Workforce Language Services

Popular parenting blogs and websites show that many New York families are hiring babysitters to speak a second language with their children at home. When only a few years ago the trend was the opposite (only English-speaking nannies at home), New Yorkers now believe it’s important for their children to speak two or more languages.

That has certainly helped Elena Alarcón, a nanny born in Mexico who attended school in the United States. Ms. Alarcón recently completed 15 interviews with parents living in Brooklyn, and all of them insisted that if hired, she speak only Spanish with their children.

“I thought I would have to speak English with the families,” Ms. Alarcón said. “I was surprised they wanted me to speak only in Spanish.”

Ms. Alarcón now works for Yashmin Fernandes, who became fluent in Spanish living and working in Latin America. Ms. Fernandes speaks in Spanish with her daughter; her husband, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, speaks in English. “His family is the Spanish-speaking side,” Ms. Fernandes said, “but I was more adamant about getting a Spanish-speaking nanny.”

The New York Times, which reports on this trend, explains some of the benefits and disadvantages of trying to raise a child bilingually. For example, if the nanny is the only person speaking a second language, it probably won’t stick unless it’s also reinforced in another environment.

The WLS blog featured a study about raising bilingual children (http://workforcelanguageservices.com/blog/2009/07/24/sponges-inside-the-minds-of-bilingual-babies/) that explains benefits that the NYTimes article also mentions. There are significant cognitive differences between a bilingual child and one who speaks a single language. For example:

…bilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways. In one test researchers frequently use, words like “red” and “green” flash across a screen, but the words actually appear in purple and yellow. Bilingual children are faster at identifying what color the word is written in, a fact researchers attribute to a more developed prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive decision-making, like which language to use with certain people).

What’s important, above all, is for children to receive consistent exposure to both languages.

Read the full NYTimes article here.

Many Korean immigrants have recently found themselves in the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center taking classes in—what else?—Spanish. People like Sue Choe, who owns a laundromat in Koreatown, see many reasons to learn the language that many of her customers speak.

Aware of an ugly history between Korean-Americans and African-Americans–one that erupted into violence in some cities in the 1990s–Korean business owners are trying to soothe mutual suspicions with Spanish-speaking workers and customers. The effort is mostly born of an increasingly interdependent employer-employee relationship.

It is just one of the ways in which new waves of immigration and intermigration between neighborhoods is fast changing the city, mixing new combinations of ethnic groups together and forcing them to search for ways to coexist as so many previous generations of immigrants did.

Beginning a community dialogue is important, especially recalling the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles. It’s also important because Koreans and Hispanics don’t just live in the same communities, they work together too. Hispanics have become the primary labor pool for Korean business owners, and cultural differences have erupted in the workplace.

Latino workers, many earning less than the minimum wage, complain that their Korean bosses neglect to pay overtime and are often callous about days off or job-related injuries.

In turn Korean owners, at times unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, see ingratitude and disloyalty in their employees’ complaints. They argue that their up-from-the-ground businesses are a team effort that also has the owners working long hours.

Disputes have hurt both sides.  Learning to understand the cultures around you (and their languages) is a great start. Read the full Chicago Tribune article about this issue here.

Want to learn the languages spoken in your neighborhood? Visit MultilingualChicago.com to learn about language classes and workshops in your area!

With a fast growing Hispanic population in the U.S., poor Hispanic graduation rates could have huge consequences in the future of our nation. A new study called “Rising to the Challenge: Raising Hispanic Graduation Rates as a National Priority” shows that many of our 4-year colleges are graduating less than half of their Hispanic students.

Colleges and universities across the board graduate 51 percent of their Hispanic students versus 59 percent of their white peers.

When the study’s researchers examined graduation rates among similarly selective colleges and universities, they found considerable variation in Hispanic graduation rates, indicating that though student background is important, institutional practices also play a role.

“This data shows quite clearly that colleges and universities cannot place all of the blame on students for failing to graduate,” said Andrew P. Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute. “Colleges struggling to graduate their Hispanic students should learn from the successes of leaders like Whittier College, which has successfully closed the gap between its Hispanic and white students.”

So what can colleges to do to help retain Hispanic students? The student found that rates tend to improve with “an increased institutional focus on graduating all students, better consumer information, and reformed government funding that focuses on performance instead of enrollment.”

The low rates can’t be ignored. HispanicTips.com, reporting on this study, writes that “education beyond high school is critical for both a strong economy and the financial security of American families. Employees with higher education are more productive and earn more money than those who only graduated from high school.”

Read the full article here.

When Roxana Soto and Ana Flores retired from careers in TV and print journalism and became mothers, they were both amazed at the misinformation and lack of resources for parents who wanted to raise their kids bilingually and biculturally. So, they started SpanglishBaby, an online community dedicated to raising bilingual children.

SpanglishBaby is more than a blog (although it does have excellent daily blog posts with expert advice). It’s committed to providing resources to answer any and every question that might arise. Sections include ‘Must Reads,’ ‘Daily Learning,’ ‘The Culture of Food,’ ‘Ask an Expert,’ and ‘La Tiendita,’ among others.

La Bloga writes about SpanglishBaby:

According to Soto, Spanglish Baby’s first year has been full of both challenges and surprises. Among the former she cites the typical trials of starting a blog: building consistent traffic and creating fresh and interesting content. A loyal readership has emerged over the past months and, to celebrate this and its successful first year, Soto and Flores completely redesigned the blog, allowing readers to navigate the site more easily and to have a more participatory role. They’ve also added five regular contributors who, according to the editors, provide fresh perspectives on bilingual parenting on a weekly basis.

Check it out here! www.spanglishbaby.com

On Sesame Street, neighbors work their problems out with smiles under cloudless skies. Kids learn the letters of the alphabet and sing songs, and in the tradition of the 40+ year old TV show, they learn that their world is diverse—and that’s okay.

The question, then, is how to bring these same messages to a world divided, where neighbors do not work out their problems with smiles, much less in the same neighborhood: Israel and Palestine. We post this great NYTimes Magazine article (although published last year) here as a very interesting read as well as a case study for localization in a controversial environment.

This season’s episodes of “Shara’a Simsim,” the Palestinian version of the global “Sesame Street” franchise, were filmed in a satellite campus of Al-Quds University, a ramshackle four-story concrete structure that houses the school’s media department and a small local television station. The building sits in an upscale neighborhood on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah, not far from the edge of the Israeli settlement Psagot. Like many structures on the West Bank, the Al-Quds building seems to be simultaneously under construction and decaying into a ruin. Some walls are pocked with bullet holes, from when the Israeli Army occupied the building for 19 days in 2001, during the second intifada. In another life, the building was a hotel, and the balconies out front where TV crews and students take smoking breaks overlook the crumbling shell of its swimming pool.

Read on…

Motivos, a bilingual Latino youth magazine (by and for youth) out of Philadelphia, is more that just a publication. On a Friday night, when the last thing on most teens’ minds is work, a half a dozen of them are huddled around a table in a basement room of Benjamin Franklin High School, talking about fonts.

The magazine is a for-profit enterprise that has been operating out of the high school since 2008. Virtually all of it is written, edited and illustrated by 14- to 24-year-olds under the direction of founder Jenée Alicia Chizick. Chizick is passionate about educating and motivating the often under-served teens.

“When you’re not educated it’s harder to get into decision-making rooms,” Chizick told an audience during an author series at the community workshop Taller Puertorriqueño in North Kensington in November. “I wanted to make sure from the get-go that the students that the magazine employs were in the decision-making rooms, so part of the model is that those schools that subscribe in bulk to the magazine then can choose one or two students to serve on the advisory board.”

Schools see the magazine as a way to boost enrollment of underrepresented students. Amid the student-penned poems, cultural columns and relationship advice, readers encounter occasional articles supplied by a university admissions department.

Chizick has already inspired many students who now go to college and are seeing opportunities abound. “‘Everything that she does, she has a reason for it and she explains it,’ said Keisha Frazier, a Motivos contributor studying broadcast journalism at Temple. Frazier said traveling to the National Council of La Raza annual conference with Chizick a few years ago was a life-changing experience.”

Read the full profile here.

Great news for parents of bilingual kids: the first entirely bilingual brand of children’s toys has hit the market. Atlanta-based Smart Play, LLC launched Ingenio(TM) which features “10 portable, affordable toys and games that teach a comprehensive range of early learning skills in English and Spanish – fine motor, reading, writing, math, vocabulary, geography and problem solving.”

The news is refreshing to teachers and parents who have long desired Spanish language toys for their children, especially as nearly 25% of the country’s children between ages 3-6 are of Hispanic origin (a number that is rising). Bilingualism at a young age has proven benefits, such as “greater cognitive flexibility, improved powers of concept formation and enhanced creativity.”

Read the full press release here.

An estimated 850,000 adults in the Greater Chicago area have limited English competency skills, according to Literacy Chicago. With many of their children in English-speaking public schools, this creates a huge problem for Chicago schools.

Parents may not need the English communication skills on the job, but without the ability to speak in English, they are unable to communicate with teachers and other parents, as well as their children. One example:

Although Maximina Esteban’s work as a house cleaner does not require her to speak English, her duty as a single mother of two sons does.

Born and raised in Chicago, Esteban’s children, 11 and 7, spend most of their days at school speaking English rather than Spanish.

Despite her attempts to get them to speak Spanish at home, they reply in English, especially her younger son. He understands very little Spanish and rarely uses it with his mother.

Literacy Chicago, which provides free English language training to adults, had their federal funding reduced by 13% for the 2010 fiscal year. They anticipate greater cuts in 2011. Other organizations with English literacy programs are facing similar cuts.

Explains Medill Reports of Northwestern University, “This threat of budget cutbacks makes immigrant parents particularly vulnerable. With fewer opportunities for free English instruction, they will continue to struggle to communicate with their children and their teachers.”

Read the full story here.

Should names of the likes of Cesar Chavez and other Hispanic historical figures be erased from the history books? Some people in Texas seem to think so, and so the State Board of Education will put the question to a vote.

The online magazine Latina Lista takes a strong stance against this in an editorial titled “Latino leadership needed to counter TX State Board of Education’s attempt to write minorities out of history.”

The article cites a new study from the Southern Education Foundation that reports that for the first time in history, more that half of students in the 15 Southern states are children of color—African-American, Hispanic and Native American. Latina Lista sees this as a blatant reason not to cut minority leaders out of the textbooks.

These SBOE board members, along with their appointees, who adhere to the perspective that it is repugnant to teach children about the historical contributions of Latinos and African Americans show they are no better, and given recent quotes attributed to some who were involved in setting the Social Studies standards, are essentially rewriting U.S. history to conform to their distorted views of how they wish to see the United States.

Click here to read the full (heated) opinion.

Sad, but true — a local Chicago non-profit will be closing its doors after 18 years due to the economic downturn. The MultiCultural Development Center (MCDC) has been an area leader in education related to issues of diversity and cultural inclusion.

From the December 7 press release:

Through its many programs, thousands of participants gained new understanding and knowledge regarding the many people and cultures that make up the world in which we live. The goal of MCDC has been to help build a culture where the attitudes and actions of people foster mutual respect so that people of all backgrounds can fully participate in the workplace as well as in the community.

From 1991 to 2009, MCDC educated thousands of people by promoting cultural understanding and inclusiveness to enhance workplace performance and community relationships. The organization was best known for its educational events, led by presenters such as Dr. Roosevelt Thomas, Tim Wise, Angela Bassett, Jane Elliott and Lee Mun Wah, as well as its trademarked Chronology of World Cultural Events poster calendar.

Workforce Language Services is sad to see this great community resource go, and wishes everyone involved with MCDC the best in the coming year.

Visit the MCDC at http://www.mcdc.org/.