The recently released National K–12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report shows that a total of 10.6 million U.S. students ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade are studying a world language, accounting for only about 20% of U.S. school children. As this is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive study of world language enrollments across the formal U.S. education…
President Trump has announced a new executive action restoring restrictions on travel and trade with Cuba, “I am canceling the previous administration’s completely one-sided deal,” he announced to an appreciative crowd of Cuban dissidents in Miami. One of the major changes in the policy directive is that U.S. travelers making educational people-to-people trips can no…
Countless studies have proven that there are many benefits, in both cognitive and social tasks, so the new findings on recognition of voices by Dr. Susannah Levi add to the growing pile of research in support of bilingualism. Research Levi selected 41 children (22 monolinguals and 19 bilinguals) who were then separated into two groups…
aztec chocolate pattern UCLA historian, Kevin Terraciano, is working with art experts at the Getty Center in collaboration with Italy’s Laurentian Library in Florence to create an online, annotated version of the ancient Florentine Codex —an Aztec text written in Nahuatl dating from 1577. There is only one copy of the codex currently in existence,…
Revolutionizing Education Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to revolutionize education as we know it. Specifically, it immerses students in their learning more than any other available medium. It blocks out both visual and auditory distractions in the classroom and has the ability to deeply connect students with the material they are learning in a…
A Gap Emerges In the mid-’90s, as personal computer and internet access was becoming more available to many in the U.S., a correlation could be observed between access to technology and socioeconomic status. Scholars, policy makers, and advocacy groups referred to this as the “ digital divide,” and many school districts began investing in both…
Teaching an advanced Spanish conversation course at the university level can be challenging for many reasons, but for me, the biggest challenge was trying to find a textbook with clearly organized topics for conversation. I found plenty of wonderful textbooks that were appropriate for low-advanced or high-intermediate Spanish conversation, but nothing just right for advanced…
Flag of Friesland of NetherlandsThe Frisian languages are a closely related group of Germanic languages, and has about 500,000 speakers who live in the Netherlands and Germany. There are three types of Frisian (West Frisian, Saterland Frisian, and North Frisian). Saterland and North Frisian are officially recognized and protected as minority languages in Germany, while…
The Welcome sign of Acoma Pueblo, Sky City in New MexicoNearly two dozen of the approximately 100 last remaining speakers of the Acoma Keres language have answered the call for a new project designed to restore the language for generations to come. Last month, they came together to record their voices for the Acoma Dictionary…
According to a new report by Transparency Market Solutions the value of the cloud-based language learning market will grow from $146.3m in 2016 to $427.5m by 2025, with much of the demand for virtual learning coming from North America, which accounted for 50% of revenue in 2016. Languages considered in the scope of study were…