Changing foreign policy (Leader-Telegram)

Changing foreign policy

Spanish language program beginning in kindergarten

By Keighla Schmidt  with comments by PLS
Leader-Telegram staff

"Bienvenidos a la escuela!" In English: "Welcome to school!"

When I was growing up (I'm now 31), foreign language (Spanish, German, and French) was only available to highschoolers.  I have been greatly encouraged by hearing that many middle schools are offering foreign language courses.  Who knows where you will be living or traveling when you grow up?

I grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa.  I would not have been able to guess that I'd be living in Mexico city (since Jan 1, 2001).  American schools have been slow to adjust to the fact that traveling is much easier than it was before, and the American economy isn't that strong either, so there is less reason to say.

The following article is about a Catholic school in Wisconsin. They are starting a program to teach Spanish to children from Kindergarten. Before they had classes from 3rd to 12th grades which would have been amazing when I was growing up.  Although it would be a far cry from a true bilingual school, it is very encouraging and I hope more American schools will follow their lead.

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Catholic Area Schools of the Eau Claire Deanery have started a Spanish language program for children in kindergarten through second grade.

It will be a jump-start to foreign language programs the school offers in the third through 12th grades.

CASE President Cindy Hofacker said the program started after reading research indicating young minds are open to learning languages. The importance of introducing other cultures and the success of pilot programs in the school system also motivated school officials.

"We realize the world is getting smaller," she said. "Not everyone will stay in Eau Claire for the rest of their life."

Lynne Larabee, who will teach the classes, said children respond better to a new language if they are introduced to it at a young age.

"The window for language learning is open while children are young," Larabee said. "We're laying the groundwork."

Both Hofacker and Larabee said they don't expect children to be fluent in the language after two 15-minute sessions a week, but they aim to familiarize students' minds with Spanish.

Children will learn basic Spanish to introduce them to the language and the culture. Hofacker said students will be taught the Spanish words for colors, numbers, common words and phrases, and comparisons between American culture and the cultures in Spanish-speaking countries will be emphasized.

Larabee plans to use music, games, puppets and prayers to help the children connect to the language.

"If it's integrated into daily lives, then the probability of it being used is much higher," she said.

Hofacker said there is a deeper connection to the language: The ties that Spanish, a Latin-based language, has to the Catholic faith will help children integrate both the language and religion into their daily lives.

The students' full-time teachers will stay in the classroom during the Spanish session, Hofacker said, and find ways to integrate the language and culture into the day-to-day curriculum.

Elementary Principal Joseph Eisenhuth said he is excited about the addition of a foreign language program when many other institutions are removing them.

"It's exciting to see, especially in young children, how quick skills are picked up," he said.

Invented languages take on a life of their own / Once the province of a few, new tongues flourish through Net (San Francisco Chronicle)

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed. The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that. So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own...

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed.

The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that.

So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona - "good language" - and gave it just 120 words.

"Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."

Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.

It's all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena of J.R.R. Tolkien, Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.

The Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem.

The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do - "conlang," short for constructed languages.

Created languages may have no hope of supplanting the real thing, but for most conlangers, that is hardly the goal. Hobbyists such as Kisa find it a fun or therapeutic practice. Linguists can use conlangs to dissect how real language works. For a select few who write fiction or work for Hollywood, conlanging can even be a moneymaker.

But to the majority of linguaphiles, conlangs are simply art. Their palette holds not paints but the buzz of the letter "z," the hiss of an "s," the trill of an Italian "r."

And sometimes the howl of a Klingon scream: "Hab SoSlI' Quch!"

"Your mother has a smooth forehead!"

In this realm of art, Toki Pona is white canvas with scattered brush strokes of primary colors.

Kisa created Toki Pona as an exercise in minimalism, looking for the core vocabulary necessary to communicate. With only 120 words, a Toki Pona speaker must combine words to express more complicated ideas. For example, the Toki Pona phrase for "friend" is "jan pona" (the "j" sounds like a "y"), literally "good person."

Kisa, who is studying speech language therapy, tried to focus Toki Pona's vocabulary on basic, positive concepts.

"It has sort of a Zen or Taoist nature to it," Kisa said.

Tolkien liked to call invented language his secret vice. He spent hours at the solitary hobby, designing grammars and modifying words from Latin, Finnish, Welsh and others for his languages.

Eventually, his languages needed tongues to speak them, and those speakers needed a place to live. And thus Middle-Earth was born, with Tolkien's languages becoming the Sindarin and Quenya of the Elves, the Khuzdul of the Dwarves, and the Black Speech of the Orcs.

In the 12th century, the nun Hildegard of Bingen developed a rudimentary conlang she called Lingua Ignota, Latin for "unknown language" No one knows its purpose. All that survives is a short passage and a list of 1,012 terms arranged from the highest form, "God," to the lowest, "cricket."

Esperanto was created in the late 19th century by Polish doctor Ludovic Zamenhof. His dream was to give humanity a common international language that would be simple to learn. Esperanto's vocabulary is small, word order does not matter and there are no irregular verbs.

"Gi estas iom lingvo idealisma," said William B. Harris, director of the central office of the Esperanto League for North America, in California. "It's somewhat of an idealistic language."

Today, as many as 2 million people speak Esperanto, which conlangers call an "auxlang," or auxiliary language.

Learning is the easy part. Actually creating a language is a task only for the very tenacious. It took Kisa a year to put hers together, and her language was built to be basic.

It is not enough simply to replace existing words with invented ones. To a conlanger, such a construction would be a mere code.

The conlanger considers many factors, starting with the sound of the language. Linguists call it phonaesthetics; Germans call it Sprachgefuhl - "speech feeling."

Tricky to define, it's that certain quality that makes French the language of love and German the language that "makes you want to conquer Poland," said John Quijada, a Web site developer in Sacramento who created Ithkuil

There are rules to this game. Human languages - known as "natlangs," for natural languages - follow universal linguistic patterns. For example, few human languages use the raspberry sound, but all have an "ah" sound. To create a pseudo-natlang, the conlanger also should follow those rules.

Of course, there are instances when one doesn't want to follow the rules. In creating Klingon for "Star Trek," Marc Okrand, 59, said, "I looked at all those kinds of rules and then violated them on purpose."

If a conlang is to be a language for nonhumans, the conlanger must consider their biology - if they lack teeth or vocal cords, the language's sounds will be constrained accordingly.

The conlanger also must ponder the grammar. For example, will the word order be subject-verb-object, as in English, or perhaps object-subject-verb, following the example of Yoda?

Okrand chose the rarest of grammatical structures, object-verb-subject. A Klingon would say, "The Enterprise boarded I." He purposely picked sounds that never would be found together in the same human language.

All this has added up to one alien manner of speech.

The challenge has not deterred serious Klingonists, who number perhaps a few hundred worldwide. Djorn X. Oqvist, 33, a Swedish linguistics student and founder of the Klingon Academy, said you must be creative with Klingon's 2,600 words.

For example, he said, there is no way to say: "Park the car." No problem. Klingon speakers "dock" their vehicles.

The difference between "park" and "dock" illustrates how languages can talk about similar things but conjure subtly different images.

The phenomenon was noted by early 20th century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. They proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts. That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them.

In 1955, sociologist James Cooke Brown came up with an idea to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He would train students in a new language, and look at how their thinking changed.

He knew he could not use a natlang - it would be impossible to separate language from the influence of culture. So Brown invented a cultureless language, Loglan - short for "logical language."

Just as scientists use mice as a model for the human body, Loglan would be a model language for his laboratory of thought.

Brown borrowed vocabulary from English, French, German, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Japanese - the eight most widely spoken languages at the time.

Loglan was designed to be free of irregularity and ambiguity. The Loglan lexicon, containing more than 10,000 words, is made up of five-letter root words and short, one- or two-letter modifiers. The roots can be combined to make new six-letter words.

He included words for the mathematical Boolean variables such as "and," "or inclusive" and "or exclusive" to encourage clear, logical thinking.

As it turned out, creating the language wasn't the hardest part. Like many successful conlangers, Brown struggled to maintain control over his creation.

He founded the Loglan Institute in San Diego in the 1970s to bring others into the project, but then was upset when they didn't agree with his ideas.

"In 1984 there was a knock-down, drag-out battle over this," said Bob LeChevalier, 53, who was a member at the time. The institute fell apart and Brown was never able to conduct his great experiment.

LeChevalier and others developed Lojban, a language built on identical principles as Loglan. LeChevalier estimates there are between 500 and 1,000 Lojban speakers.

Kisa, too, has wrestled with the growing pains of her creation.

Once a language is released from the notebooks and index cards of its birth, other speakers might use it for purposes its creator never intended.

Since Kisa let Toki Pona loose on the Internet in 2001, it has spread from Toronto to speakers all over the world.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely offers a seminar about the language. Kisa has received e-mails from Russians learning Toki Pona and a Finnish therapist who wants to teach it to his depressed patients.

Occasionally these correspondents offer criticism as well as praise. Some want to express complicated thoughts in Toki Pona, running counter to its design.

Kisa has given in to a few complaints. It's only natural for language to evolve, she said.

"Tenpo ni la toki pona li kama suli. Jan mute li kepeken e ona," she said. "It's like a living thing now."

Young Expressions: Language learning (Radio Singapore International)

Find out how someone has learned to speak several languages fluently.  When we have the need and the desire we discover that we can learn another language quickly.  Typically we don't learn because we don't practice enough.

If you are wondering if those words were spoken by four different people. The answer is no.

his young lady from Malaysia has picked up not only her mother tongue, but also other Chinese dialects like Hokkien and Teochew, and even Thai, Bahasa Malaysia as well as English through the course of her growing up years in Kelantan.

This is Young Expressions and I am Shereena Sajeed. Recently, Loretta Foo made a trip to Malaysia and caught up with Ng Wan Choo , a 25 year old Malaysian law student who is able to understand and speak five different languages.

And she shares with us what these languages are.

Chinese, English, BM (Bahasa Malaysia), Malay, Cantonese and Hokkien are languages that I can understand and I can speak. I can only understand a bit of the Thai language because I watch a lot of Thai drama, other languages like Teochew, I can only understand but I cant’s speak.

You can hear the podcast at the original site.

Getting the Instruction Right at Khalil Gibran (The New York Sun)

The following article is about the conflicts that exist in the United States regarding the use of religion in public schools and their funding.   In the United States most people believe that religion and Education should be separate. This is not the case in many countries.  In fact, in most arab and muslim countries, religion is integrated in classes as a matter of fact.

In other countries, religion is just considered a fact of life and appears without planning in and around schools. This is especially true in countries where most people belong to the same religious organization for example Mexico is at least 90% Catholic.  While Catholicism is not a public school course here, symbols and mini-altars are common, even at gas stations.

This article is from here.

The city's Arabic-language public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, opens its doors this week, with special security, for about 55 12-year-old students. One hopes that the prolonged public debate over the school's Islamist proclivities will prompt it not to promote any political or religious agendas.

Count me as skeptical, however, and for two main reasons. First is the school's genesis and personnel, about which others and I have written extensively. Second, and my topic here, is the worrisome record of taxpayer-funded K–12 Arabic-language programs from sea to shining sea.

The trend is clear: Pre-collegiate Arabic-language instruction, even when taxpayer funded, tends to bring along indoctrination in pan-Arab nationalism, radical Islam, or both. Note some examples:

• Amana Academy, Alpharetta, Georgia, near Atlanta: A charter school that requires Arabic-language learning, Amana boasts of its "institutional partnership" with the Arabic Language Institute Foundation. But ALIF forwards the learning of Arabic as a means "to convey the message of Qur'an in North America and Europe" and thus to "help the Western countries recover from the present moral decay."

• Carver Elementary School, San Diego: A teacher, Mary-Frances Stephens, informed the school board that she taught a "segregated class" of Muslim girls and that each day she was required to release them from class for an hour of prayer, led by a Muslim teacher's aide. Ms. Stephens deemed this arrangement "clearly a violation of administrative, legislative and judicial guidelines." The school's principal, Kimberlee Kidd, replied that the teacher's aide merely prayed alongside the students and the session lasted only 15 minutes. The San Diego Unified School District investigated Ms. Stephens's allegations and rejected them, but it nonetheless changed practices at Carver. Superintendent Carl Cohn eliminated single-gender classes and reconfigured the schedule so that students can pray during lunch.

• Charlestown High School, Massachusetts: The school's summer Arabic-language program took students on a trip to the Islamic Society of Boston, where, the Boston Globe reports, students "sat in a circle on the carpet and learned about Islam from two mosque members." One student, Peberlyn Moreta, 16, fearing that the gold cross around her neck would offend the hosts, tucked it under her T-shirt. Anti-Zionism also appeared, with the showing of the 2002 film "Divine Intervention," which a critic, Jordan Hiller, has termed an "irresponsible film," "frighteningly dangerous," and containing "pure hatred" toward Israel.

• Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, Inver Grove Heights, Minn.: Islamic Relief Worldwide, an organization that allegedly has links to jihadism and terrorism, sponsored this charter school, which requires Arabic as a second language. The academy's name openly celebrates Islamic imperialism, as Tarek ibn Ziyad led Muslim troops in their conquest of Spain in 711. Local journalists report that "a visitor might well mistake Tarek ibn Ziyad [Academy] for an Islamic school" because of the women wearing hijabs, the carpeted prayer area, the school closing down for Islamic holidays, everyone keeping the Ramadan fast, the cafeteria serving halal food, classes breaking for prayer, almost all the children praying, and the constant use of "Brother" and "Sister" when adults at the school address each other.

• Only in the case of the Iris Becker Elementary School in Dearborn, Mich., is the Arabic-language program not obviously pursuing a political and religious agenda. Its program may actually be clean, or perhaps the minimal information about it explains the lack of known problems.

The above examples (see my Web log entry "Other Taxpayer-Funded American Madrassas" for yet more) are all American, but similar problems predictably exist in other Western countries.

This troubling pattern points to the need for special scrutiny of publicly funded Arabic-language programs. That scrutiny should take the form of robust supervisory boards whose members are immersed in the threat of radical Islam and who have the power to shut down anything they might find objectionable.

Arabic-language instruction at the pre-collegiate level is needed, and the American government rightly promotes it — for example, via the National Security Language Initiative on the national level or the Foreign Language in Elementary Schools program on a local one. As it does so, getting the instruction right becomes ever more important. Citizens, parents, and taxpayers have the right to ensure that children attending these publicly funded institutions are taught a language skill — and are not being recruited to anti-Zionism or Islamism.

What do you think?  Is it possible to teach Arabic or related languages or teach arab and muslim people without involving religion?

An Indian Nation Preserves Its Heritage With a Magic Joystick (The New York Sun)

Video games can become a way to learn languages and culture

An Indian Nation Preserves Its Heritage With a Magic Joystick

Like many 8-year-old boys, Eli Langley loves video games. The ins and outs of Nintendo and PlayStation characters, puzzles, and role-playing adventures are much more accessible to him than, say, the oral traditions or hunting techniques of his Coushatta Tribe's ancestors. His latest obsession is trying to restore the powers and magic of a character named Sora in the "Kingdom Hearts" game for Nintendo DS.

"If I sleep on it, I think I'll beat it," Eli said one night after school and football practice. "I'm not modest, I know I'll do it."

Eli's love of gaming got his mother, Linda, and several of her tribe's leaders thinking: Could the tribe harness the power of video games and their mighty influence over today's young people to promote cultural learning? Could a game about American Indian culture and language be of interest to a plugged-in child like her son?

"We wanted to find something new, something fun, to engage our younger members," the tribe's chairman, Kevin Sickey, said. "We need to draw strength from our past, while doing everything we can to preserve our future."

After months of working with a high-tech gaming development firm and investing thousands of dollars, that mission is becoming a reality with the creation of a state-of-the-art museum called the Coushatta Heritage Center, soon to be built in Elton, La.

In fact, Eli recently helped test a prototype 3-D video game for the museum, in which players are able to explore a virtual world in order to experience how members of the Coushatta Tribe traditionally interacted with their environment and used handmade tools to survive.

Where a typical video game might feature a European-looking spaceman running around on an alien planet with a laser gun, this game prototype featured a Coushatta hero with darker skin and a build more like a traditional member of the tribe, with a sinewy and slightly muscular upper body and legs. True to tribal history, the character carried a bow and arrow, as well as a blowgun to hunt small animals. His game-play environment was modeled after the traditional Coushatta forests, and he received instructions in the game from a computerized elder who asked him to collect firewood for warmth and pine needles to weave baskets.

Eli was able to manipulate the character via a game controller, just as he would make Super Mario jump and run in a Nintendo game. If his character picked up wood that was too close to a pond, the guiding elder would tell him that the wood bundles were too wet to be used.

"It's kind of boring right now because it's only a prototype," Eli explained. "It'll get better."

Eli's mother couldn't be happier about this modern-day video game creation story, which she has played a large role in promoting through her role as an anthropologist at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La. "We saw that the first day of testing," she recalled. "I couldn't get him to get off it. He sat and he played, and he made the character run through the landscapes."

Ms. Langley is as pumped as a video game fanatic to have her son join other Native kids from her community as guinea pigs for this mission. "They were so hooked," she recalled of one demo day. "We knew we were on to something."

But there is an educational method behind the fun. "What we're really trying to do is use modern learning technology to help educate about the tribe and to help preserve the language and the culture for future generations," said John Purdy, president of Red Knight Learning Systems of Dallas, the firm the Coushatta Tribe has contracted with to help develop its digital learning center. "Young people have not always been able to pick up much on their language and their tribe's history."

The Coushatta partnership with Red Night, which began early this year, will make the tribe one of a handful in the nation with a museum that features modern immersive, multimedia learning exhibits designed to preserve tribal language and heritage.

Indian leaders say that as the concept of tribal self-determination has taken steam since the 1960s, more tribes have taken ownership over their representation in museums. The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., which has received funding from dozens of tribes, is but one symbol of the movement. Since its opening in 2004, it has featured many "living history" video exhibits with tribal cultures being explained by contemporary American Indians via film and other electronic means.

Ms. Langley prefers to call the Coushatta museum a digital center because museums have often held negative connotations for Native people, she said. Many non-Indian museums, like the Smithsonian Institution, host exhibits featuring Indian bones and sacred artifacts, a practice that fundamentally violates the cultural ideologies of many tribes.

By most accounts, the Coushatta Heritage Center will take tribal museums to an even higher playing field. Ground has already been broken for the nearly 10,000-foot facility that will house the unique technological learning experiment, and leaders are tentatively expecting the museum to open in the fall of 2008.

Video games won't be the only unique aspect of the museum. Red Knight is also designing an immersive theater, which will feature computerized sound effects and "smell cartridges" that will allow visitors to sense and feel like they've walked into the Coushatta woods in the evening. A timeline wall will allow visitors to "interact with history" -- by sliding a display monitor along the wall, they will able to see and hear the tribe's history. Several Kosati language programs will be available, and basket-making games also will allow visitors to make their own virtual Coushatta basket.

The center, according to Ms. Langley, will also include interactive and physical exhibits exploring the tribe's prophecies and stories from their more than 500-year history. The Kosati language will be integrated into all exhibits, and the Heritage Center will also function as a tribal library, archive, and language learning center for Coushatta tribal members.

Ms. Langley insists that those who are resistant to or reluctant to use technology will still find much to enjoy at the museum. "You will not have to be a video game expert to get a lot out of it," she said.

Mr. Purdy of Red Knight said tribal leaders were adamant that they didn't want this project to turn out like any old museum. After researching the current field of tribal museums, he believes that the Coushatta Heritage Center "will be one of the more high-tech and unique buildings and heritage centers among American Indian tribes in the nation."

Technology, of course, does not come cheaply. No one interviewed for this story would give exact numbers, but some say the video-game aspects of the heritage museum alone will cost upwards of six figures. The Coushatta Tribe is paying for the project via tribal casino profits and other fund raising, as well as from grant money from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the Smithsonian.

"The amount of resources that are being poured into this initiative are unprecedented," the tribe's vice chairman, David Sickey, said. "It serves a dual purpose: serving the generations that are coming up and educating our non-Indian friends as well."It's crucial for tribal councils to endorse these types of forward-thinking initiatives, Mr. Sickey said.

"That's one thing I've really noticed about the tribe," Mr. Purdy said. "They do seem to spend a lot of their money and energy into helping out their own people."

With a kid like Eli at the controls, that mindset may be prove to be useful. "He likes complicated games," Ms. Langley said.

"Yeah, they can't be boring," Eli chimed in over his mom. "They're not going to be fun unless they mess me up a little."

The original article can be found here.