700 reasons to study Spanish:
http://www.llas.ac.uk/700reasons/700reasons.aspx
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Foreign Languages: Doors to Opportunity - VIDEO
produced by Michigan State University – an excellent source for information about the reasons to learn a foreign language!
http://clear.msu.edu/clear/video/doors2opp/
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Want to know the research on how studying a Foreign Language…
* supports academic achievement?
* provides cognitive benefits to students?
* affects attitudes and beliefs about language learning and about other cultures?
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VIDEO:
Watch a video exchange between Senator Daniel Kahikina Akaka (D-HI), Chair of the Readiness and Management Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee and Leon Panetta during his confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Defense. They are discussing the value and importance of knowing other languages and the “foreign language capabilities” of the Defense Department. This clip is available on the Senator’s web site as well, http://akaka.senate.gov
http://youtu.be/Y8uylcb2CjM
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ARTICLES:
Why Study Spanish?
http://fluencyfast.com/globearticle.htm
Science Grows on Acquiring New Language
Quote from article: Ms. Abbot, who has supervised foreign-language programs for early-elementary students in Fairfax County, Va., said she saw exactly that sort of flexibility in problem-solving among the young students in the district’s partial-immersion program, in which both English-speaking students and speakers of other languages spend part of the school day learning in a second language.
“A bilingualist,” Ms. Kroll said, “is a mental juggler.”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/10/22/09window_ep.h30.html?tkn=TNPFqJBHpqUPsAmtxWv1RHBwsJn%2BTWCr%2BbC9&cmp=clp-edweek
Gray Matter
Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?_r=2&hp
Being Bilingual Boosts Brain Power
http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20041013/being-bilingual-boosts-brain-power
Keep Your Brain Young: Read, Be Bilingual, Drink Coffee
http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/3799571/1180558529/name/Read+be+bilingual+drink+coffee.pdf
Why Learn Spanish? Spanish for Beginners
By Gerald Erichsen, About.com Guide
http://spanish.about.com/cs/forbeginners/a/whylearnspanish.htm
Foreign Languages: An Essential Core Experience - an article by a professor in Tennessee
http://www.utm.edu/staff/bobp/french/flsat.html
Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen.
(Translation: First learn Spanish. Then study Chinese.)
NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Nicholas Kristof, speaks Chinese and has traveled extensively throughout his life. Read his view on this controversial topic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/opinion/30kristof.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%2b%22elementary+school%22+%2bcurriculum&st=nyt
Leon Panetta: Language training vital to our defense
Secretary of Defense addresses military students in Monterey
http://www.thecalifornian.com/article/20110824/NEWS01/108240315/Leon-Panetta-Language-training-vital-our-defense
Top Ten Reasons to Learn Spanish
http://www.studyspanish.com/topten_reasons.htm
Why Study Spanish Abroad?
http://www.donquijote.org/english/whyspanish.asp
Why Choose Spanish as Your New Foreign Language? Why is it Important to Learn Spanish?
http://www.spanish-school.com.mx/learnspanish.php
Learn Spanish in Spain
http://www.universpain.com/Spanish/Spanish.php
The Importance of the Spanish Language
http://languagemagazine.com/internetedition/spanimm/spanish.html
Why Spanish?
http://www.spanishmaster.com/SpanishMaster/WhySpanish/WhySpanish.html
Why learn Spanish?
http://www.vistawide.com/spanish/why_spanish.htm
Porque aprender Español?
http://www.learn-languages-abroad.co.uk/espanol/aprende-espanol.html
¿Por qué Estudiar Español?
http://hispanos-europa.blogspot.com/2007/02/por-qu-estudiar-espaol.html
Learn languages Abroad
http://www.learn-languages-abroad.co.uk/
Why Learn a Second Language?
http://ccflt.org/adfl1.htm
Reasons to Learn Spanish
http://www.studylanguages.org/spanishcourses/reasons.asp
Dancing To Connect To A Global Tribe
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102423050
Why Learn Languages
http://www.language-learning-advisor.com/why-learn-languages.html
The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bilingual-brains
Illinois Learning Standards – Foreign Languages
http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/foreign_languages/standards.htm
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Go to ACTFL RESEARCH FOR MORE INFO!
http://www.discoverlanguages.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4524
AT THE SITE ABOVE, YOU CAN CLICK ON EACH OF THE FOLLOWING TOPICS TO GET MORE INFORMATION…
How does language learning support academic achievement?
Language learning correlates with higher academic achievement on standardized test measures.
Language learning is beneficial to both monolingual English and English language learners in bilingual and two-way immersion programs.
Language learning is beneficial in the development of students’ reading abilities.
There is evidence that language learners transfer skills from one language to another.
There is a correlation between second language learning and increased linguistic awareness.
There is a correlation between language learning and students’ ability to hypothesize in science.
Language learning can benefit all students.
There is a correlation between young children’s second language development and the development of print awareness.
Heritage learners who use their language skills to interpret and translate for family members experience higher academic performance and greater self-efficacy.
There is a correlation between language study and higher scores on the SAT and ACT Tests.
There is a correlation between high school foreign language study and higher academic performance at the college level.
How does language learning provide cognitive benefits to students?
There is evidence that early language learning improves cognitive abilities.
There is evidence bilingualism correlates with increased cognitive development and abilities.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and the offset of age-related cognitive losses.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and attentional control on cognitive tasks.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and intelligence.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and metalinguistic skills.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and memory skills.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and problem solving ability.
There is a correlation between bilingualism and improved verbal and spatial abilities.
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Find out more about the benefits of language learning by investigating these resources.
http://www.discoverlanguages.org/i4a/pages/Index.cfm?pageID=4526#more1
Find out more about the benefits of bilingualism by investigating these reviews of the literature.
http://www.discoverlanguages.org/i4a/pages/Index.cfm?pageID=4526#more2
How does language learning affect attitudes and beliefs about language learning and about other cultures?
Research suggests that language learners develop a more positive attitude toward the target language and/or the speakers of that language.
Helpful Resources on the topic of attitudes and foreign language learning.
http://www.discoverlanguages.org/i4a/pages/Index.cfm?pageID=4527#helpful_resources
Article from Education Week: Does NCLB Promote Monoligualism?
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/03/17/25salomone_ep.h29.html?tkn=VRNF5PM4WwR6XgFC0bE3Dfx5IEbCP2VY25BZ&cmp=clp-edweek
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CAREER POSSIBILITIES WITH FOREIGN LANGUAGE SKILLS… Check out this info from this site:
http://www.uncwil.edu/stuaff/career/Majors/language.htm#related%20career%20titles
Much of the information from the site above is on my page entitled Career possibilities with foreign language skills:
http://srarose.wordpress.com/why-study-spanish/career-possibilities-with-foreign-language-skills/
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How long does it take to learn a language?
http://drsaraheaton.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-a-new-language/
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How Europeans Know You’re American
http://www.life.com/gallery/46721/how-europeans-know-youre-american?xid=newsletter#index/0
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This I Believe
Barbara – Seattle, Washington
Entered on September 8, 2006
Age Group: 30 – 50
This I Believe
I believe in foreign languages. I believe that in learning to speak languages other than our mother tongues, we find our better selves in the words and worlds of others.
I know this because I was raised with only one language — English. As a child, I developed a strange, inchoate envy of kids who spoke other languages at home. I envied Carmina — who could speak Spanish with her parents, and Kareen — who spoke Creole at home. I envied Mischa, who knew French and German, and I envied my friends who trudged off every week to Hebrew school. I coveted those alien languages, their mysterious sounds and enigmatic words, and the difference that they presented to the world that I knew. Other languages promised not just other worlds beyond my home in suburban New Jersey, but a way of being someone other than who I was. I desperately wanted to be foreign, and to do this, I would have to learn as many languages as possible.
This wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped it would be.
My only real gift in learning languages is a good ear. Everything else is a struggle. I’ve never really mastered the many moods of French verbs. German sentence structure exasperating continues to be. And Latin was a dolorous exercise in futility. To learn the languages that I work with every day, Russian and Yiddish, it took a tremendous effort to assimilate the dative case, the genitive of absence, the langer tsadik, and unstressed verbal prefixes. Gradually, it all sank in, and today I even teach these languages to other people.
There are many pleasures in knowing another language — the warmth of a stranger’s face when you answer in her mother tongue, books as their authors wrote them, songs and films without liner notes and subtitles. But there’s also the joy of thinking and being in another language. That moment when you forget which language you’re speaking or hearing, because the native tongue and the adopted one have ceased to be marked as such in your mind. Their merging signals the end of translation, and the beginning of creation — both of perception and expression that do not exist in your native tongue, and of one’s own self. For by learning to speak with another’s voice, you have fundamentally changed your own.
In your adopted tongue, you tend to listen more, and talk less. You think about the way the language works, admire its elegance and economy. And you marvel at how a five-year old native speaker fearlessly employs the daunting instrumental plural.
Because in truth you too have become a child again in your adopted language. You and your second language grow together, through youthful exploration and awkward adolescence, into the heady freedom of adulthood. I believe that you are reborn in another tongue — in a language that was not given to you, but chosen, and earned.
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16054/
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You can go to this site to see a larger version of the following Infographic:
http://voxy.com/blog/index.php/wide-infographics/5312-2/?post=2725
Via: Voxy Blog
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You can go to this site to see a larger version of the following Infographic:
http://voxy.com/blog/index.php/wide-infographics/language-and-your-brain-infographic/?post=3587
Via: Voxy Blog
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