Applied Languages

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus has signed Department of Education Order 74, nullifying the 35-year-old bilingual directive laid down in the 1970s on English and Filipino as the only languages of instruction. Neither of the languages is the first language of most Filipinos. Lapus said findings of various local initiatives and international studies in basic education have validated the superiority of the use of the learner’s mother tongue in improving learning outcomes and promoting Education For All.

He added the Order 74 institutionalizes the use of mother tongue as a fundamental educational policy and programme in the department in the whole stretch of formal education including preschool and in the Alternative Learning System. The policy widely referred to as mother tongue-based multilingual education aims to improve learning outcomes and promote Education For All.

Lapus cited findings from international and local research such as learners acquire reading skills more easily in their native than in their second language. Pupils who start to speak, read and write in their mother tongue learn a second language, like English, more quickly than those exclusively taught in a second language.

Learners develop cognitive, linguistic and academic competencies much faster in their native language than in a second language.
Under the new order, Filipino and English will be taught as separate subjects in the early grades and will be used as media of instruction when students are “ready.” This means when they have gained sufficient proficiency in the two second languages, as determined by the department, English and Filipino will remain the primary languages of teaching in high school, with the mother tongue as auxiliary and supplementary medium.

Lapus clarified that mother tongue-based multilingual education (MLE) will only be implemented at the level of the school, division and region after meeting certain conditions.  These include the establishment of a working orthography or spelling system; the formation of a technical working group to oversee the program; the development, production and distribution of culturally-relevant but inexpensive mother tongue materials; in-service MLE training of teachers; the use of the mother tongue for testing; and maximum participation and support from the local government unit, parents and community under the concept of school-based management.  The new policy also extends to the alternative learning systems and the madaris schools.

Philippine education stakeholders and linguistic experts have been clamoring for a change in the language-in-education policy. They have identified the disparity in the home and school languages as a major factor in the worsening functional literacy levels, high drop-out rates, and low learning outcomes among Filipino pupils.

Read more: Manila Standard Today

 Around 5,000 new words have been officially added to the German language – many of them from the English-speaking world.
The newcomers appear in the latest edition of the respected German dictionary, Duden.

Germans can now go to an “After-Show-Party”, as long as it is not a “No-Go Area”, and meet the “It Girl” – if she does not have the “Babyblues”.
Fans of social networking can also “twittern”, which means to Twitter.

The financial crisis has inspired many of the new entries in the 135,000-word dictionary. Appearing for the first time are “Kreditklemme” (credit crunch), “Konjunkturpaket” (stimulus package) and “Abwrackprämie” (car scrappage bonus).
The word “Ehrenmord” (honour killing) also makes it into the dictionary, which was published on Wednesday.

The German language is known for its extremely long compound nouns. And the new edition includes a 23-letter example: “Vorratsdatenspeicherung”, which means telecommunications data retention.

The first Duden dictionary was produced in 1880 and consisted of just 27,000 words.

Read more: BBC News

As the community of Esperanto speakers prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of its author’s birth, the appeal of this language designed to foster harmony and coexistence continues.

There are currently believed to be about one million people around the world who speak Esperanto, devised in the 1880s by Dr Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof (1859-1917) whose 150th birthday is being marked this month by an International Esperanto Congress in his birthplace, Bialystok, Poland.

Language is identity, and Esperanto speakers have a strong sense of community, based on tolerance and equality. “You’d have to be pretty weird not to be accepted in an Esperanto club,” says Mr Miklaf who belongs to a group of speakers in Tel Aviv.

Some argue that this tradition of tolerance goes back to the original values of its founder. “If I wasn’t a Jew from a ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity would either have never occurred to me, or it would have never taken such a firm hold of me throughout my life”, wrote Zamenhof in 1905. A resident of Warsaw, Zamenhof was alarmed at the growing wave of anti-Semitism throughout the Russian empire.

Zamenhof’s book Dr Esperanto (meaning Dr Hopeful) offered a simple grammar and a vocabulary of 900 words derived from Romanesque, Germanic and Slavic languages. Through a system of suffixes and prefixes it had a built-in ability to generate new words.

“Everyone who has learnt Esperanto knows the joy of using this flexible and witty language”, says Esther Schor of Princeton University, who is writing a book on the history of Esperanto. Zamenhof believed that his language was so simple that even an uneducated person could learn it in a week. This assessment was probably optimistic. But today most speakers would agree that a couple of months is sufficient to become fluent.

These days, Esperanto has gone far beyond being a purely Jewish, or minority, project. It connects people even in troubled parts of the world.

Read More: BBC News

Slovakia has dismissed protests by neighbouring Hungary over a new language law which would impose fines for using minority languages. The Slovak foreign minister Miroslav Lajcak was speaking after Hungarian MPs on Monday jointly urged Slovakia to rescind the language law. He said “it’s necessary to return this hysterical atmosphere – which hasn’t been caused by the Slovak side – to normal”.

Slovakia’s 5.4 million population includes more than 500,000 Hungarians. The law, due to come into effect on 1 September, envisages fines of up to 5,000 euros (£4,315) for people who use minority languages in public services. It would apply in cases where the minority forms less than 20% of the local population.

Janos Koka, leader of the liberal Free Democrats (SZDSZ) party group in the Hungarian parliament, said “what we need is a diplomatic offensive so that this law is rescinded before it comes into force on 1 September”.

A German conservative MEP, Michael Gahler, also condemned the law. He said Slovakia was “violating commonly respected standards in the EU and disregarding respective recommendations of the Council of Europe, which foresee the extended use of minority languages”.
According to Mr Lajcak, the law “in no way restricts the use of minority languages in Slovakia”.

He said the law was intended to “ensure that no Slovak citizen, irrespective of their ethnicity, feels disadvantaged or discriminated against in the territory of their country on the grounds of the language they speak”.

Slovakia’s ruling coalition, led by Prime Minister Robert Fico of the left-wing Smer party, includes the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS) of Jan Slota.

Read more: BBC News

The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?

New research is showing just how children’s brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.

“We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults,” says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.

Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.

Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn’t distinguish between the “L” and “R” sounds of English — “rake” and “lake” would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.

Time out — how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there’s a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl’s research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don’t fit.

“You’re building a brain architecture that’s a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French,” whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you’re a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It’s remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.
Italian researchers wondered why there wasn’t a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies.

While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty. “We’re seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty,” Kuhl says. As an adult, “it’s a totally different process. You won’t learn it in the same way. You won’t become (as good as) a native speaker.”

What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language — TV or CDs alone don’t work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.

Recall that Japanese “L” and “R” difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in “motherese,” the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.
Japanese college students who’d had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated “Ls” and “Rs” while watching the computerized instructor’s face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

“It’s our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal,” says Kuhl. But she’d rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly. “You’ll be surprised,” Kuhl says. “They do seem to pick it up like sponges.”

Read more: Associated Press