Multilingualism and Education for Democracy

This essay attempts to show the importance of linguistic issues in education for democracy and the close relationship between democracy and multilingualism. Increasingly nation-states are having to adapt to linguistic diversity within their borders and to recognize that democracy requires the participation of all citizens, including those belonging to linguistic minorities. Democracy also requires that all linguistic groups share a sense of community. The author argues the need for educational policies that address these challenges.     

Imagined Communities,School Visions,and the Education of Bilingual Students in Japan

The purpose of this study is to analyze the policies and practices of schools in Japan that serve large numbers of bilingual students. Using the notion of imagined communities (Anderson, 1991; Norton, 2001), I examine the relationship between the schools' visions for their students, their current policies and practices, and the students' identities. Based on the ethnographic data collected at four schools in Japan that cater to very different groups of bilingual children, I argue that schools have visions of the communities and societies in which their students will grow up to participate. Moreover, these visions condition the schools' current policies and practices and ultimately affect the identities of the students. Because the students at the four schools are expected to lead different futures, they are being prepared for different kinds of bilingualism. In this stratification process, it is the least privileged bilingual children who are socialized into the most impoverished imagined communities.     

The Imagined Communities of English Language Learners in a Pakistani School

This article reports a 2001-2002 study conducted among middle-school students in Karachi, Pakistan, in the wake of 9/11. In the context of their involvement in a global community-building project, in which students sought to develop the literacy and English skills of a group of Afghan refugees, students were asked to reflect on their perceptions of literacy and the English language, as well as their hopes for the future. Students saw the development of literacy, competence in English, and technological advances in the future as desirable and interdependent. They imagined a future society in which Pakistan was peaceful, true to the principles of Islam, and a contributing member of the international community. The authors suggest that the students' imagined communities are best understood with reference to a "politics of location" (Canagarajah, 1999) in which the English language coexists with vernacular languages, and local needs are balanced against global imperatives. In such a context, imagined communities are multiple and identities hybrid. The authors conclude that the challenge for educators is to harness our own imaginations in the pursuit of a peaceful and just global community.     

Preparing Science Teachers for Culturally Diverse Students: Developing Cultural Literacy Through Cultural Immersion, Cultural Translators and Communities of Practice

This three year study of P-12 professional development is grounded in sociocultural theories that hold that building knowledge and relationships among individuals from different cultural backgrounds entails joint activity toward common goals and cultural dialogues mediated by cultural translators. Sixty P-12 pre and in-service teachers in a year long interdisciplinary science curriculum course shared the goal of developing culturally relevant, standards-based science curricula for Native Hawai'ian students. Teachers and Native Hawai'ian instructors lived and worked together during a five day culture-science immersion in rural school and community sites and met several times at school, university, and community sites to build knowledge and share programs. Teachers were deeply moved by immersion experiences, learned to connect cultural understandings, e.g., a Hawai'ian sense of place and curriculum development, and highly valued collaborating with peers on curriculum development and implementation. The study finds that long term professional development providing situated learning through cultural immersion, cultural translators, and interdisciplinary instruction supports the establishment of communities of practice in which participants develop the cross-cultural knowledge and literacy needed for the development of locally relevant, place and standards-based curricula and pedagogy.     

Coloniality and Education: Negotiating Discourses of Immigration in Schools and Communities Through Border Thinking

In this article, we examine the discursive construction of knowledge about immigration in two geographic spaces whose “border” many students navigate: a school context meant to support English Language Learners and an out-of-school faith based organization serving immigrant communities. We draw on the concept of “border thinking” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 18) to understand how colonial histories continue to influence contemporary educational contexts. Through examples from students’, community members’, and educators’ interactions with available discourses of immigration, we elaborate on the implications of community knowledge for revising school practices to represent a fuller complexity of immigration experiences.     

校园网中居民区接入方案的探讨

居民接入网是校园网的一个重要组成部分,它对教学起着重要的作用,但目前国内学校对其重视程度不够。通过归纳和分析适合于校园网的各种接入技术,探讨一种建设校园居民区接入网的解决途径和方法。     

学校教育:没有想象的那么神奇

在当前社会中,存在一种将学校教育神奇化的不良倾向,也即学校教育功能泛化倾向。这一倾向使学校教育不堪重负,给学校教育带来了不应有的伤害。要避免这一倾向,就必须重新认识学校教育。实事求是地说,学校教育的功能是有其边界及限度的,只有正确认识学校教育的有限性,才能正确发挥学校教育的本体功能,也才有利于正确发挥学校教育的工具性功能以及其他教育形式(如家庭教育、社会教育等)的功能,进而全方位地促进学生发展。     

“We Share the Same Biology…” Cultivating Cross-Cultural Empathy and Global Ethics Through Multilingualism

The “language-culture tesseract” hypothesized in the September 2010 issue of Mind, Brain, and Education suggests successive links between non-native language (NNL) acquisition, the development of cross-cultural empathy, and prosocial global ethics. Invoking Goethe's (1833/1999) aphorism, “those who do not know other languages know nothing of their own,” it was argued that becoming plurilingual constitutes an essential step toward metalinguistic and metacultural awareness; and that “what is true of water for a fish is also true of the mother tongue and of the native culture for a human being.” In this article, we would like to elaborate on that argument and submit to the MBE community the idea of applying the developing understanding of empathy in the brain toward the design of new approaches to NNL education that maximize its potential to cultivate a positive local–global dialectic in students.     

Teaching Through Testimonio: Accessing Community Cultural Wealth in School

Using the concept of community cultural wealth, this article examines the ways that a group of 3rd-grade students engaged in writing testimonios, or personal narratives, to reflect on their cultural and linguistic lives in and outside of the classroom. Countering deficit notions of Latina/o students, families, and communities, this study illuminates the powerful ways that students utilize various forms of community cultural wealth. The findings indicate that testimonio can be an effective pedagogical tool to help students identify their individual and collective community cultural wealth and draw on these forms of knowledge in the elementary classroom.     

Teaching Culture: Imagined Communities and National Fantasies in the O. J. Simpson Case

This article argues for a complex and contradictory presentation of culture in the language classroom. To demonstrate the possibilities, it uses theories of nationalism to examine treatment of the O. J. Simpson case-a murder trial in the United States. Coverage from popular news magazines is read through the lens of anthropology (Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, 1991) and of literary and social theory (Lauren Berlant's National Fantasies, 1991). The focus of these readings is the transformation of the race-neutral citizen Simpson into the racialized and criminalized defendant, then the "cultural work" (Tompkins, 1985) that once again attains a national perspective. As the media transformed Simpson, the individual reader was enfolded into an "us" that (re)built the nation at the moment of its disturbance. Exploring the cultural work that produced these transformations exposes the complex raw material from which cultural presentations can be drawn. The article argues that language students require a similarly nuanced sense of cultural events and artifacts if they are to avoid essentialist and anachronistic conceptions of "target cultures." The discussion ends with reflections on classroom practice. It begins with the author's early experience in the language classroom.     

美国浸入式教学实践及其启示

作为第二语言教学新模式的浸入教学，近十几年来得到世界上越来越广泛的认同。美国是世界上最大的移民国家，如何解决移民语言问题，并让本土美国人能更好地学习得外语，发展语言能力，提升国民素质，是当今美国极其敏感的社会政治问题，浸入式教学模式之一－双向浸入式（TWI）经过多年实践，证明是卓有成效的，学生在学习学科知识的同时，第二语言能力也获得了全面发展，并具备了较强的文化敏感性，美国浸入式教学为外语教学的改革与发展提供了宝贵经验。     

"浸润式"双语教学模式的建构与实践

一、浸润式双语教学模式的概念与特点(一)浸润式双语教学模式的概念阐释浸润式双语教学模式指的是在一定条件下采用逐渐渗透的方式所实施的以提高学生双语能力为目标、为培养面向世界的高素质双语人才打基础的教学模式。笔者之所以将其定名为“浸润式”,主要依据我国辞书中对“浸润”一词的以下三种解释:第一,“浸润”有“物受水渗透”①之意。在我国,双语教学的直接目标,是解决基础教育阶段学生一门外语基本过关的问题。第二语言习得理论认为,学生第二语言能力的形成是在一定的语言环境中自然而然习得的。在这里,语言环境的“渗透”功能至…     

Higher Education Communities and Academic Identity

The slippery use to which the word 'community' is applied in higher education studies and pronouncements makes it desirable that it should be better defined and related to more bounded assumptions about individual academic identity and relationships within academe. There is discussion of the academic communities of the invisible colleges and their modes of internal governance by elites and the communitarian implications of the changing pattern of institutional management. The relationship of academics and their institutions to the wider world of society and the economy is considered. It is concluded that external connections are not best pursued through assumptions of shared community but of acceptance of differentiation and exchange.     

加拿大浸入式双语教育和香港EMI双语教育的比较

加拿大和香港的双语教育都有着悠久的历史.加拿大法语浸入式双语教育和香港EMI双语教育表面上有很大的相似度,然而,从本质上来看,两地的语言环境、双语师资、双语教育的类型以及第一语言和第二语言的相似度之间都有很大的差异.这些差异导致了两地双语教育的效果也大相径庭.通过对两地双语教育的分析比较,对我国大陆开展的双语教学是有借鉴作用的.     

美国外语浸入式教学现状

外语浸入式教学定义为使用某种外语为教学语言媒介,进行学科知识内容的教学.浸入式教学法不同于传统外语教学法,在美国已有30多年历史.本文旨在对美国浸入式教学的引进和发展,根据已有的研究结果,为读者提供一个简介.文章重点阐述了与浸入式课堂教学实践有关的问题,如师资能力、教材选用和开发、教学方法、课程综合性教学以及校方领导参与等问题.     

Thinking Through Computing: The Power of Learning Communities

This paper describes an empirical study that investigated the knowledge that Computer Science students have about the extent of their own previous learning. The study compared self-generated estimates of performance with actual performance on a data structures quiz taken by undergraduate students in courses requiring data structures as a prerequisite. The study was contextualized and grounded within a research paradigm in Psychology called calibration of knowledge that suggests that self-knowledge across a range of disciplines is highly unreliable. Such self-knowledge is important because of its role in meta-cognition, particularly in cognitive self-regulation and monitoring, as well as in the credence that instructors give to student self-reports. Our results indicated that Computer Science student self-estimates are highly correlated with performance, more so for estimates provided after the performance than before. This high level of calibration, however, was likely the result of a number of conditions that do not always hold: that the students already had domain expertise, that the quiz had unambiguous and verifiable answers, and that students expected their estimates to be validated. When these conditions are not met, it becomes more important for students to have direct feedback about their performance so as to uncover those areas where their intuitions might mislead them. Students also had weak knowledge about their standing relative to their peers, particularly those in the lower performance quartiles, exhibiting the well known better-than-average heuristic. There was, additionally, no correlation between calibration ability and degree of liking or difficulty with the data structures material, suggesting that instructors and researchers should not treat liking or difficulty as reliable indicators of the learning that has occurred.