Employment advantages of being bilingual

This morning I received the following newsbrief from the Language Immersion in the Americas listserve through University of Minnesota.

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From our colleagues at Center for Applied Second Language Studies CASLS:

Source:  California Language Teachers Association (CLTA) News Flash*

If you search for jobs at Monster.com at any time, you will find thousands of jobs for speakers of all languages. Here are some average findings (which may vary from day to day).

* At any given time, approximately 1000 employers nationwide are looking for French speakers. 200-400 of those jobs are here in California.
* There are approximately 500 new jobs available for German speakers. Nearly 100 of those are in California.
* If you speak Chinese, there are typically more than 800 job openings in the country, of which more than 300 are in California.
* If you speak Japanese, there are more than 1400 job openings in the country. In California, there are 400 employers looking for Japanese speakers.
* Spanish, of course, tops the list, with more than 8,300 jobs nationwide and almost 3000 jobs in California. With all languages combined, there are typically nearly 4000 jobs for bilingual individuals in California. That’s a lot of organizations, industries and companies that need employees with language skills. Are we preparing our students to meet this need?
* What kinds of jobs are these? Regardless of specific language needed, the jobs I find on monster.com <http://monster.com/> span all fields: medical, legal, computer technology, science and research, engineering, fashion and interior design, graphic design, editorial, administrative assistants, accountants, and many others.

from CLTA Advocacy Chair, Nicole Naditz

Johnson, L. CLTA News Flash, January 2, 2009.

Parents respond

Our community outreach is well underway and I wanted to share a few of the positive responses that we’ve received from families.

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You came at just the right time. Since my son was 6 months I have been thinking about where he was going to kindergarten. Just last week after much research, I had narrowed it down to a charter school and I wanted him to learn French and German.
I visited your website on this past Saturday.
I am so excited about the school and this opportunity for my son.
I told my in-laws and my family about Brysen’s new school.
Everyone is excited. My in-laws live in St. Thomas, Missouri (a small town, population 1,000 where they are the only blacks in town and unrelated to anyone else).
St. Thomas, Missouri is talking about the school.
My family back home in New Orleans is talking about the school.
I was at a birthday party this week with my neighbors ( I live in Benton Park West) and was talking about the school.
I will be at a sorority event next week and will talk about Brysen’s future.

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Other language immersion schools in the US

The Center for Applied Linguistics’ Directory of Foreign Language Immersion Schools includes 263 language immersion schools, 181 of which are elementary schools. The CAL directory focuses on public schools (traditional or charter), which means that when you consider the private and parochial schools with language immersion programs, there are over 300 such schools in the country. This doesn’t include two-way immersion and bilingual programs that target native and heritage speakers of a language. Here are few other language immersion schools inpo:

Traditional Public

Milwaukee German Immersion School (MGIS) Milwaukee, WI (German)

L’étoile du Nord, St. Paul, MN (French)

Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland (Mandarin, French, Spanish)

Post Oak Elementary, Lansing, MI (Mandarin)

District Magnet

Smith Academy, Charlotte, NC (French, Spanish, German, Mandarin)

Inter-American Magnet School, Chicago, IL (Spanish)

Horace Mann Dual Language Magnet, Wichita, KS (Spanish)

Public Charter

Académie Lafayette, KCMO (French)

Albert Einstein Academies, San Diego, CA (German & Spanish)

Lakes International Language Academy, Forest Lake, MN (Spanish)

International School of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA (French & Spanish)

Yu Ying Charter School, Washington D.C. (Mandarin)

Lisa Dorner rocks!

Lisa Dorner, French/Spanish School Project Group member, UM-SL College of Education Faculty, and SLLIS advocate extraordinaire is presenting a session at the conference tomorrow. Today at lunch we’re chatting up practitioners from MN, KY, CA and NY about special education inclusion, early literacy, school models, you know, regular conference goodness. Who then just happens to sit next to Lisa Dorner– Helena Curtain! Dr. Curtain was charged with implementing Milwaukee’s German Immersion School in 1978, is author of Languages and Children: Making the Match, and is retired professor of K-12 Foreign Language Teacher Certification at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Because Lisa Dorner is exceptionally Lisa Dorner, she chatted her up, learned that Dr. Curtain currently serves on the board of two other language immersion charter schools and elicited an offer for Dr. Curtain to provide us some consultation/advice on our school development. Go Lisa Go!

A New Year for schools in St. Louis

This week’s guest blogger is Paula Hanssen, Professor of German at Webster University and coordinator of the German School Project Group.

The German school group will meet in early October again to see what we can do to help this project of immersion language instruction succeed for the St. Louis community. This issue is important to me as a German instructor at Webster University, where I see the difference language learning makes in the lives of young college students. I actually started very late in the game with language, not until 7th grade did I dip into the waters of learning Spanish, and then gave up languages completely until a language requirement in college forced the issue. From that first year of language learning, and that first trip to Austria, I was hooked.

The world is open to those who learn other languages, and we all know that research has shown that young learners learn more quickly, with less fear and trepidation, than older learners. If we can start a school in which children learn that it’s fun and important to learn other languages, we can change lives and give those pupils opportunities for travel, scholarship, and work that they might not have otherwise.

I often take students to Europe for short trips, and always get the same evaluation of language education in the States: that we don’t start soon enough, and don’t require enough of our young people to learn at least a bit of conversational foreign language. Most students are shocked at how many people speak English fluently, and wish they could understand more of the world around them in a foreign country. It’s an honor to help with this important endeavor, one I’ll be rooting for and talking about to anyone who will listen. As Wittgenstein, the philosopher/architect from Vienna said: “The borders of my language are the borders of my world.”

Paula Hanssen

Assistant Professor

Webster University

German immersion schools

When I was asked in April 07 by the Dean of the Center for International Studies at UMSL if I would like to participate in a founding board for a St. Louis language immersion school I was downright thrilled by the idea.

While working for the German Goethe-Institut and the cultural branch of the German Foreign Office, ZfA, I had just begun to work together with this rather new type of school. We had held a first conference of German immersion schools of the US in Portland, Oregon, and I had learned about wonderful and thriving schools and start-up projects, mostly initiated by parent groups.

While it is sad (but true) to say that we find German programs at high schools in a downward movement these immersion schools provided growing numbers of students of all ages.

I have been a foreign language teacher myself for many years and also have taught German as a foreign language for six years in Spain. I know of the importance of starting early with foreign language education – and here in St. Louis, there was just the right environment for such an undertaking.

When I started my professional career I studied languages and – almost logically – went into education. Today languages are not only a field for future teachers, but also and in the main place an additional qualification young people need to be able to compete in our global world. Our goal should hence be to provide them with this additional skill that might make the difference in getting a good job.

The project of a language immersion school in the city of St. Louis is an ambitious goal – but it can mean “future” for hundreds of kids who will be able to choose learning one or more foreign languages at an age where learning is just natural to them. I am very glad to be part of that project and to be able to contribute whatever there can be provided by the German institutions I represent.

Enthusiastically
Gert Wilhelm
German Language Consultant
Goethe Institute
Central Agency for Schools Abroad (ZfA)