The U.S. Department of Education launched a new interactive web page dedicated to data on English Learner students (ELs). The site uses colorful maps, bar graphs, and charts to provide a clearer understanding of America’s diverse ELs population in a “data story” format based on data from the Common Core of Data (CCD). The data…
Raohe Street Night Market in Taipei – Taiwan.Taiwan’s government has approved a national language-development bill to protect linguistic diversity, which requires national language courses throughout preschool, elementary, and high school education. At the moment, mother-tongue education is only mandatory in elementary schools, while it is an elective course for high school students.The bill also requires…
Over half a billion people speak HindiThe Indian government is prepared to spend up to four billion rupees ($63 million) to make Hindi one of the official languages of the UN, according to the country’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj.Speaking in the Lok Sabha (India’s lower house of parliament) last month, Swaraj said that the…
According to a new study published in Child Development, bilingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are better at switching from one task to another than their monolingual peers. “This is a novel and surprising finding,” says Prof. Aparna Nadig, the senior author of the paper, from the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at…
According to a poll recently released by the British Council, one out of every five UK adults (about 13 million people) said they plan to learn another language as a New Year’s resolution, while one in three (over 20 million Brits) intends to try and learn at least some phrases in another language in the…
It’s long been known that babies modify their sounds to become more speech-like in response to feedback from their caregivers, and that they learn things have names by caregivers naming objects. But a news study, published in Developmental Science examines how specific types of babbling elicit particular parental behavior. To answer this, the research team—Rachel…
If you type “Facebook educational usage” into Google, it will show millions of relevant sites in just .278 seconds. With the popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites, such as Twitter and Renren (China), there is an assumption that such sites are useful in classrooms and outside of classrooms. It is not surprising that…
A study recently published in European Psychiatry suggests that mothers who took acetaminophen during their pregnancies had higher rates of language delays in their two-year-old daughters compared to mothers who did not. Delays, however were not seen in boys, who generally develop language at a slower rate than girls. The study was written by researchers…
Iran has announced that English would no longer be taught in primary schools after Islamic leaders warned that early exposure to English would help facilitate a “cultural invasion.” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has previously expressed concern over speaking English. The ban comes as a particular surprise, as many Iranians study and speak English….
Does one have to speak Spanish to be considered Hispanic or Latino in the U.S.? What is the role of Hispanic media in the country which elected Donald Trump a year ago? How important is the Spanish language to Hispanic media? How does such media affect the use of Spanish in a country with 58…