Multilingual Mania — Multilingual Parenting, Multilingual Education, Multilingual Advocacy

Spanish Language Development in a Kindergarten Dual Immersion Classroom

August 23, 2010

We wanted to share a number of pictures with you from a Dual Immersion kindergarten classroom. The teacher had a number of Spanish learners (i.e., English-only students who are learning in Spanish) in the classroom and she used a variety of strategies to make the Spanish instruction comprehensible to her students. She initially developed a [...]

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“Spanish is a Problem”, and Other Racist Assumptions

August 22, 2010

Last week the Los Angeles Times published a controversial article about teacher effectiveness by using what they call a “value added approach” to evaluate teachers and schools who have made significant improvement in student achievement. I am not too familiar with the approach, but many educational experts and scholars have criticized the approach as being [...]

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Native American Language Loss and Revitalization

August 18, 2010

Scholars estimate that as many as one of two endangered languages become extinct every couple of weeks throughout the world. K. David Harrison from the Living Tongues Institute states: When a community loses its language, they really lose their history. They lose their connection to the past. They lose all the wisdom and knowledge that [...]

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¿Sabe cuánto inglés sabe?

August 17, 2010

Cuando me dedicaba a buscar trabajo en México, mi lado cínico se regocijaba al llegar a la pregunta del porcentaje de inglés que hablo. Y sigo pensando que la idea de preguntar cuántas palabras de cada cien puedo decir, leer o entender en cualquier idioma, es bastante ingenua. ¿Puede alguien objetivamente contestar esa pregunta? O [...]

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“What Mommy Call That?”

August 14, 2010

When do young children become aware that people around them communicate in multiple languages? Surely they can understand multiple languages early on, but when do they realize that everything, anything can be communicated in two or more different ways? My wife and I practice one-parent-one-language at home with our 3-year-old. My wife speaks English, while [...]

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Video: The Importance of Mother Languages

August 12, 2010

This video features students who speak about their perspectives as to why their mother tongue is important. It’s always so powerful to hear student voices!

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Dehumanizing Immigrants-Lies and More Distorted Lies

August 11, 2010

“La mentira dura hasta que la verdad llega”. “The lie endures until the truth arrives”. It’s a classic trick of the racists to paint a portrait of a people so horrible that it makes anything that is done to them to be justifiable. It’s quite a brilliant idea, really, to be able to paint such [...]

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Bilingualism in the News

August 10, 2010

Predominately Immigrant School Defies Odds: This article about the El Sol Dual Immersion public charter academy in Santa Ana, California demonstrates how students in effective Dual Immersion programs can score comparably to or outperform their counterparts in English-only programs. One key to success is the school’s philosophy about serving the whole child by providing a [...]

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Should My Students Read the Same Book in Both Languages?

August 9, 2010

Dear Multilingual Mania, I teach in a second grade bilingual classroom and I was wondering if you could help me out with a question that I have about teaching reading. We teach language arts in Spanish, and we are also supposed to teach language arts in English since we are getting kids ready to begin [...]