Volume
VI - April 6, 2004
Welcome
to the E-Comp! - a complimentary monthly newsletter
brought to you by Prolinguistica.com.
******************************************************
First,
apologies...
...for
the lateness of this month's issue of E-comp! And by way of explanation,
information that may be of interest to some of you.
Since
July of last year I've been pursing licensing as a dyslexia correction
facilitator through Davis Dyslexia Association International®.
I plan to add this service to those offered by Prolinguistica. Licensing
is obtained by attending about 7 weeks of training, and doing approximately
180 hours of field work. I've just completed the training sessions
and 120 hours of fieldwork. That training prevented me from getting
this issue out on time.
Although
Davis Dyslexia Association is known all over the world, it's a low
key operation, and if you have no urgent personal concern about
dyslexia, you may not have heard of it. Initially, I checked it
out because part of the correction process involves working with
clay. I've long used clay in language classes, so this piqued my
interest. In addition, most of us are probably worried about the
significant number of students who are referred to "special
ed" or placed on medications (such as Ritalin), but in spite
of the best efforts and intentions of all involved, don't subsequently
receive instruction that meets their needs. I've also always been
intrigued by the fact that "special" students do so well
with TPR; I've often had students in my classes who were "special
ed" qualified, yet who seemed bright, sensible, functional
in the real world, just not so functional in school. So I visited
the website, www.dyslexia.com,
and read Ron Davis' book, The
Gift of Dyslexia, which started me down a fascinating
road of discovery. I highly recommend you read this book. Be prepared
to be surprised.
One
of the things Davis has been doing is looking into ways to apply
his ideas in a classroom setting. The licensing I'm pursuing is
to provide programs for individuals. But Ron Davis and his colleagues
have come up with a program called Davis Learning Strategies ®,
which is designed to be used in K, 1st, and 2nd grade classrooms.
You can find out about DLS at www.davislearn.com.
A seven year pilot study in California is described at the site;
the results were stellar: no special education referrals from classrooms
where the Davis Learning Strategies were used, but higher than usual
referrals to gifted and talented programs. So watch the Prolinguistica
website this summer - you'll see an announcement of a subdivision
and new services, with links to information about DDAI ® and
Davis Learning Strategies.
******************************************************
For
your reading pleasure…
Talk
about your less commonly taught languages...
Pupils to learn Elvish in school
PA News
05/03/2004
http://www.tes.co.uk/breaking_news/story.asp?id=21807
Pupils at a city school are being given the opportunity to learn
an Elvish language devised by Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien.
Students at Turves Green Boys’ Technology College in Birmingham
are being offered weekly out-of-hour lessons in Sindarin - a conversational
form of Elvish invented by the Oxford academic and based on Welsh
sounds.
The school’s special needs co-ordinator Zainab Thorp said
she was offering the out-of-hour classes to the boys, some of whom
had special educational needs, to boost their self-esteem.
Mrs Thorp said: “The recent success of the Lord of the Rings
films has increased the interest in learning Elvish.
”The children really enjoy it. It breaks the idea that education
should simply be aimed at getting a job.”
She said Tolkien was expert in ancient languages who had developed
two forms of Elvish. Sindarin was based on Welsh sounds and was
the more commonly used, while Quenya, which related to Finnish,
was largely a ceremonial language.
Mrs Thorp said: “A couple of the boys are very into role-playing
games. Knowing Sindarin is useful when giving orders to their Elvish
armies.
”The reason I’m offering the lessons is to give the
boys, some of whom have special educational needs, something to
boost their self-esteem.
”They have responded very well and are eager to learn more.
It’s also very useful if they want to go on to university
to study, as it involves looking at some of Tolkien’s old
manuscripts. This develops some very complex skills.”
The
secret language of Chinese women
Tongue devised by 'sworn sisters' came down through centuries
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2004/02/29/MNGFO59IQF1.DTL
Edward Cody, Washington Post
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Pumei Village, Hunan Province, C -- Nowadays, it would be called
empowering women. But back then, centuries ago, it was just a way
for the sworn sisters of this rugged and tradition-laden Chinese
countryside to share their hopes, their joys and their many sorrows.
Only men learned to read and write Chinese, and bound feet and social
strictures confined women to their husband's homes. So somehow --
scholars are unsure how, or exactly when -- the women of this fertile
valley in the southwestern corner of Hunan province developed their
own way to communicate. It was a delicate, graceful script handed
down from grandmother to granddaughter, from elderly aunt to adolescent
niece, from girlfriend to girlfriend -- and never, ever shared with
the men and boys.
So was born nushu, or women's script, a single-sex writing system
that Chinese scholars believe is the only one of its kind.
"The girls used to get together and sing and talk, and that's
when we learned from one another," said Yang Huanyi, 98, a
wrinkled farmer's widow whom scholars consider the most accomplished
reader and writer among a fast- dwindling number of nushu practitioners.
"It made our lives better, because we could express ourselves
that way."
Renewed interest
Scholars and local authorities have taken renewed interest in the
exclusive language, trying to preserve it as the last women who
are fluent reach the end of their lives. Generations of women in
the region once penned their diaries in nushu, and the few journals
that survived offer a unique chronicle of these private lives long
ago. Today, girls learn Chinese along with the boys, so learning
nushu has less appeal.
Nushu in some ways resembles Chinese, if some of the characters
were stretched and altered. But it also differs in many respects.
For example, according to researchers, the letters represent sound
-- the sounds of this region's Cheng Guan Tuhua dialect -- and not
ideas, as in the Chinese ideograms that men studied and wrote. Nushu
was written from top to bottom in wispy, elongated letters in columns
that read from right to left.
Much remains unknown about nushu. Its origins, reaching perhaps
as far back as the third century, have been the subject of scholarly
exchanges among a handful of researchers in China and elsewhere.
They know it was used in Hunan's Jiangyong County, in south central
China about 200 miles northwest of Guangzhou, and believe it was
limited to what is now Jiangyong's Shungjian Xu Township, which
includes Pumei and these days has a population of around 19, 000
people. But even that is not certain.
What seems clear is that nushu was fostered by the region's ancient
custom of "sworn sisters," whereby village girls would
pledge one another fealty and friendship forever. The tight sorority,
which included growing up together in cobbled village lanes and
gathering with adult women to weave and embroider, inevitably was
shattered when the time for marriage came. Tradition dictated that
a bride go away to her groom's home -- and that is where nushu came
in.
Three days after the wedding, the adolescent bride would receive
a "Third Day Book," a clothbound volume in which her sworn
sisters and her mother would record their sorrow at losing a friend
and daughter and express best wishes for happiness in the married
life ahead. The first half-dozen pages contained these laments and
hopes, written in nushu that the groom couldn't read. The rest were
left blank for the bride to record her own feelings and experiences
-- in nushu -- for what would become a treasured diary.
The sworn sisterhood tradition has led some scholars to speculate
that nushu developed as a secret language for lesbians, according
to Zhao Liming, a literature professor at Tsinghua University in
Beijing who helped bring nushu to researchers' attention in the
1980s and is one of the foremost authorities on it.
Way to express themselves
"But that is not true," she said in an interview. "They
just wanted a way to express themselves." She added: "Women
needed a spiritual life. They could not write Chinese, but they
wanted to express their feelings."
Most important to the women who learned it, sometimes memorizing
letters written on the palms of their hands because of a lack of
paper, nushu liberated them from illiteracy.
The way nushu came to light some 20 years ago also has been clouded
in competing theories.
Lin Lee Lee at the University of Minnesota has written that a Jiangyong
County woman visiting relatives in Beijing in 1982 astounded them
by singing and then writing a language and script they could not
understand. The relatives passed along their amazement to scholars,
she said in a conference presentation, and research into the strange
female writing system began.
But Zhou Shuoyi, 78, a self-described countryside intellectual who
lives in nearby Yongzhou city, said he knows better, and he explained
why.
Zhou's father, a schoolteacher, was impressed by the strange writing
he couldn't understand and urged the young Zhou to investigate.
Later, working for the Jiangyong County cultural department in the
1950s, Zhou said he discovered a number of elderly peasant women
still mastered nushu. A speaker of the Tuhua dialect, he was also
able to get a whiff of what nushu was about -- and what a cultural
discovery there was to make.
"At that time, many grandmothers could sing it, write it and
read it," he said in an interview. "In society at that
time, there was injustice between men and women, and women needed
this language as a way to express themselves."
Zhou reported his findings to authorities in Beijing, but by then
the Cultural Revolution had convulsed China. As an intellectual,
Zhou said, he was branded a rightist and forced to halt his work.
Red Guard zealots destroyed the nushu documents he had painstakingly
accumulated.
"But the stuff in here could not be burned," he smiled,
pointing at his head and its tufts of white hair.
So in 1979, when calm had returned, Zhou said, he went back to work
at a local museum and resumed his interest in nushu, eventually
learning to read and write.
In 1982, he said, he wrote a book about the region's culture, including
a section on nushu. Scholars from relatively nearby Wuhan, from
faraway Beijing and eventually even from abroad started dropping
by. Nushu had been discovered.
"Now a lot of people are studying it, and a lot of people come
here to ask about it," he said.
1,500-word vocabulary
Zhao said that over the last 20 years she has guided a number of
graduate students, Chinese and foreign, in studying nushu at Tsinghua.
Estimates of its contemporary vocabulary range from 670 to 1,500
words. A dozen of Zhao's students recently started compiling them
in a dictionary. The students include three young men, she specified
with a smile.
But aside from scholars, Zhao and Zhou said, fewer than 10 people
can fluently read and write nushu. Yang, the 98-year-old, has little
time left. Several other women in Jiangyong County who can read
and write, or at least read, also have neared the end of their lives.
Local authorities nevertheless have seized on nushu's cultural value,
and on its tourism potential. An $80,000 school and museum went
up last year here in Pumei, where Hu Mei Yue, 42, visits every Saturday
to teach nushu to any village girls who show up.
Hu, who learned from her grandmother, the late Gao Yinxin, also
embroiders bags and handkerchiefs with nushu writings to sell to
tourists, who people here hope will start coming soon to see what
they have baptized "Pumei, Nushu Cultural Village."
"It's very interesting, and Gao Yinxin left this valuable thing
for our village," said Hu Linyin, 10, a Pumei girl attending
Hu's session Saturday.
"I don't know how people can write like this," remarked
classmate Hu Cui Cui, 12, who said she can read about 200 words.
"Each word is like a flower.
"In
Siberia, a Race To Write a Dictionary Before the Subject Dies
As Khanty Dialects Fade, Ms. Parnyuk Scribbles; Qaqi and the Three
Bears
By JEANNE WHALEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 26, 2004
http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/mailing_lists/CLA-L/2004/03/0992.php
LUKASHKIN YAR, Russia -- Lyuba Parnyuk had traveled thousands of
miles across frozen swampland to make an elderly woman sing, but
the sun was going down, and the young linguist's tape recorder was
still empty. Outside, her Siberian snowmobile driver was cold and
hungry. "Please," she pleaded. "Just one song."
Sitting next to her in the remote cabin was 71-year-old Elizaveta
Sigilyetova, one of the last living speakers of a rare dialect of
Khanty, a regional tongue nearly overwhelmed by Russia's slavic
majority. Forced to speak Russian since her school days, the petite
grandmother was slow to remember her native language. But finally,
fiddling with the tails of her headscarf, she filled the room with
a hoarse melody:
"Änkel wajah qimlen semkan lalten pa qit' qaskin ninet."
"The eagle owl with sad eyes sings that all the men and women
have gone."
Delighted, Ms. Parnyuk scribbled down new words and coaxed a few
more songs from her hostess. It was a coup for the 22-year-old graduate
student, who braves blizzards and voyages to the farthest corners
of the taiga to document little-known languages before they die
out.
Based in Tomsk, an oil and university town lined with 18th-century
log cabins, Ms. Parnyuk and her colleagues at Tomsk State Pedagogical
University are fighting a global epidemic: Linguists estimate that
two-thirds of the world's 6,500 languages will disappear this century
as the increasingly global economy and culture promote a few dominant
languages.
A crossroads of migrating peoples since the Stone Age, Siberia's
forests once echoed with the songs and legends of the Saams, the
Karels, the Veps and Moris, and dozens of other tribes. Their remoteness
helped preserve their cultures for centuries, but Siberia's Russification
over the last 50 years means the last generation of about 30 language
groups is now dying off.
To many -- even to some native Siberians -- the drive to preserve
local tongues seems futile. Yet every time a language is lost, thousands
of years of culture, religion and medical knowledge die with it,
linguists argue. They worry about the disappearance of Pongyong
(in Nepal), Arabama (in Australia) and Lower Sorbian (in Germany).
"If you wait another two years in this region, it'll be too
late," Ms. Parnyuk said after her recording session, sipping
tea in the kitchen of a nearby Khanty family.
WORD PLAY
Khanty ways of saying "bear":
. "Ih"- Bear, as hunters would say it
. "Pupi" - Bear, as women or children would say it
. "Qaqi" - Bear, a sweet nickname that means "little
brother"
. "Worong Qu" - Bear, meaning "man of the forest"
. "Mä elle ih welsim" - I killed a big bear
Ms. Parnyuk's travels took her to three remote villages along the
Ob River, a shallow waterway 2,000 miles east of Moscow that once
supported thousands of Khanty.
The tribe is distantly related to the Finns, Estonians and Hungarians,
who migrated west from Siberia 40,000 years ago. Some linguists
also see links to native Americans.
For centuries the Khanty fished and hunted rabbit and moose near
the Ob. Their language had no alphabet but was rich with legends
about mammoths, shamans and pagan gods. Awestruck by bears, the
Khanty invented a whole separate vocabulary to describe the animal
and its body parts.
Slavic missionaries turned up in the 18th century to preach Christianity.
Then the Russian Revolution brought lasting change. Bent on forging
hundreds of ethnic minorities into one Soviet citizenry, the Bolsheviks
herded Khanty children to boarding schools and adults to collective
farms, where they were forced to speak Russian.
When the Soviets discovered oil in Siberia in the 1960s, millions
of Russian-speaking workers invaded Khanty land to drill wells and
build cities.
Demoralized, most Khanty either assimilated into Russian life or
took to drink, typically vodka or moonshine. "Russians tell
us to this day that we weren't literate, we couldn't read or write.
Well, OK, they brought culture, literacy and education, but they
also destroyed our way of life," says Klavdia Demko, a Khanty
activist who helps arrange Ms. Parnyuk's travels.
In the 1950s, a distinguished Soviet linguist named Andrei Dulzon
began meticulously documenting indigenous languages, traveling by
motorboat to remote settlements along the Ob. Today, at the university
in Tomsk, surrounded by stacks of Mr. Dulzon's vocabulary-card files,
graduate students compile dictionaries, write ABC books for kids,
and train teachers to keep up the languages in rural schools. They
set out on expeditions as often as possible.
Andrei Filtchenko, a Tomsk linguist finishing his Ph.D. on Khanty
dialects at Rice University in Houston, once walked 40 miles through
a bog to visit two elderly Khanty hunters. Navigating the knee-deep
water in rubber boots, he finally reached a log house sitting on
a shallow lake. Delighted by the company, the hunters regaled him
with tall tales about bears.
"Ninety percent of my language data comes from bear stories,"
says Mr. Filtchenko, who developed an interest in indigenous people
after reading "The Last of the Mohicans" as a child.
Khanty superstitions pepper every journey. Last summer, Mr. Filtchenko
cut himself while swimming. The wound swelled. The next day, several
Khanty led him to a sacred log cabin where he laid a piece of cloth
and a few coins before a wooden deity inside. "The cut healed
in one or two days," he says.
Ms. Parnyuk paid for her recent two-week expedition herself, keeping
costs to under $250. She stayed with families and often hitched
rides with drivers such as Father Alexei, an orthodox priest who
drove her from village to village in a 1979 Moskvich, the Soviet
equivalent of a Ford Escort. The priest's rattly car broke down
twice and finally plowed into a snowbank.
In Lukashkin-Yar, population 600, Ms. Parnyuk cruised from cabin
to cabin on a snowmobile in the minus 40 degree temperatures. She
found only three remaining Khanty who could speak the regional dialect,
known as Alexandrovskoye. They helped the linguist correct a draft
of a Khanty dictionary and filled her notebook with legends.
After her tea break, she zoomed off to another elderly informant,
a retired oil worker who had chatted at length with her the previous
summer. Ducking into the door of his disheveled hut, she found him
sitting in his undershorts, drunk on moonshine. "Tell us about
all the oil fields you've explored," she said gently. But realizing
it was no use, she left a package of food and departed.
The Tomsk linguists hope to finish their Khanty dictionary by 2008.
Ms. Demko, the activist, has offered to raise money from local Khanty
to help sponsor the book.
"We are all counting on Lyuba," she says. But she admits
young Khanty such as her nephew, a computer programmer, are more
interested in studying English.
Ms. Parnyuk, who now speaks Khanty better than many of her informants,
has few illusions that her work will restore the Alexandrovskoye
dialect.
Still, she adds, the Khanty have remarkable faith in renewal. "When
they bury someone, they put broken things in his grave," she
says. "They think that in the next life, all broken things
will become whole again."
Write to Jeanne Whalen at jeanne.whalen@wsj.com1
Mi Historia, NY Culture
On a makeshift set in Florida, 24 journalism production students
at Aspira South Leadership Charter School are making a movie. And
the script -- written by the middle-schoolers -- tells the story
of their lives as the children of migrant workers.
Read about it at: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/8073746.htm
Preschoolers Study Foreign Tongues
Education Week
March 24, 2004
By Linda Jacobson
Lafayette, Calif.
The 4-year-olds grab foam alphabet letters from a pile in the middle
of a table, matching them to the large words on pieces of construction
paper: le pantalon, la cravate, les savates.
"Trés bien, Chloe," instructor Catherine Jolivet-Johnson
praises one of the preschoolers.
Interest in foreign-language instruction in preschool is growing,
both among parents and early-childhood educators trying to meet
the demand. The interest, though, comes at a time when some districts
are scaling back on such programs in the elementary grades in order
to spend more time on reading and mathematics—the subjects
currently tested to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind
Act. Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=28Language.h23
In the "Oh, please..." department...
British Government Hopes New Language Tests Will Motivate
Students
A new five-year contract between the British government with the
University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) to
begin developing foreign language tests for seven year-olds. By
September, 2005, exams for eight languages (German, Urdu, French,
Italian, Spanish Chinese, Punjabi and Japanese) should be ready.
At the end of the contract, assessments for 26 languages will be
in place. The British government believes that by grading students
at a young age, like they do for playing a musical instrument, students
will be more motivated to learn foreign languages at a young age.
If you can stand to read it, visit:
http://education.independent.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=500001
And this is bad news because...?
National FL Assessment Delayed
Plans for administering the first national assessment in a foreign
language, Spanish, has been postponed. According to Peggy G. Carr,
the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education
Statistics, participation issues cast doubt on whether the test
- at two hours, the longest NAEP assessment - can be given in its
current form. The test of students' proficiency in Spanish was going
to be administered to 12th graders and would gauge how well these
students who studied Spanish could speak, read, listen, and write
in this language. To read this article, visit (free subscription
required):
http://www.edweek.com/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=27NAGB.h23
An Interview with Sonia Nieto
During this interview, Nieto discusses two books that she is working
on. Dear Paulo is a book in which teachers have written
letters to Paulo Freire, a greatly influential Brazilian educationalist,
about how his ideas have impacted them and their practice in the
classroom. Nieto also discusses her second book, Why We Teach,
a sequel to her What Keeps Teachers Going? Nieto also talks
about issues facing educators today, including the standardization
movement and the achievement gap. Listen to or to read the interview,
at:
http://www.ascd.org/cms/index.cfm?TheViewID=2321
Beginning Teachers Feel Unprepared to Teach ELLs
The Public Education Network has released a new report in which
beginning teachers share their perspectives and opinions on their
first years in the classroom. Results of teacher surveys included
in this report indicate that one of the areas teachers feel least
prepared for is addressing the learning needs of English language
learners.
Read about it at:
http://www.publiceducation.org/pdf/PEN_Pubs/Voice_of_the_New_Teacher.pdf
English in Decline as a First Language
Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News
February 26, 2004
It may be time to brush up on your Mandarin. According to one new
study, the percentage of the global population that grew up speaking
English as its first language is declining. In addition, an increasing
number of people now speak more than one language. In the future,
English is likely to be one of those languages, but the Mandarin
form of Chinese will probably be the next must-learn language, especially
in Asia. Read more about it at:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/02/0226_040226_language.html
******************************************************
Resources you might be interested in….
PBS American Family, "Journey of Dreams"
The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is participating in a national
outreach campaign focused on health issues in conjunction with the
premiere of the new season of the acclaimed public television dramatic
series, American Family. The new season of American Family, "Journey
of Dreams," chronicles the multigenerational saga of one family's
pursuit of the American Dream. It begins airing on the Public Broadcasting
Service (PBS) April 4. This year's American Family traces the history
of the Gonzalez family from the Mexican Revolution to today. The
American Family Web site includes Web pages on health, teachers'
guides, and other Web resources.
More information at: http://www.pbs.org/americanfamily/
And on NCLR at: http://www.nclr.org
Animal Web Sites in Spanish and Catalan
* "Welcome to the Zoo" - photos and information on endangered
animals.
http://www.arconet.es/users/marta/default.htm
* Animalia - photos, articles and general information.
http://orbita.starmedia.com/%7Eanimalia/
* The Madrid Zoo - organizes animals by region of origin.
http://www.zoomadrid.com/index.php3
* Valencia Zoo - photos of animals they house in their facilities.
http://www.zoovalencia.com/
* The Barcelona Zoo - information on its resident animals, photos
and a virtual visit to the zoo with 360º images. http://www.zoobarcelona.com/ZOO_Barcelona/Catalan/catalan.asp
New Articles at Krashen Web Site
Stephen Krashen has posted three new articles on his web site:
* "The Acquisition of Academic English by Children in Two-Way
Programs: What does the Research Say?"
* "Let´s Tell the Public the Truth about Bilingual Education"
* "The Case for Narrow Reading"
To read the articles, visit:
http://www.sdkrashen.com
New Lesson Plan Collection
LEARN NC, the North Carolina teachers' network, recently re-released
its lesson plan search engine on their Web site. Lesson plans in
the collection are for classes in K-12 and include the following
subjects: Arts, Computer Technology Skills, Educational Technology,
English Language Arts, Foreign Language, Guidance, Healthful Living
Education, Health, Information Skills, Language Arts, and Mathematics.
To view the collection, go to:
http://www.learnnc.org/learnnc/lessonp.nsf/doc/newcollection?OpenDocument
Hands on Baking - El futuro en tus manos
This is a free online and offline resource developed by Wells Fargo,
offering financial literacy lessons in English and Spanish. All
of the materials are available via Internet, CD-ROM, and print.
The curriculum includes topics such as: budgeting, bank accounts
and services, borrowing money and maintaining credit, buying a home,
investing, and starting and managing a small business. Additional
resources include a dictionary of financial terms and printable
worksheet templates.
For more information, visit:
http://www.handsonbanking.org/
Or call (toll-free): Tel: (866) 650-6228
New Web Site Archives Indigenous Languages of Latin America
This is a digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the
indigenous languages of Latin America. It offers recordings of naturally-occurring
discourse -- conversations, narratives, ceremonies, speeches, and
songs. Many recordings are accompanied by transcriptions in Spanish,
English, or Portuguese. The archive also provides dictionaries,
grammars, ethnographies, and teaching materials.
Visit: http://www.ailla.org/site/welcome.html
New NCLRC Language Resource Newsletter Published
The National Capital Language Resource Center 's (NCLRC) monthly
online newsletter posts current research findings, effective teaching
methods, and professional development opportunities for foreign
language educators. The March, 2004 issue of the "NCLRC Language
Resource" has articles on:
* "Building a New Public Idea about Language"
http://www.nclrc.org/caidlr82.htm#no1
* "Who Is Paying the Bills? The Federal Budget and Foreign
Language Education in U.S. Schools and Universities?"
http://www.nclrc.org/caidlr82.htm#no2
* "Language Lesson: Paintings -A Medium for Oral Communication"
http://www.nclrc.org/caidlr82.htm#ll
* "What Is Culture?"
http://www.nclrc.org/cultureclub0403.html
To read the entire issue, visit:
http://www.nclrc.org/caidlr82.htm
PacifiCare Latino Health Scholars Program Scholarships
for Bilingual, Bicultural Students
Deadline: June 30, 2004
Scholarships are available for Spanish-speaking, bicultural high-school
students who want to pursue careers in the healthcare industry.
The $2,000 scholarships are available for students in Arizona, California,
Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. High-school
seniors with a minimum grade-point average (GPA) of 3.0 and who
are fluent in Spanish are eligible to apply. Applicants must show
proof of acceptance into a university, community college, or an
accredited technical college and must be enrolled in an approved
healthcare program at the time they receive the scholarship.For
more information, visit: http://www.pacificarelatino.com
Semillas Literarias
Student Writing Contest
Dual Language Education of New Mexico
Deadline Extended from April 16 to April 30
Winners may have their authored and illustrated book published and
featured at La Cosecha 2004 Dual Language Conference. This is an
opportunity to showcase students' writing, artistic talents, as
well as dual language programs.For more information and official
entry form, go to the Dual Language Education of New Mexico website
at:
http://www.duallanguagenm.org
For more information, contact:
semillasliterarias@duallanguagenm.org
Downloadable Brochures from CAL
Working Together to Build a Multilingual Society (PDF)
This brochure offers tips for parents, teachers, school administrators,
and policymakers to help establish or improve a multilingual environment
in homes and schools. Doing so not only addresses American security
and economic needs, but also creates opportunties for Americans,
both at home and abroad.
Sets of 10 are $7.50 per set Order online
Sets of 50 are $35.00 per set Order online
Sets of 100 for $50.00 per set
http://www.cal.org/resources/brochures/
Why, How, and When Should My Child Learn a Second Language (PDF)
This brochure helps parents and schools become aware of the benefits
of helping children learn a second language at an early age. It
can be used with school boards, parents, and school and district
staff to advocate for new or improved early foreign language programs.
Sets of 10 are $7.50 per set Order online
Sets of 50 are $35.00 per set Order online
Sets of 100 for $50.00 per set
http://www.cal.org/resources/brochures/
Why Start and Maintain an SNS Program
Use this brochure to advocate for a Spanish for Native Speakers
program in your school or district, start one, or improve one already
in place. The brochure can be used with school board members, school
and district administrators, Spanish teachers, and parents of Spanish-speaking
students.
Sets of 10 are $7.50 per set Order online
Sets of 50 are $35.00 per set Order online
Sets of 100 for $50.00 per set
http://www.cal.org/resources/brochures/
Scholarships, Internships, and Fellowships for Latino Students
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) has published
the 2003-04 Directory of Scholarships, Internships, and Fellowships
for Latino Students for Hispanic students looking forways to pay
for college. View the Directory at:
http://www.chci.org/chciyouth/publications/directory.pdf
To view the CHCI Web site, visit:
http://www.chciyouth.org
El Pueblo, Inc. offers scholarship resources "regardless of
immigration status." For more information, visit: http://www.elpueblo.org (click on "Youth Program," then "Scholarships")
The College Foundation of North Carolina also offers free workshops
to assist Hispanic students with finding resources to finance their
higher education.
To view their Web site, visit: http://www.CFNC.org
Or call for more information:
Tel: (866) 866-CFNC
******************************************************
Thinking about it…
To David, About His Education
The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind's eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don't know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato's Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.
— Howard Nemerov
from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago
Press).
found at: http://cadee.blogspot.com/
******************************************************
Got
a great teaching idea you’d like to share? Send it in to Laura's
attention at e-comp@prolinguistica.com and we’ll publish it in the newsletter, giving you credit for your
brilliance! YOU can make this a really outstanding newsletter!!
******************************************************
Please
excuse any typos you find!!! Any volunteer proofreaders out there?
Have a great month!
Laura
|