From the Center for Advance Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota

CARLA Summer Institutes 2011

(To see on the web, go here.)

Hurry and register!

The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota has sponsored a summer institute program for second language teachers since 1996. This internationally known program reflects CARLA’s commitment to link research and theory with practical applications for the classroom. Each institute is highly interactive and includes discussion, theory-building, hands-on activities, and plenty of networking opportunities.

CARLA summer institute participants—more than 3,400 to date—have come from all over the world. They have included foreign language and ESL teachers at all levels of instruction, as well as program administrators, curriculum specialists, and language teacher educators. The institutes that will be offered during summer 2011 are:

Using Social Networking Technology: Collaborative Language Learning
June 20-August 19, 2011
Presenters: Marlene Johnshoy, Alyssa Ruesch and Dan Soneson
In this new 8-week online course, participants will work together to learn ways to use social networking and Web 2.0 application to promote student language learning.

Immersion 101: An Introduction to Immersion Teaching for Character-Based Languages
June 20–24, 2011
Presenters: Tara Fortune and Molly Wieland
This institute provides novice immersion teachers in character-based languages with the tools and information they need to survive and thrive in the immersion classroom. The institute also includes a two-day session for administrators of immersion education programs for character-based languages.

Content-Based Language Instruction and Curriculum Development
July 11-15, 2011
Presenter: Laurent Cammarata
This institute will provide foreign language teachers with the background and tools needed to implement content-based instruction in their second language classroom.

Culture as the Core in the Second Language Classroom
July 11-15, 2011
Presenters: Francine Klein and Wendy Allen
Weaving together theory and practice, this interactive institute will help teachers develop instructional strategies and practical tools for integrating language learning with a systematic culture curriculum.

Focusing on Learner Language: 
Second Language Acquisition Basics for Teachers
July 11-15, 2011
Presenters: Elaine Tarone and Maggie Broner
Participants will learn to analyze learner language in light of research on second language acquisition and will then consider implications for language teaching.

Meeting the Challenges of Immersion Education: Counterbalanced Instruction in the Immersion Classroom
July 11-15, 2011
Presenter: Roy Lyster
This new institute will provide a fresh perspective on integrating language and content in the immersion classroom.

Immersion 101: An Introduction to Immersion Teaching
July 18-22, 2011
Presenters: Tara Fortune, Maureen Curran Dorsano and Ursina Swanson
This institute provides novice immersion teachers with the tools and information they need to survive and thrive in the immersion classroom. The institute has been reconfigured to offer two teacher sessions simultaneously and a newly expanded 3-day session for administrators of immersion education programs.

Developing Assessments for the Second Language Classroom
July 18-22, 2011
Presenters: Ursula Lentz and Donna Clementi
Focusing on the alignment of standards-based curriculum and assessment, this institute includes an overview of the wide range of purposes in assessment, and step-by-step guidance in creating integrated performance assessments for classroom use.

Improving Language Learning: 
Styles- and Strategies-Based Instruction
July 18-22, 2011
Presenter: Martha Nyikos
This summer institute is designed to help language teachers maximize students’ ability to learn a foreign/second language through styles- and strategies-based instruction.

Language and Culture in Sync: Developing Learners’ Sociocultural Competence
July 25-29, 2011
Presenter: Noriko Ishihara
Participants will gain both theoretical and practical insights on teaching students how to use functional language appropriately in different socio-cultural contexts.

Using Technology: Digital Storytelling for Communication
July 25-29, 2011
Presenters: Marlene Johnshoy, Beth Kautz, Alyssa Ruesch, Dan Soneson, Rick Treece, Pablo Viedma and Zhen Zou
Participants in this institute will learn how to use technology to facilitate storytelling and get “hands on” practice in using computers to promote students’ skills in interpretation, presentation, and interaction.

Developing Materials for Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs)
July 25-29, 2011
Presenters: Bill Johnston and Louis Janus
This summer institute will provide LCTL teachers with practical tools and hands-on experience in designing a wide range of materials that will improve their students’ abilities to use the language for communicative purposes. A special rebate of $150 will be available to teachers who submit satisfactory curricular material to the LCTL website.

Registration Information—Note: Many of the institutes fill up very quickly. Register now!
The cost of each of the CARLA summer institutes is $350 if registration is received by May 31, 2011 and $400 after that date. More information is available on the CARLA  website at: http://www.carla.umn.edu/institutes. To request a copy of a print brochure you can email the CARLA office at: carla@umn.edu.

The institutes have been developed and are offered with the support, in part, of the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Language Resource Center program. The summer institutes are co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development and College of Liberal Arts.

Advanced Practices in Second Language Teaching Certificate
This certificate offered by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development provides an exciting opportunity for teachers of foreign languages and English as a second/foreign language to showcase their professional development work through the CARLA summer institute program by taking the institutes for graduate level credit.

More information about the courses needed to obtain the certificate, admission criteria, and application materials can be found on the web at: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/CI/Programs/college/Certificates/Advanced-SLT.html

“Things I Wish I’d Known:  Current Mandarin immersion parents offer up
what they’ve learned to incoming MI families”

Tuesday, May 24, 2011
6:00-7:30 PM
Jose Ortega Elementary School (in the library)
400 Sargent Street
San Francisco

At this meeting of the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council, current MI parents from Jose Ortega and Starr King will answer questions and generally offer advice to families who have just gotten into Mandarin immersion.  Bring your questions!  Topics can include where to buy uniforms, how lunches work, and what to expect when your child comes home that first week exhausted from a new school and new friends.  If your family speaks Mandarin at home, perhaps you have questions about what your child will be learning and what kind of support is available for English language learners.

We’ll also have copies of the MI FAQ: Everything you always wanted to know about Mandarin immersion in the San Francisco Public Schools but didn’t know who to ask.  We look forward to meeting our new families.  (And if you’re wait listing for either Jose Ortega or Starr King, you’d be most welcome too!)

Childcare will be available at $10/child.  Dinner will be provided for kids.

Millburn Hosts Panel Discussion on Charter Schools

Princeton school officials among those talking about the cost of charter schools to school districts.

By Marilyn Joyce Lehren and Laura Griffin |  May 9, 2011

   

School leaders from four neighboring school districts gathered in Millburn on Monday night to learn more about charter schools – a divisive issue in New Jersey that now concerns even high-performing districts like Millburn, which is faced with two Mandarin-immersion charters seeking approval.

“It’s a storm and it’s a big storm now,” said Lynne Strickland, executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools. “And it’s not a perfect storm.”

Strickland was part of a panel brought together at Millburn High School to provide school boards from Millburn, Livingston, Union and South Orange-Maplewood with information to take back to their communities.

Millburn will follow up this meeting an agenda item for discussion by board members and the public at its May 23 meeting, said Superintendent Dr. James Crisfield.

School districts have until the end of May to respond to the New Jersey Department of Education with concerns and questions about applications filed by two Mandarin charters – Hanyu International Academy Charter School and Hua Mei Charter School.

Read more here.

Getty Images

Four teachers at a special magnet school in Point Loma will have their pink slips rescinded.

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By Rory Devine

A reprieve this afternoon for a Mandarin Chinese immersion program in Point Loma, after 80 percent of their mandarin teachers were given pink slips.

When pink slips were first handed out to teachers, there was much concern about the future of this five-year-old magnet program. Concern, after four of the five teachers who teach Mandarin Chinese there were issued pink slips.

Now, it looks like those lay off notices will be rescinded.

Sally Lowe was one of those told she could be laid off from her job at the Barnard Mandarin Chinese Magnet School. Despite 15 years of teaching experience, she has only four years with San Diego Unified, so she has less seniority than other teachers in the District.

Source: Teachers’ Pink Slips Rescinded | NBC San Diego

Kylie Hwang reads in Korean to her second-grade class at Keppel Elementary School in Glendale. The Glendale Unified School District has become one of the nation’s leading laboratories for dual-language immersion, offering programs in Italian, German, Spanish, Armenian, Japanese and Korean. (Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times)

In a Glendale public school classroom, the immigrant’s daughter uses no English as she conjugates verbs and writes sentences about cats.

More than a decade after California voters eliminated most bilingual programs, first-grader Sofia Checchi is taught in Italian nearly all day — as she and her 20 classmates at Franklin Elementary School have been since kindergarten.

Yet in just a year, Sofia has jumped a grade level in reading English. In the view of her mother — an Italian immigrant — Sofia’s achievement validates a growing body of research indicating that learning to read in students’ primary languages helps them become more fluent in English.

The Glendale Unified School District has become one of the nation’s leading laboratories for such dual-language immersion experiments, offering programs in Italian, German, Spanish, Armenian, Japanese and Korean. At Franklin, instruction is 90% in Italian and 10% in English in kindergarten and first grade, a proportion that will shift to 50-50 by fifth grade. Although Sofia is classified as an English-language learner, most of her classmates are native English speakers whose parents want them to learn Italian.

Growing in popularity, dual-language immersion programs are the new face of bilingual education —without the stigma. Though bilingual education was often perceived — and resented by some —as public handouts only for immigrant families, dual programs offer the chance to learn a second language to native-born American children as well.

read more here.

ASU Confucius Institute launches Chinese program in local schools

May 06, 2011

The Confucius Classrooms at Boulder Creek, Diamond Canyon and Gavilan Peak will have a joint Confucius Classrooms Celebration at 7:00 pm on Friday, May 6 at Boulder Creek High School.  Boulder Creek, Diamond Canyon and Gavilan Peak students will perform skits, songs, a drums and lion dance, and a ribbon dance.

The ASU Confucius Institute has partnered with several Arizona schools to establish the Confucius Classrooms that offer effective Chinese language and culture programs.  Confucius Classrooms are Chinese programs funded by Confucius Institute Headquarters/Hanban.

In 2010, Hanban gave awards to six Confucius Classrooms in three Arizona school districts: Diamond Canyon School, Gavilan Peak School, Boulder Creek High, Horseshoe Trails Elementary, Lone Mountain Elementary and Rhodes Junior High.

Both Gavilan Peak and Diamond Canyon offers students Mandarin instruction to all students from Kindergarten to eight grade.

The Confucius Classroom at Gavilan Peak also offers the first public school Mandarin Immersion program in Arizona.  Fifty-four first grade students are taught mathematics and science in Mandarin only. The Confucius Classroom at Boulder Creek will offer a Madarin Chinese course in the fall of 2011.  The Mandarin program at Boulder Creek will be part of a K-12 articluated course of study with two other Confucius Classroom Schools, Gavilan Peak and Diamond Canyon K-8 Schools.

This collaboration will allow Boulder Creek to expand its language offerings  and allow them to offer Advanced Placement courses in Mandarin within the next few years.

See story here.