Liberating “Shadow” America

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-70
Author(s):  
John P. Enyeart

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Ronald W. Schatz

In January 1942, President Roosevelt set up the National War Labor Board to reduce strikes, control wage inflation, develop national policies for union-management relations, and resolve disputes between labor and companies for the duration for the war. This chapter explains the dire situation facing the United States and its allies in the winter of 1941-42, how the NWLB came into being, the board’s members, and the backgrounds and outlook of the young economists and attorneys who did the bulk of the board’s work. Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Steelworkers union, called the staffers “the Labor Board boys.”


PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 488-499
Author(s):  
Eileen Chang

Translation played a central role in the life of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-95). One of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century Chinese literature, Chang also wrote extensively in English throughout her career, which began in the early 1940s in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. She achieved fame quickly but fell into obscurity after the war ended in 1945. Chang stayed in Shanghai through the 1949 Communist revolution and in 1952 moved to Hong Kong, where she worked as a freelance translator and writer for the United States Information Service and wrote two anti-Communist novels in English and Chinese, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) and Naked Earth (1956).


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Byrnes,

AbstractThe paper suggests that among reasons for the difficulties collegiate foreign language (FL) programs in the United States (and most likely elsewhere) encounter in assuring that their students attain the kind of upper-level multiple literacies necessary for engaging in sophisticated work with FL oral and written texts may be the fact that prevailing frameworks for capturing FL performance, development, and assessment are insufficient for envisioning such textually oriented learning goals. The result of this mismatch between dominant frameworks, typically associated with communicative language teaching, and the goals of literary cultural studies programs as humanities programs is that collegiate FL departments and their faculty members face serious obstacles in their efforts to create the kind of coherent, comprehensive, and principled curricula that would be necessary for overcoming what are already extraordinary challenges in an educational environment that provides little support for long-term, sustained efforts at language development toward advanced multiple literacies. The paper traces these links by examining three such frameworks in the United States: the Proficiency framework of the 1980s, based on the ACTFL oral proficiency interview, the Standards framework of the 1990s, part of a more general standards movement in U.S. education, and the most recent document, by the Modern Language Association (MLA), which focuses on the need for new curricular structures in collegiate FL education. Specifically, it provides an overview of the U.S. educational landscape with an eye toward the considerable influence such frameworks can have in the absence of a comprehensive language education policy; lays out key characteristics that would be necessary for a viable approach to collegiate FL education; probes the complex effects the three frameworks have had in collegiate FL programs; and explores how one department sought to counter-act their detrimental influence in order to affirm and realize a humanistically oriented approach to FL education. The paper concludes with overall observations about the increasing power of frameworks to set educational goals and ways to counteract their potentially unwelcome consequences.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld

Although contrastive studies do not enjoy great prestige among linguists, they have a very long tradition dating back to ca. 1000 A.D. when Ælfric wrote his Grammatica, a grammar of Latin and English. Even then he must have been aware of the fact that the knowledge of one language may be helpful in the process of learning another language (Krzeszowski 1990). Similarly, it seems that throughout the history of mankind teachers of a foreign language must have realized that a native and foreign tongue can be contrasted. However, contrastive linguistics only came into being as a science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first works were almost purely theoretical, and it is worth emphasizing that among the first scholars working in the field was Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish linguist, who published his contrastive grammar of Polish, Russian and Old Church Slavonic in 1912. The outbreak of the Second World War was a milestone in the development of applied contrastive studies since a need to teach foreign languages in the United States arose as a result. The 1960’s is considered a further step in the development of contrastive grammar since a number of projects were initiated both in Europe and in the U.S.A. (Willim, Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1997), which resulted in the introduction of courses in English-Polish contrastive grammar at Polish universities. The aim of the present paper is to characterize and evaluate the courses offered in the English departments of selected Polish universities and to suggest an “ideal” syllabus.


Author(s):  
José Antonio Jódar Sánchez ◽  
Rocío Domene Benito

Resumen: En esta propuesta didáctica, utilizamos el álbum ilustrado como herramienta para la enseñanza de contenido lingüístico, así como valores sociales y cívicos a un grupo de estudiantes de ELE de nivel A2. Utilizamos el álbum ilustrado El día de la rana roja que narra la historia de dos príncipes que se enamoran y adoptan a una niña huérfana. Estructuramos nuestra propuesta en cuatro fases (introducción, comprensión, consolidación, resignificación), de las cuáles las dos últimas son las dos que más desarrollamos. Planteamos una entrevista a la rana del cuento, un teatro con marionetas, y el dibujo del mapa del reino como actividades de introducción. En la fase de comprensión se sugieren actividades de léxico y gramática sencillas, tratando, por ejemplo, los tiempos de presente y futuro. En la fase de consolidación, el profesor tiene la opción de realizar el taller del adivinador de sueños o la puesta en escena de declaraciones de amor entre animales. Finalmente, para la fase de resignificación, se cuestiona por qué el rey y la reina cambian el vestido por unos pantalones al averiguar que su hijo se casará con un chico.Palabras clave: Homosexualidad, español como lengua extranjera, álbum ilustrado, El día de la rana roja. Abstract: This teaching material is based on the picture book El día de la rana roja, the story of a prince who marries another man and together adopt an orphan child. It is targeted to students of Spanish as a foreign language of any country, including the United States, with an A2 level. Picture books are useful tools to teach, not only language and grammar, but also civility and good manners in society. The proposal is divided into four phases (introduction, comprehension, consolidation, and intellectual challenge), the latter of which are explained in detail. For the introduction phase, we propose interviewing the frog in the story, having a puppet role play narrating the story, and drawing a map of the kingdom. For the comprehesion phase, we suggest grammar (present and future tense) activities and lexicon ones. For the consolidation phase, the teacher can choose between doing an activity with a mind reader or with declarations of love among animals. Finally, for the phase where their ideas are challenged, the focus is on the topic of clothing. The fact that the king and queen change the dress of the princess for a pair of trousers for the prince is challenged to show students that clothing is a mere social convention based on sex that can be questioned.Keywords: Homosexuality, Spanish as a foreign language, picture book, El día de la rana roja.


Author(s):  
Jesus Garcia Laborda ◽  
Iulia Vecan ◽  
Angela Sauciuc

Language assistants have become an important resource for teachers in bilingual schools in Spain, especially in the Madrid region. Most language assistants come from English-speaking countries, especially from the United States. In their role as language assistants, they are expected to bring and share their knowledge about the cultural aspects and content subjects and, at the same time, they need to share their beliefs and perspectives towards Spain and Spanish schools. Nevertheless, sometimes there is controversy around this topic, as there are obvious differences and similarities between both cultures; one of them being the misconception regarding the type of culture they need to teach students.


1967 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
George C. A. Boehrer

In 1872, it was estimated that there were 378 foreign language journals published in the United States. Of these, only one was in the Portuguese language. O Novo Mundo, published in New York from 1870 to 1879, was singular among the foreign language press publications in that it was designed not for an immigrant audience but rather for readers in another country. Its purpose was to interpret the United States primarily to Brazilians and secondarily to other Latin Americans. Faithful until its last issue to this end, it also commented on the Brazilian political and social scene.José Carlos Rodrigues, O Novo Mundo's original owner and only editor, was a remarkable Brazilian in an era when the Empire and the First Republic produced a galaxy of extraordinary public figures. Born in the city of Cantagallo, province of Rio de Janeiro, on July 19, 1844, be was the son of fazendeiros, and attended the Colégio Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 151-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Kramsch ◽  
Tes Howell ◽  
Chantelle Warner ◽  
Chad Wellmon

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