Downloadable classroom poster from Middlebury Interactive Languages.
Seal of Biliteracy
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?
Shortage of Dual Language Teachers
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
Diversity Needed in the Foreign Service.
U.S. foreign policy is informed and improved by a wider range of experiences, understandings and outlooks. To represent America abroad and relate to the world beyond our borders, the nation needs diplomats whose family stories, language skills, religious traditions and cultural sensitivities help them to establish connections and avoid misunderstandings. For some of our international allies that are themselves facing diversity issues, American diplomats of diverse backgrounds can help them build bridges. For others, diversity in the American diplomatic corps makes the United States seem more approachable.
The Washington Post: The Foreign Service is too white. We’d know, we’re top diplomats.
Who are Dual Language Learners?
New America’s EdCentral is publishing a part of a 10-week series on research, policies, and practices pertaining to the education of dual language learners (DLLs) in U.S. public schools.
Children between the ages of zero- and eight-years-old are the most diverse age group in the United States. Compared to other age groups, they are more likely to be racial and/or ethnic minorities, be born to immigrant parents, and speak a language other than English. Many of these young children are considered dual language learners (DLLs). Yet despite this fact, it is somewhat difficult to find a good estimation for just how many DLLs there are.
The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.
New America EdCentral: http://www.edcentral.org/dllreader2/
Children exposed to multiple languages may be better natural communicators
Researchers discovered that children from multilingual environments are better at interpreting a speaker’s meaning than children who are exposed only to their native tongue. The most novel finding is that the children do not even have to be bilingual themselves; it is the exposure to more than one language that is the key for building effective social communication skills.
UChicago News: Children exposed to multiple languages may be better natural communicators
America’s Lacking Language Skills
Kirsten Brecht-Baker, the founder of Global Professional Search, recently told me about what she calls “the global war for talent.” Americans, she said, are in danger of needing to import human capital because insufficient time or dollars are being invested in language education domestically. “It can’t just be about specialization [in engineering or medicine or technology] anymore,” she said. “They have to communicate in the language.”
From The Atlantic: America’s Lacking Language Skills
Hearing of the Joint Committee on Education
Support the LOOK Bill and the Seal of Biliteracy Bill
Hearing of the Joint Committee on Education
Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 10 a.m.
Massachusetts State House, Room 2A
- See our Legislation page for information about the bills.
- Let us know via the Contact Us page if you plan to testify.
- Instructions on how to take action – testify and contact your legislators: English / Spanish
The Value of Language Diversity
We can do more Massachusetts — Support Language Opportunity!
Language diversity brings many benefits: each tongue contains a wealth of knowledge, often reflecting rich spiritual and cultural traditions, critical medicinal and agricultural practices and unique understandings, all providing a lens into how different groups of people view the world. Language is intrinsic to a people’s identity, so to lose a language may mean to lose a people.
We need to take seriously the proposition that languages are part of a person’s – and a society’s – identity and we need to value languages as we do other precious resources.
What would this look like? Local schools would teach in multiple tongues…
- From the Huffington Post: Valuing Languages
LOOK Bill – Letters to the Editor
Two Letters to the Editor were published in The Boston Globe in support of the March 31 Globe editorial on the LOOK Bill:
- In lagging on bilingual education, we’re squandering valuable asset, by Phyllis Hardy and Helen Solorzano for the Language Opportunity Coalition
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Boston’s failings highlight flaws in state’s English immersion law, by Patrick Proctor and Mariela Páez, Lynch School of Education at Boston College.
Language Opportunity 
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