The House of Representatives has rejected some significant cuts to federal education spending proposed by education secretary Betsy DeVos and President Trump in the $1.3 trillion spending bill awaiting Senate approval. DeVos and Trump wanted to cut the Education Department’s budget by $3.6 billion and use more than $1 billion to encourage school choice, including…
Emmanuel Macron By OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsPresident Macron Announces Plan to Promote French worldwide and labels French teachers ‘heroes’ France’s President Emmanuel Macron, whose mastery and use of English is unprecedented among French leaders, has unveiled a plan to promote his native tongue, aiming to make it the first…
The government of British Columbia has announced a revitalization plan for Indigenous language funding. British Columbia is home to 60% of First Nations’ languages in Canada, with around 34 Indigenous language and 203 First Nations communities. The money was allocated to the First Peoples’ Cultural Council in hopes of reversing the history of colonization within…
TESOL International Association has released a “set of universal guidelines drawn from decades of research in language pedagogy and language acquisition theory.” The 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners are “targets for teaching excellence” designed to support any English language instruction program. “TESOL embarked on this project because we recognized the need for…
The constitutional crisis in Spain’s autonomous region of Cataluña may soon affect its classrooms. Madrid’s control over Catalan regional affairs is continuing in the wake of the region’s inability to form a government following December’s election, a situation that began after the Catalan parliament declared unilateral independence in late October.The central government may now make…
Domes of the The Badshahi Mosque (Emperor Mosque ) built in 1673 by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in Lahore, PakistanPakistani and Indian media jumped on a story last month that Pakistan had decided to make Chinese one of the country’s official languages, in addition Urdu and English. According to reports, the Senate of Pakistan had…
More than half a millennium after most Jews were expelled from the country in 1492, Spain is officially recognizing their language, Ladino, as a type of Spanish. In Madrid last month, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE—Real Academia Española) announced the establishment of a new Ladino academy in Israel. “One of its goals will be to…
Instead of further denigrating the education profession by suggesting that teachers double up as armed bodyguards in the wake of the latest school shooting, we need to be taking radical steps to improve their conditions, pay, and status to ensure not only that the next generation has enough teachers but that those teachers have enough…
A language previously unknown to linguists has been discovered by Swedish researchers. The language, Jedek, is spoken by only 280 people on the Malay peninsula. The language was discovered to be spoken in a town that was previously studied by anthropologists. The language first became known during a linguistic survey called Tongues of the Semang. The…
Last month, an episode of ABC’s primetime sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, called “Ride the Tiger,” broke ground by being about 50% spoken in Mandarin. Writer Jeff Chiang explained the rationale behind it to the Hollywood Reporter: “As a first-generation Chinese-American who grew up in the 1990s, I didn’t see a whole lot of Chinese…