Like there isn’t enough good news these days, a new website “Professor Watchlist” was recently launched in the United States. This website seeks to expose liberal professors who contradict Alt-right ideas in the classroom. According to its website,
“The mission of Professor Watchlist is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.
For a fuller picture, please read more on Inside Higher Ed.
Immediately following the election of Donald Trump, the Immigration Canada website crashed because it was overloaded by traffic from the United States. Some Americans thought to escape to Canada by studying here. The day after the election, the University of Toronto saw ten times US traffic to its site than the day before.
Furthermore, Google searches in the US for “colleges Canada” and “university Canada” on the day after the election were over 200% higher than any day in the past five years.
Read complete coverage in The Globe and Mail.
On November 11th, the Canadian government announced a change to the Express Entry system, which is the system in which most people immigrate to Canada.
Effective November 19th, applicants who completed a degree in Canada will receive up to 30 additional points (scoring the highest level of proficiency on a language test only gets the applicant 22 points). It is believed that this change will help boost the number of international students choosing to study in Canada.
Read more in Canadian Business
English Central is pleased to announce that Liz Lee is our new Senior ESL Specialist in Texas. We are honored and thrilled that Liz is bringing her considerable knowledge and experience to our team.
Elizabeth Lee graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University and attended Vanderbilt-in-Spain. Her educational career began as a teacher of Spanish and English in Florida, California, and Arizona. She eventually joined the publishing world as a sales representative in California and Arizona and a trainer for the Western Region with NTC Contemporary Publishing. When NTC became a part of McGraw-Hill, she became a National World Language Consultant traveling throughout the United States to train teachers in best practices for language acquisition. Next, she worked for many years with Cambridge University Press as an Independent Consultant which led her to be very familiar with the needs of ESL teachers and students.
Working with English Central in the great state of Texas, she will be able to provide new opportunities for success in the ESL classroom. She is dedicated to helping her customers discover materials to support their curriculum and providing the best service possible.
She resides in Dallas with two dogs and has two adult sons. One son is studying communications at FIT—Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, and the other, a Texas State University graduate and owner of one of the dogs, is teaching ESL in France.
The number of limited English speakers in Texas has grown by about 50 per cent in the past decade with 1 in 5 students struggling. Sadly, at the same time there has been a 20% drop in educators working in bilingual and ESL classes.
We asked Liz Lee, our new sales representative in Texas, for her thoughts on the situation as reported in the Dallas News:
This has been an ongoing problem in Texas that has gotten worse. As the population of non-English speakers has continued to grow, the pool of certified bilingual teachers has waned. When I first began working in Texas, I worked with pre-K and elementary programs. The bilingual ones were more predominant and successful in South Texas, which was a reflection of demographics. It was most difficult to find teachers for programs in North Texas. The majority of bilingual teachers were raised and educated in South Texas and were not willing to relocate. The culture is very family oriented so venturing away from home is not common.
The article addresses financial incentives, and lack of funding is certainly a big problem in education overall. It has especially affected special programs as cutbacks have been the norm for the last decade. Even textbook adoptions have been pushed forward so that new materials have not been selected for as long as a decade. Many retiring coordinators of language programs have not been replaced due to lack of funding. The decline of all teacher candidates due to lack of incentives is also a problem.
I would imagine that the number of qualified bilingual candidates would be also be on the decline as time goes by and generations change. When the Hispanic population first began to grow, the children were not allowed to use their native language in class. Memories of rulers hitting knuckles are not uncommon among adults today. This changed, but many young Spanish speakers never had adequate education in their native language. The use of Spanglish or code-switching is abundant. Many can communicate orally but have little or no reading/writing skills. Their native language ability is poor and certainly not that of an educated professional. In addition, the phenomenon of not wanting to communicate in Spanish exists. These young people comprehend but want to respond only in English. The desire to assimilate is stronger than the one to preserve heritage.
The article also speaks to the certification issue where requirements are more rigorous. Those with the cultural and language backgrounds needed to facilitate programs are discouraged. I relate this to a friend who I recently encouraged in her job search. I’ve found her English to be quite adequate and never considered that she might be self-conscious about her language ability. She certainly has the required job skills, but she was concerned that a mandatory assessment might include words beyond her comprehension. Time and money for furthering education is an issue for many. My friend has managed to balance evening classes with a full-time job and a family, but it is has not been easy. Add financial burden to the time sacrifice and top it off with the stress of working with young students and teens, and the result will be fewer candidates. With cutbacks, training for dealing with behavior problems is limited or non-existent.
As a language teacher and promoter of language acquisition and as one who has met educators and researchers in the world of bilingual programs, I’ve done a lot of thinking about bilingual education. There was a time when I was not an advocate of bilingual programs. I still believe immersion is the best. However, as with many issues there are circumstances that must be considered. When very young children are introduced to a new environment, I believe that they should not check their language skills at the door and enter a world to learn new concepts in a completely foreign tongue. Scary! I have come to believe that learning basic skills in one language (whichever) is best; then, transferring these to a new language can be easily achieved. Too many programs have not fostered development of needed skills in one language resulting in children not having a strong foundation in any language to which they have been exposed. The programs that I have found to be best are the dual language programs. Language arts instruction occurs in the student’s first language. Other disciplines are taught in a second or first language depending on the subject. Students are exposed to a third language in an exploratory class. I would like to see all high school students graduate as bilinguals and bi-literates.
Working with adults and students in higher education is another issue with other sets of circumstances. Hopefully a solid first language foundation is in place so that the transition of skills can occur more easily. This is not always the case. Also, similarity of the first language to the second helps. This too is not always the case. This is where good ESL materials can contribute to success!
It is difficult to believe that a reality TV star (and narcissist, sexist, racist, ignoramus, buffoon, etc) is now the president of the United States. We are disillusioned and we are also trying to focus on positive things that will allow us to not entirely lose our faith in America and humanity in general. So…we are not going to write much about Trump… but we will link to others who have.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Trump’s Surprise Victory Sends Shock Through Higher Ed
A Canadian perspective from the Higher Education Strategy Associates, A Second Thought About Half-Way Through a Pretty Awful Day
Over the years, we have come across a lot of teachers who fantasized about having their own language school. Of those, a few bravely actually took the leap and made the fantasy a reality. That reality can be rough, though, for a variety of reasons. We were interested to learn that relatively well-known ELT authors Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley have taken this leap themselves. They have written about a few things they wish they had known before they had started; if you are one of the ones who dreams about taking the leap, you are lucky to be able to benefit from their experience.
For the past five years or so, there has been a growth in corporations buying up independent language schools to create large, multinational chains of schools. This trend has amplified in Britain over the past few years, with the summer of 2015 being weak and agents’ costs rising considerably. The situation is ripe for acquiring British private language schools and that is exactly what is happening. Because of how the strengths and weaknesses of various currencies, the Irish have been in a good position to buy and that is what they have been doing!
A federal class action was recently filed alleging that the School District of Lancaster, Pennsylvania has been illegally refusing to enrol older immigrant children in public school or diverting them to a inferior, privately-run disciplinary. The plaintiffs include six refugees, aged 17-21 from Burma, Somalia, Sudan and The Congo.
This is not an isolated incident of discimination agains ELL students. This is the third class action launched in the past two years in the US. Similar suits were also filed against school districts in Utica, New York and Collier County, Florida.
The University of British Columbia just released a report on how their open access materials for Mathematics have saved students up to $1 million this year.
While we agree that publishers often make bad decisions, including sometimes unreasonably increasing the costs of textbooks, we generally object to the attitudes expressed in this report. Post secondary education costs thousands of dollars very year. Why do people generally accept this and not accept several hundred dollars for their textbooks. Professors seem to love to be the champions of students, helping them find ways to avoid paying textbooks…. so why don’t they give up their pay as well so that students can save on the much larger expense of tuition?
Textbooks and educational publishers are whipping boys, it would seem, and it is hardly fair. No publisher is rolling in money these days while everything they publish is an investment (or a gamble). The publishers have real costs: authors, editors, printers, paper, warehouses, shipping, returns, damaged stock, unsold stock, desk copies for instructors and so forth. It is ridiculous to focus on the cost of books; education is expensive and it is very convenient diversion for those in post-secondary instituions to point fingers at publishers.
