Eliminating Language Barriers for LEP Individuals: Promising Practices from the Public Sector

While the focus of this report is on eliminating language barriers for limited English proficient (LEP) individuals, any strategy to improve communications with this population must also include English learning and address the shortage of high-quality English as a Second Language (ESL) courses for adults. State-administered ESL programs currently serve only about a million of the estimated 12.4 million LEP adults in the United States who need language instruction. The underfunding of ESL programs means that large numbers of immigrant adults who wish to learn English are unable to enroll in classes or face overcrowded classrooms. For instance, a 2006 national survey of ESL providers found that 57 percent of these programs maintained waiting lists -- ranging from a few weeks to more than three years -- and could not accommodate the high numbers of immigrants interested in learning English. Policy experts and organizations that work with adult English learners have proposed various strategies to increase the availability of high-quality ESL courses, but lack of political support at the national level -- coupled with the current fiscal crisis -- has weakened efforts to help immigrants improve their English skills

Lexicography in Gabon : a survey

This paper traces the historical development of lexicography in Gabon. Gabon, like most African countries, is multilingual. The recent inventories of languages spoken in Gabon are those established by Jacquot (1978) and Kwenzi-Mikala (1998). According to Kwenzi-Mikala (1997), there are 62 speech forms divided into 10 language groups or language-units in Gabon. These speech forms co-exist with French, the official language. In fact, in article 2 of paragraph 8 of the revised Constitution of 1994 the following can be read: "The Gabonese Republic adopts French as the official language. Furthermore, she endeavours to protect and promote the national languages." This constitutional arrangement naturally makes French the language used in education, administration and the media. The survey of lexicography in Gabon that is presented here includes the linguistic situation in and the language policy of Gabon, the lexicographic survey itself, as well as the lexicographic needs of the different speech forms (including languages and dialects). Initially, the pioneers of Gabonese lexicography were missionaries or colonial administrators. Very little was done in this field by the Gabonese themselves. Although credit is to be given to these early works, there are a number of shortcomings regarding the linguistic as well as the metalexicographic contents of dictionaries and lexicons produced during this period. In fact, the main weak point of those studies was the lack of tones in the written transcription of oral productions and orthographic problems. Furthermore, in those contributions, the theory of lexicography is largely unknown and lexico-graphic works are hardly ever based on authentic data corpora of the languages being described.Le présent article retrace l'histoire de la discipline lexicographique au Gabon. Comme la plupart des pays africains, le Gabon est un état multilingue. Les classifications établient par Jacquot (1978) et Kwenzi-Mikala (1998) sont souvent citées comme les travaux d'inventaire les plus récents sur les parlers gabonais. Selon Kwenzi-Mikala (1997), le Gabon compte 62 parlers reparties en 10 unités-langues. Les dits parlers cohabitent avec le français qui faut-il le rappeler jouit d'un statut particulier. En effet, à l'article 2 du paragraphe 8 de la Loi fondamentale révisée de 1994, on peut lire ceci: «La République gabonaise adopte le français comme langue officielle. En outre, elle s'engage à protéger et à promovoir les langues nationales». Cette disposition constitutionnelle fait naturellement du français le véhicule et la matière de l'instruction, la langue de l'administration et celle des médias. L'état des lieux de la lexicographie au Gabon présenté ici prend en compte la situation et la politique linguistique au Gabon, l'état des connaissances lexicographiques à proprement parler ainsi que les besions lexicographiques des différents parlers au regard de ce qui existe déjà. Les premiers travaux à caractère lexicographique ont été réalisés essentiellement par les missionnaires et les administrateurs coloniaux. Très peu de gabonais étaient engagés dans la confection des dictionnaires et lexiques à cette époque pionnière. Enfin, il convient de souligner que le principal talon d'Achille de ces travaux de la première heure est à la fois linguistique et métalexicographi-que. En effet, la majorité de ces travaux ne prennent pas en compte le système tonal des parlers décrits et s'inscrivent rarement dans un cadre théorique défini. Enfin, ils souffrent de nombreuses insuffisances orthographiques et sont rarement basés sur des corpus linguistiques

Our Children Our Schools: A Blueprint for Creating Partnerships Between Immigrant Families and New York City Public Schools

Eighty percent of immigrant parents surveyed indicated that they would like to be more involved in their children's schools. However, immigrant parents are often under-utilized as critical resources in their school communities. In New York City, where more than 60% of students are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, schools cannot afford to allow immigrant families to remain alienated. Schools need to determine what keeps immigrant parents away and address these hurdles proactively. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive picture of what hinders immigrant parent participation in the New York City public schools and what can be done to make schools more inclusive of immigrant parents so that they can be active partners in their children's education. We asked 82 immigrant parents and representatives from ten community-based organizations (CBOs) that work with immigrant parents across the City's diverse communities to tell us about their experiences in the schools and what could be done to improve those experiences. Their stories and recommendations are the heart of this paper. We also identified a number of promising practices in New York City and other cities around the country and provide a number of concrete steps the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and individual schools can take to build true partnerships with immigrant families

Bilingual newsgroups in Catalonia: a challenge for machine translation

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus of messages written in Catalan and Spanish, which come from several informal newsgroups on the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia; henceforth, UOC) Virtual Campus. The surrounding environment is one of extensive bilingualism and contact between Spanish and Catalan. The study was carried out as part of the INTERLINGUA project conducted by the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Its main goal is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the e-mail register in the newsgroups in order to assess their implications for the creation of an online machine translation environment. The results shed empirical light on the relevance of characteristics of the e-mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for the use of machine translation for CMC data in order to facilitate cross-linguistic communication on the Internet

Ensuring Linguistic Access in Health Care Settings: An Overview of Current Legal Rights and Responsibilities

Focuses on the language access responsibilities of healthcare and coverage providers pursuant to federal and state laws and policies

Introduction: how Scotland translates

No abstract available

PRESERVING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES THROUGH A MORE INTEGRATED NATIONAL CULTURAL STRATEGY 47

By the end of this century, according to Unesco, more than 3000 languages people in various parts of the world use for communications today will disappear. In Indonesia, Unesco notes that 137 local languages are in the state of endangeredment. The causes for such a cultural change are varied from geographical to political, from sociological to linguistic, and from philosophical to pragmatic. An important aspect of the extinction of a language is the disappearance of certain philosophical and cultural values contained in the language expressions which are very relevant with the dynamics of the society needing more effective instruments for maintaining its identity against globalization values. With all the background in mind, this paper tries to investigate a number of steps a multilingual country like Indonesia could possibly take to enhance the preservation of indigenous languages by researching their philosophical and cultural values and formulating policies for future action plans. The basic assumption is that in every language there are living values the speakers believe and maintain from time to time. However, time changes and the language changes, too, to cope with, among other things, newer values coming from outside and the need to be accepted in wider communities. In the process of exchanging linguistic and cultural phenomena domination and submission take place as a consequence. Therefore, dominating languages would place a certain language as a receiver of the exchange and this is where the state of endangeredment begins. In cooperation with international organizations like Unesco and local universities the government must take an initial plan to maintain the submitting language from further unexpected situations. The big number of Indonesian endangered local languages necessitates attentions from the central government to make a national campaign for preserving indigenous languages thorugh a more intregrated national cultural strategy. This must be the first test case for the combination of educational and cultural affairs under a new ministerial roof

Beyond English text: Multilingual and multimedia information retrieval.

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