Languages

Ann Abbott sees tensions in Spanish programs that cannot hold In one of my roles as a director of Undergraduate Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I work closely with our advisor, I speak directly with potential students and their parents, and I am on our department’s curriculum committee. On the one hand, I am passionate about Spanish and...

The English language has progressed over time without a handbook or guidance, so one would think that the structure within the language would be nonexistent. A new study, however, proves otherwise. The study, by Kristian Berg of the University of Oldenburg and Mark Aronoff of Stony Brook University is titled “Self-Organization in the Spelling of English Suffixes: the Emergence...

A new study, titled “Late Bilinguals Are Sensitive to Unique Aspects of Second Language Processing: Evidence from Clitic Pronouns Word-Order” asked whether English speakers who become highly proficient at a late age in Spanish could understand grammatical constructions that are present in Spanish but not in English. The study is hinged on the longstanding question if adults who...

The Toronto and York Region Labor Council (TYRLC) has released a series of videos aimed to help Chinese workers with limited proficiency with English confront worker’s rights, labor laws, and other work-related issues. The Toronto and York Region council is based out of Ontario, Canada, and “combines the strength of hundreds of local unions… mandate is to organize...

Netflix has just released its new Spanish-language series, Ingobernable. Netflix has had its fair share of success recently in the Spanish-language department, most notably the 2015 Spanish-language drama Narcos, a crime drama filmed in Colombia that follows the story of drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. Narcos was wildly successful with American audiences, and presumably proved to Netflix that English-speaking audiences...

Antura and the Letters and Feed the Monster, the two winners of the EduApp4Syria innovation competition, were announced today and then released worldwide as open-source Arabic literacy learning games. Both games are available for free download through Google Play and the App Store. The EduApp4Syria competition was launched in January 2016 as a challenge to game developers and pedagogical experts...

Dr. Kate Kinsella offers evidence-based instructional practices to advance students’ verbal and written command of critical words Vocabulary Knowledge and Overall Academic Achievement Vocabulary plays a crucial role in all aspects of academic competence in K–12 schooling. Certainly, one of the most consistent findings in reading research is the extent to which students’ vocabulary knowledge directly supports their reading comprehension (Baumann and...

Poly began after a successful Kickstarter campaign last year as an open source, modern software built to share and learn languages in text and video. The project was created by Wikitongues founders and directors Daniel Bogre Udell and Frederico Andrade, who aimed to document and teach every language in the world. Wikitongues began in 2012 when Daniel Bogre Udell...

A new report in Frontiers in Psychology found that deaf adults who use British Sign Language (BSL) had significantly faster peripheral vision reaction time than non-deaf BSL language interpreters and that the interpreters had faster reaction times than hearing adults who do not speak BSL. What is interesting about deaf individuals is that from having an altered cognitive experience, they...