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Press \"ONE\" for Englishexamines how Americans form opinions on language policy issues such as declaring English the official language, printing documents in multiple languages, and bilingual education. Deborah Schildkraut shows that people's conceptions of American national identity play an integral role in shaping their views. Using insights from American political thought and intellectual history, she highlights several components of that identity and shows how they are brought to bear on debates about language. Her analysis expands the range of factors typically thought to explain attitudes in such policy areas, emphasizing in particular the role that civic republicanism's call for active and responsible citizenship plays in shaping opinion on language issues. Using focus groups and survey data, Schildkraut develops a model of public conceptions of what it means to be American and demonstrates the complex ways in which people draw on these conceptions when forming and explaining their views. In so doing she illustrates how focus group methodology can help yield vital new insights into opinion formation. With the rise in the use of ballot initiatives to implement language policies, understanding opinion formation in this policy area has become imperative. This book enhances our understanding of this increasingly pressing concern, and points the way toward humane, effective, and broadly popular language policies that address the realities of American demographics in the twenty-first century while staying true to the nation's most revered values.

Roughly two-thirds of school-age Navajo children now attend public schools; roughly a quarter still attend federal schools. Since the mid-1950s, the federal government has put large amounts of money into effecting a shift on the Navajo Reservation from smaller one-community federal schools to larger multicommunity public schools on the Navajo Reservation. The federal schools that remain have become multicommunity boarding schools. The public schools tend to draw students from more Anglo-like, more English-speaking, homes, but these Navajo students and particularly Navajo-speaking students average some years behind state averages. This article is about a Navajo community and school that went back to parental involvement and community control, that went back to the native language and to the community and Reservation as a source of content and curriculum, and that went forward to a more appropriate, more effective education for their children.

This chapter contains sections titled: The End of the Discipline as We Know It Language versus Literature China: English Plus, Literature Minus? English Studies and “Culture Studies” in Europe and Australia Creative Writing for a Creative Economy The Global English Major

The dual-language program at Public School 84 provides immersion settings in Spanish and English, on an alternate-day basis, for classes containing both Hispanic and non-Hispanic children of varying degrees of language dominance. Teachers carefully avoid concurrent mixing of languages as they develop curriculum. Language itself is not taught; rather, it is learned through use in informal classroom structures that encourage social interaction. Bilingualism and biliteracy are expected outcomes by grade six but are secondary to the goal of academic growth. The dual-language program is an enrichment program that grew out of the school's earlier bilingual program, which was started in 1970 and rooted in the principles of heterogeneity and inclusion of children's cultural backgrounds. It has been a collaborative effort of staff, parents, and administration, with technical support from Professor Ricardo Otheguy of City College, New York.

A twenty-year debate has divided educators over the question of the use of the native language in the education of language-minority children whose English-language skills are not developed enough for regular classroom work. The dramatic increase in the number of these children-refugees, legal and illegal immigrants, and the native born-together with the diversity of languages and ethnic groups represented dictates a need for a variety of educational solutions. The Newton, Massachusetts, public school district has developed a model program that, without relying on the use of the native language, provides a comprehensive array of services. The program goals are clear, closely focused, and have the understanding and approval of teachers and parents. Newton's program responds to the needs of language-minority children from thirty different language origins and a very wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Its main features can be implemented, partly or entirely, in other school districts with similarly diverse populations.

Significance People have long debated about the global influence of languages. The speculations that fuel this debate, however, rely on measures of language importance—such as income and population—that lack external validation as measures of a language’s global influence. Here we introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network connecting languages that are co-spoken. We show that the connectivity of a language in this network, after controlling for the number of speakers of a language and their income, remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence when validated against two independent measures of the cultural content produced by a language’s speakers. Languages vary enormously in global importance because of historical, demographic, political, and technological forces. However, beyond simple measures of population and economic power, there has been no rigorous quantitative way to define the global influence of languages. Here we use the structure of the networks connecting multilingual speakers and translated texts, as expressed in book translations, multiple language editions of Wikipedia, and Twitter, to provide a concept of language importance that goes beyond simple economic or demographic measures. We find that the structure of these three global language networks (GLNs) is centered on English as a global hub and around a handful of intermediate hub languages, which include Spanish, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese. We validate the measure of a language’s centrality in the three GLNs by showing that it exhibits a strong correlation with two independent measures of the number of famous people born in the countries associated with that language. These results suggest that the position of a language in the GLN contributes to the visibility of its speakers and the global popularity of the cultural content they produce.

People use more positive words than negative words. Referred to as “linguistic positivity bias” (LPB), this effect has been found across cultures and languages, prompting the conclusion that it is a panhuman tendency. However, although multiple competing explanations of LPB have been proposed, there is still no consensus on what mechanism(s) generate LPB or even on whether it is driven primarily by universal cognitive features or by environmental factors. In this work we propose that LPB has remained unresolved because previous research has neglected an essential dimension of language: time. In four studies conducted with two independent, time-stamped text corpora (Google books Ngrams and the New York Times), we found that LPB in American English has decreased during the last two centuries. We also observed dynamic fluctuations in LPB that were predicted by changes in objective environment, i.e., war and economic hardships, and by changes in national subjective happiness. In addition to providing evidence that LPB is a dynamic phenomenon, these results suggest that cognitive mechanisms alone cannot account for the observed dynamic fluctuations in LPB. At the least, LPB likely arises from multiple interacting mechanisms involving subjective, objective, and societal factors. In addition to having theoretical significance, our results demonstrate the value of newly available data sources in addressing long-standing scientific questions.

The purpose of BEST Plus is to assess the ability to understand and use unprepared, conversational, everyday language within topic areas generally covered in adult education courses. It is one of several standardized assessments approved by the National Reporting System (NRS, 2008), which is the accountability system for federally funded ESL and adult education in the USA. The test is used to measure language gain in individuals as well as the overall effectiveness of a language program through a pretest-posttest process. This article provides a review of BEST Plus. (Contains 1 table.)

With the development and maturity of computer and multimedia technology, computer-aided teaching represents advanced teaching ideas and teaching methods. Computer-aided learning systems can dynamically generate personalized teaching content and strategies through intelligent system inferences. The diagnosis mechanism is used to judge the learning level of students and provide a favorable basis for teachers to adjust teaching content. Based on the advancement of the current English teaching reform, the use of computer aid has become a trend in English teaching. It analyzes the current design requirements of computer aided English teaching systems and designs a teaching system based on C++ and Windows. The results prove that based on C++ and Windows, the design and realization of computer-assisted English teaching cannot increase the actual teaching efficiency by 20%, and can also play the value of computer-assisted English teaching, improve the level of English teaching by 12.0%. The conclusion shows that in the design of computer-assisted English teaching system, the design system based on C++ and Windows can effectively improve the quality of computer-assisted English teaching and have a positive impact..

This research analyzes the inclusion of the Pseint programming language in educational institutions in South America, as a language for the beginning of programming logic through instructions in Spanish. The institutions with a registered profile that are listed in the Sourceforge platform are analyzed, from the 9 countries that speak the Spanish language, although the language is used by a large number of teachers, they are not taken into account unless they maintain this registered profile. It is shown that the countries with more institutions adopting the language are Colombia at 25.73%, Argentina at 18.93%, and Peru at 17.48%, and the proximity of each country is analyzed to know its influence.