Thirteen states now offer a “seal of biliteracy,” and at least 10 more are working toward implementing a similar award. Students in nine of the nation’s 10 largest school systems can earn statewide or district-level recognition with the seal affixed to their diplomas or transcripts as official proof that they can speak, read, and write in more than one language.
Education Week: More States and Districts Embrace Biliteracy
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment of interpreters and translators to grow by 46 percent between 2012 and 2022.
NPR: Hospitals Struggle To Help Farmworkers Who Speak Triqui Or Mixteco
As dual-language programs are added around the country, Massachusetts falls farther behind in promoting language education:
School leaders in New York City, the nation’s largest district, are expanding their dual-language offerings beyond Spanish and Mandarin to include Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Haitian Creole.
The Houston school district opened an Arabic-language school this year, in part because the metropolitan region has seen its Arabic-speaking population spike in recent years.
And in the Westminster, Calif., schools, the state’s first Vietnamese dual-language program opened in Little Saigon, a Vietnamese enclave in Orange County.
Education Week: Districts Diversify Languages Offered in Dual-Immersion
White House Task Force on New Americans Offers Fourth of Educational and Linguistic Integration Webinar Series, on “The Benefits of Dual-Language Learning,”
Wednesday, September 30, 2015, 2–3 p.m.
This webinar—co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA)—explores the growing body of evidence suggesting that dual-language learners—those who are exposed to more than one language during the course of their development—have cognitive, meta-cognitive, and socio-emotional advantages over children who were exposed to only one language. Among immigrants, higher levels of English fluency and skill are also correlated with higher levels of education and longer residency in the United States. Panelists will share current research and promising practices for promoting biliteracy and increasing English proficiency in immigrant communities.
The webinar link will soon be posted on the webinar series page of OELA’s website, where you can also find materials from past webinars.
Representatives Price (D-NC-4), Lance (R-NJ-7), Crowley (D-NY-14) and Young (R-AK-at large) have introduced the World Language Advancement Act (WLAA), a bipartisan piece of legislation that retains a vitally important, cost-effective program to ensure access to high-quality and innovative world language programming in America’s schools.
The amendment retains a vitally important, cost-effective program to ensure access to high-quality world language programming in America’s schools. The ECAA does not provide for world language programming, depriving the Federal Government of its programmatic ability to signal the importance of world languages to SEAs and LEAs.
American youth deserve to be globally competitive. Knowledge of another language, in addition to English, confers a wide range of benefits on the individual:
Please write to your Representative asking for support for this important legislation. Your support and action are vital to our collective efforts to ensure that World Language programs remain funded by the US Department of Education. See the American Council on The Teaching of Foreign Languages website: http://capwiz.com/actfl/issues/alert/?alertid=67181626#sthash.nNWhHKbW.dpuf
A commentary in Education Week supporting expanded bilingual education in ESEA reauthorization:
While employers are clamoring for bilingual or even multilingual employees for an increasingly globalized economy, U.S. schools turn out relatively few students who are even somewhat competent in a second language. Hard figures are unavailable, but we know that only 5 percent of the 4.2 million Advanced Placement exams given in 2014 were in a foreign language, and only slightly more than half these students scored a 4 or a 5. That’s about 100,000 students—about six-tenths of 1 percent of the country’s nearly 16 million high school students. Most egregiously, instead of maintaining and building on the home-language abilities of 11 million students in our public schools, we actually attempt to quash them, if only by neglect.
Education Week: Congress: Bilingualism Is Not a Handicap
Congratulations to the students around the country who graduated from high school with a Seal of Biliteracy — Let’s make this possible for Massachusetts students as well!
See more at SealofBiliteracy.org.
A report on Dual Language programs in a Seattle school district.
“This is Lucas,” says a first-grader, introducing his friend. “A long time ago in kindergarten, he used to not know Spanish.” “Yeah, I learned a lot more,” Lucas says. Another student agrees that Lucas has improved: “Yeah, he’s saying a lot of words and compound words in Spanish.”
KUOW.org: Bilingual by 2026: Highline Schools Aim For Dual-Language Graduates
Support the Seal of Biliteracy in Massachusetts! Support An Act to Establish a State Seal of Biliteracy H.422/S.336 and An Act relative to Language Opportunity for Our Kids (LOOK) H.498/S.262.
“A lot of businesses want to know, ‘Do you know Chinese? And how do I know you know?’ And you can have your certificate as verification.”
NPR: On The High School Diploma: A ‘Bilingual’ Stamp Of Approval?
The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) has cited finding highly qualified teachers as the greatest challenge in implementing an immersion program. Aside from needing to be fluent in the target language, teachers also need to be competent in language learning strategies and the relevant pedagogical skills.
The LOOK Bill will create a certification for Dual Language educators in Massachusetts.
Education Week: Shortage of Dual-Language Teachers: Filling the Gap
Language Opportunity 
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