Student Succeeds Act, and offers insight into ideological implications of standards and assessments that impact art educator preparation and art teaching practices with regard to language in the art classroom, including the National Core Arts Standards and the Education Teacher Performance Assessment. Implications regarding ways art education, framed by ideological policies, might support or undermine social and educational inequities educational policies are intended to address are discussed.     

Sources of variation in developmental language disorders: evidence from eye-tracking studies of sentence production

Skilled sentence production involves distinct stages of message conceptualization (deciding what to talk about) and message formulation (deciding how to talk about it). Eye-movement paradigms provide a mechanism for observing how speakers accomplish these aspects of production in real time. These methods have recently been applied to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (LI) in an effort to reveal qualitative differences between groups in sentence production processes. Findings support a multiple-deficit account in which language production is influenced not only by lexical and syntactic constraints, but also by variation in attention control, inhibition and social competence. Thus, children with ASD are especially vulnerable to atypical patterns of visual inspection and verbal utterance. The potential to influence attentional focus and prime appropriate language structures are considered as a mechanism for facilitating language adaptation and learning.     

The Proximate Phonological Unit of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Proficiency Matters

An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables and Japanese uses moras to fill the metrical frame. In this study, we used a masked priming-naming task to investigate how bilinguals assemble their phonology for each language when the two languages differ in grain size. Highly proficient Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals showed a significant masked onset priming effect in English (L2), and a significant masked syllabic priming effect in Mandarin Chinese (L1). These results suggest that their proximate unit is phonemic in L2 (English), and that bilinguals may use different phonological units depending on the language that is being processed. Additionally, under some conditions, a significant sub-syllabic priming effect was observed even in Mandarin Chinese, which indicates that L2 phonology exerts influences on L1 target processing as a consequence of having a good command of English.     

Ladies Are Seen, Not Heard: Language Socialization in a Southern, African American Cosmetology School

This article examines language socialization among African American cosmetology students. To constitute themselves as hair experts, freshman and senior students learn to distinguish between specialized and lay hair terminology, avoid loud talking, and ask clients' diagnostic questions. Students also reframe textbook metacommunicative theories using personal narrative, role-play, and "mother wit." Findings from this ethnographic and discourse analytic study highlight the actual processes through which students learn to speak as and hence, become "hair experts." Data further reveal how language learning is shaped by students' cultural and communal contexts.     

Teaching Scientific Core Ideas through Immersing Students in Argument: Using Density as an Example

Argumentation is one of the central practices in science learning and helps deepen students’ conceptual understanding. Students should learn how to communicate ideas including procedure tests, data interpretations, and investigation outcomes in verbal and written forms through argument structure. This article presents a negotiation model to show how argument can be a vehicle to drive students to learn core ideas of density. The negotiation model consists of five phases: (1) creating a testable question, (2) constructing an argument in groups, (3) critiquing arguments publicly, (4) advancing students’ arguments, and (5) writing and reflecting individually.