Education - Multilingual Connections

Latino Population Growth in Chicago

May 22, 2012 By bridget

We’re fascinated by this report from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), Regional Snapshot: Latinos in our Region, which explains why we need to pay attention to the growth of the Latino population in Chicago. If you don’t have a few hours to pour through the details, here are some highlights:

Latinos are expected to make up most of the region’s population growth between now and 2040.
In 1970, one of every 20 residents was Latino, but today one of every five people in the region is of Latino origin.
Between 1970 and 1990, the region’s overall population would have declined if not for the growth in Latinos.
The Latino population in the region is expected to increase from 1.4 million in 2000 to 3.5 million in 2040, at which point more than 30 percent of the region’s residents will be Latino.
More Latinos now live in suburban areas than in Chicago.
The number of linguistically isolated Spanish-speaking children (that is, households where no adults speak English fluently) increased more significantly in the suburbs, by over 47 percent, and decreased slightly in the city of Chicago.
Only 11 percent of Latinos in the region in 2006 had college degrees, compared to 18 percent for African-Americans, 41 percent for White residents, and 61 percent for Asians.

The importance of increasing the education level of Latinos is imperative to the overall growth and stability of our region. If Latinos are the fastest-growing population, their earning potential – which CMAP proves is based on education level – can make or break our local economy.

We need to better equip our Latino neighbors, both adults and children. Proper language instruction, workplace translations and improved cultural competence by all Chicagoans is not just a nice gesture to this fast-growing population, it is a requirement to sustaining our population numbers and our economic competitiveness.

Filed Under: Chicago, Cultural competency, Economics, Education, Latino, Research, Spanish

Top Ten Most Cited OSHA Standards: How can you Prevent these Infractions?

March 11, 2011 By admin

What’s the easiest way to prevent citation and penalties during an OSHA worksite inspection? According to OSHA, in fiscal year 2010, the ten most commonly cited standards were improperly implemented:

1. Scaffolding

2. Fall Protection

3. Hazard Communication

4. Respiratory Protection

5. Ladder Use

6. Lockout/ Tagout Procedures

7. Electrical and Wiring Methods

8. Powered Industrial Trucks

9. General Electrical Requirements

10. Machine Guarding

Far too many preventable injuries occur due to the failure to properly implement these standards. A great way to avoid these infractions is to translate your employee manuals and safety materials into the languages most commonly spoken in your worksite. You can also bring an on-site language trainer to go over the OSHA procedures in a simplified English training for your Limited English Proficient (LEP) employees.

Workforce Language Services offers translations in 50+ languages as well as on-site English and Spanish vocational training. Contact Hilary Hodge, Director or Programs, for more information hilary@workforcelang.com.

Filed Under: Education, Immigrant workforce, Language Policy, Safety, Uncategorized Tagged With: construction, manufacturing, OSHA, Safety

Multicultural lit is exploding onto bookshelves

September 29, 2010 By admin

Multicultural literature seems to be the new buzzword in books. Why this sudden demand for multicultural lit? If you think about it, over half of all kids under the age of 5 are minorities, and multicultural kids want to see themselves represented in what they read. Plus, book editors and agents see the value in the growing market.

Young adult writer Ingrid Sundberg blogs about this new trend, examining the genre and also providing tips for writers of multicultural lit. She talks about how to write about culture while avoiding cliches, about whether you have to be an “insider” if you want to write about a particular culture with authenticity, and how to get sources.

Here are a few words of Sundberg’s advice:

How Do You Approach Multicultural Books the Right Way?

Take evaluative measures. Be aware of how to avoid stereotypes. These can be the greatest pitfalls.

No distortions! Befriend people in the culture. Ask questions, check facts. Find primary and secondary sources and have them help check your dialog, etc. People love to talk to writers!

Beware of insulting those in the culture. Make sure your characters are fully developed and multi-layered. Complex!

Be aware that there are different dialects within the same language (Spanish for example). People speak differently in California vs. Arizona vs. Texas vs. New Mexico. Think about this like the use of the word soda. It can be called: soda, pop, or coke, all depending upon where you live and the slang for that area.

Characters should be strong enough to solve their own problems. Don’t have another culture bail them out! There should be personal strength within the character.

You don’t have to be PC on every little thing. But be careful, there is a fine line.

The idea of the hero is important in race related books. Don’t have the characters bail out, or undermine the culture.

Read Sundberg’s full post about multilingual lit here.

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Demographics, Education

Raising a bilingual kid? Try this tip

September 14, 2010 By admin

A blog called “Latina-ish” brings us some fun tongue twisters (“trabalenguas”) to practice with your Spanish-English bilingual tots. For kids (or adults!) who have difficulty rolling their ‘r’s, try this one:

Erre con erre cigarro,
Erre con erre barril.
Rapido corren los carros,
Cargados de azúcar al ferrocarril.

The blog’s author, who is not a native Spanish speaker, tries speaking a few of the tongue twisters in this short video:

If you want to squeeze all the Spanish sounds into one sentence, have a go at this:

La cigüeña gigante bebió ocho copas de whisky, más quince jarras llenas de fría cerveza rubia, y enseguida huyó en un taxi.

Translation:

The giant stork drank eight glasses of whiskey, plus fifteen full mugs of cold pale ale, and escaped in a taxi right away.

Read the full blog post here.

Filed Under: Education

New York sees trend in hiring bilingual babysitters

August 21, 2010 By admin

NYTimes 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.

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Education Tagged With: bilingual children, bilingual education

Koreans and Hispanics in Chicago learn to co-exist

June 2, 2010 By admin

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!

Filed Under: Business, Chicago, Cultural competency, Demographics, Education, Employment, Immigrant workforce, Spanish in the Workplace, Workplace diversity

Raising Hispanic graduation rates should be national priority

June 1, 2010 By admin

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.

Filed Under: Demographics, Education, Politics

Tackling bilingual childrearing one blog post at a time

May 27, 2010 By admin

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

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Education, Latino Culture

Translating the world of ‘Sesame Street’ to the reality of Israel and Palestine

May 24, 2010 By admin

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…

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Education, Global business

‘Motivos’ Latino youth magazine inspires students

February 17, 2010 By admin

Motivos 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.

Filed Under: Education, Latino Culture