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English Plus According to a new study, the percentage of the global population that grew up speaking English as its first language is in sharp decline, and an increasing number of people now speak more than one language. A leading British linguist, David Grad­dol, predicts we are headed for “decades of rapid and perhaps disorienting change, after which a new linguistic...

Literacy for All is the Real Goal The whole argument against bilingual education is based on the premise that it is not the best way to learn English. Now, a comprehensive research report (see “Bilingual Approaches Best for ELL Reading Achievement”, p.11) has confounded that theory, proving what many educators have been arguing for years — that English language learners...

The Language of Choice The emergence of the Hispanic community as America’s largest and fastest-growing minority is having a fundamental effect on the nation by bringing Span­ish into the main­stream of Amer­ican culture. According to estimates from the Census Bureau, 38.8 million Hispan­ics were living in the U.S. in 2002, representing about 13.4 percent of the total population. And the latest...

Time to Ditch the Agenda The body of evidence supporting bilingual education and the long-term benefits of multilingualism is growing steadily. Last month, we reported on a Canadian study that suggests bilingualism helps seniors to concentrate. In February, California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office published a report asserting that “progress to fluency is slow” for English Language Learners (ELLs) six years after...

A Tale of Two Americas As the Republican Party National Convention dominates the U.S. headlines, Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards is being roundly criticized and even mocked for his campaign mantra of “two Americas... one privileged, the other burdened...one America that does the work, another that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the...

Enshrining English So, Virginia Representative Virgil Goode and the ten co-sponsors of his proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution (see News, p.10) think that linguistic diversity is such a threat to this country that we need to take extreme measures to protect ourselves from it. Of course, this is not the first attempt to make English the nation’s official language and...

Educational Payback The U.S. could recoup nearly $200 billion a year in economic losses and secure its place as the future economic power of the world by raising the quality of schooling by investing more money and other resources in education, according to evidence presented at a recent Columbia University symposium. Researchers presented evidence that the country’s health-care, crime, and welfare...

Strength in Unity As we approach the end of the first Year of Languages in the U.S., it is time to demand that this country have a cohesive plan to ensure that our children leave school with at least a basic, working knowledge of a second language. In this era of instant, global communication, language skills are not only a...

Bringing Online Sales in Line As we enter the New Year with a new Administration, any optimism amongst educators is being tempered by the recession’s effect on state and local tax revenues, and the subsequent budget limitations, but billions of dollars of sales tax revenue are being lost every year through outdated practices. More than 90 percent of education spending...

A Proven Bailout Plan After a period of sustained economic growth in the 1980s — when Finland became known as the Nordic Tiger — in the early 1990s, the Finnish economy collapsed, partly as a result of global factors, and partly due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been a major importer of Finnish goods. In the early...