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This is an approach for healthcare providers on how to make medical care more accessible to people who do not know English as their first language.

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Access Denied | Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

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You are not authorized to view this page. Please visit the login page to continue.

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Tis is a piece about a Google product that translate languages in real time. I found this piece relevant in relationship to our conversations about language acquisition.

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But tucked into the tail end of the presentation, Google quietly revealed that it had changed the world with a pair of wireless headphones. Not to be outdone by Apple's Air Pods and their wirelessly-charging TicTac storage case, Google packed its headphones (in combination with the Pixel 2) with the power to translate between 40 languages, literally in real-time. The company has finally done what science fiction and countless Kickstarters have been promising us, but failing to deliver on, for years. This technology could fundamentally change how we communicate across the global community.

The Google Pixel Buds are wireless headphones designed for use with the company's new Pixel 2 handset. Once you've paired the phones to the handset, you can simply tap the right earpiece and issue a command to Google Assistant on the Pixel 2. You can have it play music, give you directions, place a phone call and whatnot, you know, all the standards.

But if you tell it to "Help me speak Japanese" and then start speaking in English, the phone's speakers will output your translated words as you speak them. The other party's reply (presumably in Japanese because otherwise what exactly are you playing at?) will then play into your ear through the Pixel Buds. As Google's onstage demonstration illustrated, there appeared to be virtually zero lag time during the translation, though we'll have to see how well that performance holds up in the real world with wonky WiFi connections, background noise and crosstalk.

Just 20 years ago, if you wanted to have a passage of text translated using the internet rather than tracking down someone that actually spoke the language, you likely did it through Altavista's Babel Fish. Launched in 1997, it supported a dozen languages but often returned translations that were barely more intelligible than the text you put in. Over the next couple of decades, translation technology steadily improved but could never compete with natural language speakers for accuracy or speed.

In the last couple of years, we've seen some of the biggest names in technology jump into the translation space. In 2015 Skype debuted its Live Translation feature which works with four languages for spoken audio and 50 languages over IM. However the translations weren't really in real-time, there was a lag between when the original message was sent and when the translated version arrived.

Earlier this year, Microsoft debuted its PowerPoint "Presentation Translator" add-in. Using an iOS or Android app, Presentation Translator can convert your voice over into Spanish or Chinese in real-time. It will not, however, make your PowerPoint presentation any less of an ordeal to sit through, so keep those slides to a minimum.

Remember last year's Indiegogo project darling, the Pilot from Waverly Labs? Reportedly leveraging "speech recognition, machine translation and the advances of wearable technology" these paired devices would be split between the people conversing and inserted into the ear. When one person speaks, the other earpiece automatically translates those words. Or at least that's how it's supposed to work. The crowdfunding campaign closed last year and deliveries have yet to begin, though the company states that it will begin shipping units in Fall 2017.

But there's no need to do that now. Google didn't just beat Waverly Labs to the punch, Google knocked them down with 25 additional languages (40 to the Pilot's 15) and then stole their lunch money with a $160 price tag -- $140 less than what Waverly wants for the Pilot.

But this isn't just about an industry titan curb stomping its startup competition, this new high bar can, and likely will, have far-reaching implications for the global community. It's as close as we can get to a Douglas Adams-esque Babel Fish without having to genetically engineer one ourselves. With these devices in circulation, the barriers of communications simply fall away.

You'll be able to walk up to nearly anybody in another country and hold a fluid, natural language conversation without the need for pantomime and large hand gestures, or worry of offending with a mispronunciation. International commerce and communication could become as mundane as making a local phone call. The frictions of international diplomacy could be smoothed as well, ensuring that not only are a diplomat's words faithfully translated but that a copy of the conversation is recorded as well.

Granted, this isn't some magic bullet that will single-handedly bring about world peace and harmony among all peoples. You'll still have plenty of nonverbal and culturally insensitive means of putting your foot in your mouth but until we make like the Empire and develop Galactic Standard, Google's Pixel Buds are our new best bet for understanding one another.
Follow all the latest news from Google's Pixel 2 event here! Some of this story could be read to imply that Pixel Buds are able to translate conversations on their own without being connected to a phone or the internet. These sections have been updated for clarity and accuracy

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Google's Pixel Buds translation will change the world

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But tucked into the tail end of the presentation, Google quietly revealed that it had changed the world with a pair of wireless headphones. Not to be outdone by Apple's Air Pods and their wirelessly-charging TicTac storage case, Google packed its headphones (in combination with the Pixel 2) with the power to translate between 40 languages, literally in real-time.

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Discourse on The Logic of Language: A Poem

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Discourse on The Logic of Language: A Poem

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This is an incredible poem about language, by Nourbese Philips. I included this poem because of its symbolism to colonialism and colonized tongues, and I think it's relevant to our conversations about learning language and cultural assimilation.

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This spoken word piece is about code switching between dialects in conversation, and the linguistic profiling that happens between dialects. I included this video because it inspired me as I was learning about code-switching.

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English | TED

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This research considers Ebonics as a dialect and how people have profiled Ebonics and those who use it. I included it in relationship to the video I posted about Ebonics in linguistic profiling; I found it relevant to our work with linguistic profiling and code switching.

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Ebonics- When Is Dialect Acceptable English?

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This podcast is about accents and dialects, and how dialects differ from each other. I included this in my portfolio because I felt it was relevant to our work with dialects.

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View Transcript ▶︎
[Music start] From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story... of accents. [Montage of various accents in movies]
I love accents. Every time I hear someone who sounds different from the way I speak [Borat clip] I take notice and wonder where they were born, who influenced their upbringing, and sometimes whether or not I could speak like that.

Quick note: any accents you hear in this episode are not necessarily "the best." I know that people are fiercely proud of their accents and have strong opinions about what constitutes an accurate depiction. So for better... *[Capote Clip] or worse... [Austin Powers Clip] w*e're just gonna have fun with this.

[Dallas starts off in British accent] **For all English-speaking people, our language started somewhere-ok that's terrible, but it's the best I can do. While the evolution of our language took many centuries, Early Modern English, the version used by Shakespeare, dates from around 1500. And modern English, pretty close to how we speak now, came along about a hundred years later, right about the time the British began colonizing North America.
So I'm curious, did the American colonists from England originally have a British accent? But first, I wanted to speak with someone who's an expert on accents.
Erik: I'm Erik Singer and I'm a dialect coach.

An accent is just the sounds of a particular variety of speech. The sound system, the pattern, the pronunciation. A dialect is the larger category. A dialect basically includes things like syntax and word order and even lexis, kind of those individual items, different ways of saying things, different ways of referring to something whether you call it pop or soda or coke, that's a dialect feature.
Simply put, dialect is more what you say, accent is how you say it. Erik has worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. He helps them fine tune the speaking portion of their performances when they take on the role of either a real-life or fictional character with an accent. He's studied and trained for years to be able to both do accents, and also teach them. I asked him what some of his favorite accents are to perform.
Erik: Depends on the day, depends on when I'm coaching how I feel because there's a big part of that. Let's see, just to sort of pick a few that I definitely have an affinity for. My mother is Swedish. [in Swedish accent] One of things I love about Sweden is the food and the culture, it's something I have a great affinity for. So I make my own herring and aquavit. [in a Southeast London accent] I have great affinity for southeast London. [in a Xhosa accent] I like doing Xhosa even if you can't get the clicks in there when you're just speaking English.

[in a Xhosa accent] Xhosa is an indigenous language to South Africa. Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa speaker and South Africa has 11 official languages and Xhosa is one of the biggest.

[in a French accent] If you think of very stereotypically French accent, the lip corners tend to be sort of pulling in towards the teeth, they're advancing a little bit. [in a 1950s RAF colonel accent] If you think of a sort of very stereotypical 1950s kind of RAF colonel sort of thing, it's the opposite. The jaw is very high and the lip corners tend to spread a bit.
Erik is pretty talented, but everyone has their kryptonite right? I wondered which accents are harder for him to perform.
Erik: Welsh accents tend to be tricky for American actors. We generally haven't heard a lot of Welsh. I just never had the opportunity to work on a Geordie accent, which is Newcastle.
[Billy Elliot clip]
The other thing that can make an accent difficult to acquire is just kind of psychological and identity stuff. It's an act of the imagination taking on an accent.

So there are these very, very technical aspects to what an accent is, how those sounds are formed. But you can't do it if you can't imagine yourself as somebody who speaks that way. It's your mind, it's your imagination, it's your heart. And so, if it's hard to imagine yourself as someone who speaks with a given accent, it's going to be a lot harder to get there.
Ok, so back to my initial question, what did British colonists sound like when settling in North America in the 1600s up to say 1776?
Erik: There wasn't only one English accent, there were many. There were three other big waves of migration. This is a little bit simplified, but we all think of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, and so, whatever that accent was then, was surely what sort of predominated in those kind of Massachusetts colonies. Virginia, sort of Tidewater, Virginia was settled to a large extent by sons of well-off families and their servants. Then, there was the Quakers who came over into kind of Delaware, Maryland area and sort of spread west into Southern Pennsylvania, so there were lots and lots of accents.
I realized that it might be hard to pin Erik down on answer here, but in the most general terms I asked him what would most of those accents sound like in the colonies at that time?
Erik: It would have sounded quite strange to our ears but I would say definitely American just because this pronunciation or non-pronunciation of R sounds after vowels is such a major feature, it's a huge divide [The Patriot clip]. The different vowel sounds between things like hat and half, where for us, hat and half it's the same [The Patriot clip]. Those two huge things I think would probably give us the impression that all English speakers in England and in the States or the colonies sounded more like Americans do now than like Brits do now.
If many of these colonists more or less sounded American, then how did the accents back in Britain change to what we now know them as today?
Walt: We have a sort of preconceived notion of what British dialect should sound like, and it's typically without its Rs. You know, so it's not rhotic.
That's Walt Wolfram. He's a sociolinguist at North Carolina State University, specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. In a 50 year career he's written 20 books and over 300 articles on variation in American English.
Walt: The accents of American English pretty much reflected areas of England. For example, you get people who settled on the coast of Virginia and islands, for example, and in North Carolina on the islands there, and they were very rhotic. That is, they pronounce their Rs in "four," and in "war," and so forth. They were very rhotic, because they came from southwest England where people still pronounce their Rs. On the other hand, there were some areas of England which were becoming quite R-less, because that was becoming the standard in London in the 1600s and 1700s and so they were more R-less.
This new accent that today is called "Received Pronunction" or RP for short may have begun in the 1600s but it would take a while before it became so synonymous with Brits. [Downton Abbey clip]
Walt: But basically, it's simply the standard of London, of southern England, because of the prestige and because of the social class. That became the acceptable sort of norm.
[Downton Abbey clip] Basically, prestige in accents is in the ear of the beholder. So, speaking of prestige, with all of this r-full and r-less business, did Shakespeare's plays around 1600 sound the way we imagine them today?
Walt: If you look at Shakespeare's background, to the extent that we know about him, he actually used Rs. He wouldn't sound like we imagine a British person to sound like at that time.

Erik: You go back to Shakespeare and the Rs were really hard. So this idea that some Americans have I think that a Shakespeare should always be pronounced in an RP accent is fine if that's your taste [Shakespeare excerpt] but it sounds absolutely nothing like what Shakespeare's actors would have sounded like. [Shakespeare excerpt], somthhing like that.

It was very R-full, really hard Rs, kind of almost a little bit piratical, sort of stereotypically piratical and it was very fluid and efficient. They left out a lot of sounds.
As accents in England began to change over the next few centuries so did American accents. But early in the 20th century an interesting phenomenon occurred as they came crashing back together in a brand new accent that didn't evolve-it was created. We'll get to that in just a minute. From colonial times to the early 1900s - accents continued to slowly evolve in America. But around the 1920s and 30s a new accent popped up... almost out of nowhere.
Erik: Well, it's got lots of names. Popularly known certainly as transatlantic, sometimes, Mid-Atlantic, which is weird. But either way, sort of like you were born on an island in the middle of the ocean between England and the US. It used to be called Good American Speech and before that it was called World English. It is, for the most part, kind of a hybrid accent.

Walt: For FDR, it was his natural dialect [FDR clip]. In a sense, while it had some characteristics that people think of as transatlantic, they were natural to him, which is quite different from an actor, for example, like Audrey Hepburn, who might want to appear to be transatlantic, and therefore be R-less, and pronounce her Ts as in "better,"[Audrey Hepburn clip] or "bettah," and so forth. They choose R-lessness. They choose a few vowels, like "bad" as "bad," and "ban" versus "ban,". They choose a half a dozen features and promote those, and they become sort of associated with this sort of transatlantic, which to a Britisher sounds, "Oh my gosh. That's a bad British accent." And to an American, they may not know the difference, and so it all sounds sophisticated to them.
[Friends clip]
Erik: Yeah, it conferred prestige. This is an idea that I think is not with the times now because this kind of idea of picking a certain group of people or way of speaking and saying everybody else speaks wrong or badly, we're then telling people who speak non-standard dialect or a lower prestige dialect, you're bad and wrong or sloppy and that's just absurd on its face.
I assumed that the Transatlantic Accent was just a fad and died out completely. But then there was that little show on NBC called Frasier...
Erik: Yes, Niles Crane. So, David Hyde Pierce trained at Yale, and Yale Drama School, like pretty much every American Drama school of the time when he was training, that was sort of the bible. So this good American speech pattern was universally taught in actor training programs long after nobody spoke it naturally anymore, it still is taught in a lot of places.

It's still useful for period stuff certainly. If you're going to set a movie in the 1950s and the characters are actors, well, go for your good American speech absolutely.
[Aviator clip] Speaking of Good American Speech, there's a perception in America that some accents are less becoming or desirable to have than others. So a sort of "General American" accent has taken hold.
Erik: There's this mythical beast called general American, put the general in quotes. It's not one accent, it's more sort of the absence of certain things, which is it's the absence of particularly regionally identifiable features. So if I say Tom or coffee or hat, those are things that are going to stand out to anybody and kind of make them say, "Oh, I know where you're from." So if you don't have any of those, then, people might say you sound kind of general American. Of course, there's lots of variations still in there. Half of Americans rhyme the words COT and the words CAUGHT, right? So cot and caught, "I caught a on a cot." Canadians pretty much all do that.
This "lack of an accent" as you might describe it can be a bit... boring. I asked Erik if he could give me one of my favorites... an accent from Fargo.
Erik: So Minnesota, so that's very different and I know a lot of people from there are quite sensitive about kind of stereotypical or exaggerated version of that, and it's not to say that everyone from Minnesota might talk like that but there are people who do for sure.
There are a whole range of regional American accents that have been around for hundreds of years. From New York, to Boston, to Chicago, to Cajun, to a whole variety of Southern accents. But what about newer ones like Valley Girl? Or the Kardashian-esque Vocal Fry?
Erik: I think it's a little hard to define. I think people mean different things by Valley Girl, although there are probably some common features like uptalk [SNL Californians clip] and definitely, like vocal fry is a part of that. That's when your vocal folds start kind of vibrating a little slower than they would for like all your voice [The Kardashians clip]. But both of those features actually are really widespread in American speech. Australian accents and Northern Irish accents and Scottish accents very often have a rise at the end of a phrase or a sentence.
[Braveheart clip]
Walt: So what you have today are you have new dialect areas in northern California, in the northwest, so for example in Seattle and Portland, areas like this, are creating dialects that are regionally distinctive. The point is this: Everybody wants to be from somewhere. And our dialect indicates where we're from.
Isolation is one reason some accents have lasted for as long as they have. One popular theory is that Appalachian English is a preserved remnant of 16th century Elizabethan English. [Inglorious Bastards clip]
Walt: Well, it's true and not true, okay? The true aspect of it is that there are certainly older retentions of the English language. For example, in Appalachian English, the prefix like, "He's a'huntin' and a'fishin'." That certainly is an older English phenomenon that has been preserved, as are pronunciations like, "twiced" and "onced" for "once" and "twice." There are certainly older pronunciations.

The problem is that at the same time, Appalachian English is changing and becoming a dialect unto itself, and so there are lots of things that are actually new in Appalachian English. It's sort of like, "Something old, something new, something borrowed, you know, something blue." A few years ago a crew from BBC came to visit the island of Ocracoke...
Ocracoke is an island off the coast of North Carolina.
Walt: Someone had said, "Well, that's where the really Elizabethan, Shakespearean English is found." It's true that they do have some older features that were around at the time of Shakespeare. They say "thar" for "there" and they also say for "high tide," they say "hoi toide," which is a little more British and older. They have some traits that certainly are remnants of former days.

Many people throughout their lives supposedly "lose their accents" or have them transform into a different one. When a southerner moves north they often start to lose that classic southern drawl. Could some accents be dying out?

Erik: there are some sounds and languages generally that are a little unstable, that are a little more likely to be changed or dropped into something else as language change goes on. And we have two of them in English, it's the two different TH sounds like in this and thin, one is a voiced, one is unvoiced, right? And every time we see those in languages, they eventually morph or change or get dropped over time. You can definitely hear that in what's called multicultural London English, which I love, kind of a V or an F sound instead.
A good example of this is the way some Londoners say Mother and Brother as muvah and bruvah.
Erik: I think I've come across predictions that by 2150, English won't have those sounds at all. So, that's always ongoing. New accents are always coming and going and merging and splitting and distinguishing themselves from each other.
Every time I hear someone who sounds different from the way I speak it reminds me that the world is vast and diverse. It's a collection of people with different ideas, different cultures, and different identities. These identities began thousands of years ago, and they're still with us.
Erik: Because we evolved in this social, communal small groups and so, you have to be able to recognize and distinguish your people from the other people. We've grown very, very attuned to these minute differences, even if we can't say technically what they are, we're like, "Oh, you're not one of me," or "You're my kind of guy."

Just coming back to the idea that accent is identity, it's a way of encoding and signaling almost completely at an unconscious level for most people, who they feel like they are, who they want to be seen as, what group they feel like they belong to. It's the richness and the variety that is so fascinating and so deeply human.

Walt: Dialects are identity. They index where we come from, who we are, where we're going, and so in a sense, to be without a dialect is to lose something of your personal character, your regional identity, and your sense of who you are, and the communities that you come from. They're about as critical as any other aspect of diversity. This would be a much less interesting place if everybody spoke the same way.
Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound. A sound design team working with production companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and game developers to make their projects sound incredible. Find out more and get in touch at defactosound.com.
This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Edds... and me, Dallas Taylor... with help from Sam Schneble. It was mixed by Jai Berger.
Many thanks to dialect coach Erik Singer for joining us. You can learn more about Erik's accent coaching at ErikSinger.com -- that's Erik with a 'K"... If you search for him on youtube, you can find an incredible breakdown he did of 32 actors accents. Also, thanks to Linguistics Professor Dr. Walt Wolfram. You can check out his latest work in the new documentary, Talking Black in America: The Story of African-American Language. And thanks to youtube.com/socratic for use of their Shakespeare sonnet #94. The music in this episode is from Musicbed. They represent more than 650 great artists ranging from indie rock and hip hop to classical and electronic. Head over to music.20k.org to hear our exclusive playlist I'd love to hear your accent. Open up your voice memos app on your phone and record your thoughts about the show, your show ideas, or anything else you want to share. We might just post your thoughts to our social accounts which you can find on facebook and twitter at 20korg. You can send your voice memo to hi at 20k.org.
If you're a little shy about recording your voice, don't be. BUT if you'd rather pass and still have something you'd like to tell us - reach out through our website at 20k.org. One thing that would be really helpful is to let your friends in the press know about the show. It's our mission to elevate the amazing sense of hearing through these little stories, and I'd love for more people to hear them. You can get in touch with me directly through our website or at hi at 20k.org.
You can find all of these links on our website or in the show description. Thanks for listening.

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When you describe yourself to others you might mention your height, hairstyle, or maybe your build. But one of the most telling things about you is something you can't even see, yet it defines you more than you realize.

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This is an interview I did with an immigrant, in which she talks about learning English language and culture. I included this interview because it relates to our studies on learning language and dialects.

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A couple years ago, my Haitian coworker came to me to resolve a question about the American expression “happy belated birthday”. He had first brought it to another coworker and friend of mine, who had told him that “happy belated birthday” was the culturally correct expression to use (instead of “belated happy birthday,” which my Haitian coworker argued to me was the more grammatically correct expression). He presented both phrases to me, and asked me which phrase was more grammatically correct. I conceded that, while “belated happy birthday” mace more sense logically and grammatically, it broke the cultural norms of the expression and therefore was culturally incorrect.

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This is an example of linguistic profiling on the phone (outside of Baugh's research) that was on NPR. I included this clip because of its relationship to linguistic profiling and our work with Baugh.

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NPR's Tovia Smith reports on scientific research that's being used to support claims of a kind of discrimination that takes place over the phone. It's called "linguistic profiling."

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This is a short audio piece on Ebonics.

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The term "Ebonics" was coined in the early 1970s as a way of describing language patterns used by some African Americans.

By the 1990s, a school system in Oakland, California passed a resolution adopting Ebonics as a native language. Not long after that, a national controversy erupted. One Senator at the time, Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, called the acceptance of Ebonics one of the most absurd examples of political correctness he'd ever seen.

A couple of decades later, the debate is still alive. The terminology, however, has shifted to African American Vernacular English. Sociolinguists say the language patterns that make up this kind of English are not only as structured as so-called standard English - they're also complex and quite legitimate.

That's the crux of our exploration on this edition of CoastLine - along with the implications for people who do speak what is now called African American Vernacular English or AAVE.

Frankie Roberts, Executive Director, LINC, Inc. Leading Into New Communities teaches young African-American men how to navigate white, middle-class American culture.

Walt Wolfram is a Sociolinguist at North Carolina State University and a pioneer in the field of African American Vernacular English. He is the author of more than a dozen books on dialect including The Development of African American English, Dialects in Schools and Communities, and American English: Dialects and Variation. He is also the Director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project.

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Editor's Note: This version has been corrected to reflect the correlation of Swedish with Sweden.

When a California school district officially recognized Ebonics as a native language in the 1990s, a national controversy erupted.

Today, it's now referred to in linguistic circles as African American Vernacular English. Decades later, those who use the language still face the consequences of linguistic profiling.

A language is often associated with a geographic area: French is the language of France, Swedish of Sweden, German of Germany. But Walt Wolfram, a sociolinguist at NC State and a pioneer in the study of African American English, says this language has all the legitimacy of any other complex linguistic system. Even the stigmatization of certain components are essentially random decisions, says Wolfram. For example, "ax" versus "ask" when posing a question:

Walt Wolfram: " So 'ax', for example, is sort of this icon of stigma despite the fact that in the history of the English language, the 'ask / ax' actually resulted from a transfer. The original verb was axiom. So it was originally pronounced as 'ax' not 'ask'. And it was the change in the English language that gave it the 'ask' pronunciation. So there are all these sort of curiosities of history which show how arbitrary language is."

Frankie Roberts: "In cases like that, we create those illusions or those artificial barriers because I'm looking for a reason to not like you, to not accept you, to not be equal to you."

Frankie Roberts is Executive Director of LINC, a local nonprofit that teaches young African-American males to navigate what he calls white, middle class society through codeswitching. His key point: speaking African American English is in no way inferior to the standard form.

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CoastLine: Linguistic Profiling Still Lives, Despite African American English's Legitimacy

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The term "Ebonics" was coined in the early 1970s as a way of describing language patterns used by some African Americans. By the 1990s, a school system in Oakland, California passed a resolution adopting Ebonics as a native language. Not long after that, a national controversy erupted.

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This is the song examined by my group in the "Music As Protest" unit. I included this song because of the way that language is used to persuade and communicate across cultural borders in the video.

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Bandera - Aterciopelados (Official Music Video)

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I took this excerpt from my Autobiography. I included this resource because it holds relevance to the way that we learn language and dialects (both from a young age and cross-dialectically).

"When I was younger, I learn to read through listening to bedtime stories and following along in simplistic books as my parents read to me at night. Since I was immersed in English from an early age, I was able to pick up cultural cues by listening to family members and learning in school and church environments. I learned to listen by decoding the messages spelled out loud by my parents above my head – when I was younger, my parents would try to convey secret messages by spelling them out loud to each other in conversation. I was always keen to decode the messages, and would excitedly yell out the word if I could string together the spelled letters in my mind. Though it wasn’t their intention, decoding their conversations helped me learn how to spell and distinguish words I already knew well (often words like “ice cream,” “car ride,” and other concepts that were familiar and close to me). These exercises helped my listening skills, and sharpened my skills in spelling (and reading) as well. I learned to speak in a similar way, by listening to my parents speak to one another and to adults outside of our family. I remember learning complicated words like “facetious” by listening to their conversations and consulting dictionaries over and over again, and I learned simpler words through them as well. By the time I was in middle school, I had a voracious appetite for reading and my vocabulary was larger than that of most kids in my social circles and classrooms."

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I included this video because it was a really succinct and exciting way to see code-switching in action. In this video, the child is switching between three different languages (and codes within those languages).

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Code switching between Indonesian, French and English

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This video is an example of linguistic profiling for kids who use Ebonics as their dialect.

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This resource explores why 50%of all students fail AP exams, and why the system is set up to disadvantage students who take the tests for those exams. I thought this research was relevant in relation to standardized testing and the discrepancies between students who take the exams.

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High school students often take college-level classes to save time and money in college, but there is one catch: You have to pass the exams in order to get the credit.

According to a recent study by The College Board, nearly 50% of high school students taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses do not pass the exams to qualify for college credit.

"While AP enrollments are on the rise, the reality is that the vast majority of new AP class takers are not becoming AP exam passers," says Jeff Livingston, senior vice president of College and Career Readiness at McGraw-Hill Education. "These students are unprepared for the rigors of college level coursework in high school."

AP exams are scored on a five-point scale, with test scores earning a three and above considered a passing grade by most universities. Some schools will give college credit for students earning a score of two on certain exams.

Besides preparing students for the challenge of a college course load, passing AP courses can potentially save students thousands of dollars in tuition and give them a better chance to graduate in four years, says Auditi Chakravarty, vice president of AP Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment at The College Board.

"Students have the opportunity to explore electives and courses outside their major, or even to complete a double-major," she says.

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AP tests cost $87 a piece--significantly less than the cost of that course in college.
Why are students unprepared?
Chakravarty says students are academically unprepared for the difficulty of AP courses, whether they are taking the course too early in their high school career or without the appropriate preparatory courses.

Livingston explains that schools are encouraging more students to take AP classes--including students whose families haven't planned for or encouraged college--to give them exposure to college-level work.

"Lots of these new test takers are from socioeconomic backgrounds where college is far from a given--the level of preparation entering the AP classes is not the same as their colleagues who have always been on what we might call an advanced placement track," he says.

Because there are more students than ever taking AP courses, more teachers are needed for both preparatory curriculum and for the advanced classes, resulting in a decrease in the quality of teachers, according to senior advisor at College Confidential Sally Rubenstone.

"Nowsecond- and third-string teachers have been called upon to teach APs and many react with mixed feelings," she says. "My own son is just a freshman in high school, but already I've seen the chasm that separates his strongest teachers from his weakest ones."

Rubenstone adds that a growing number of high schools are requiring the AP exam for all students who take an AP class, "or the school will not put the vaunted "AP" designation on the transcript if the student bails on the exam."

"In the old days, "I can't afford the test," allowed some unprepared students to wheedle out," she says. "But now, even with recent budget cuts that affected AP exam fee waivers, many school districts provide free testing for students from low-income households."
What teachers can do
To ensure that their students go into exam day feeling prepared, teachers should be very familiar with the course description and exam format for any AP class, advises Chakravarty.

"This is why all new AP teachers are required to have their course syllabus approved by college faculty," she says. "The AP Program offers a variety of professional development workshops and conferences to help AP teachers continue to grow and improve."

While proper instruction is a necessity, Livingston adds that it's essential that teachers relay to students the importance of self-preparation and commitment to the material.

"Promoting that sense of ownership in the learning process is something that the best AP teachers already do and that the new AP teachers should learn to do."
What can students do to be more prepared?
The experts stress that college-level courses are academically rigorous and that students need to understand the level of time and energy needed compared to high school classes to successfully pass the end exam.

Students should familiarize themselves with class materials by checking out a list of the courses and what's required before they sign up, recommends Chakravarty.

"Getting to know the exam format is very important, and it is a great idea to talk with other students who have taken the exam in the past," she says. "It is also much better to work hard throughout the year rather than to cram before the exam, which is not effective for the kinds of learning measured on AP exams."

Practice tests and online programs can help students understand what to focus on for the duration of the class, as high grades in an AP class won't necessarily mean high scores on the exam, says Rubenstone.

"The students need to recheck the practice material throughout the semester to see if what they're learning in class seems to mesh with what they'll be asked on the exam. Students who aren't in touch with the pending exam questions are blindsided by low exam grades after succeeding in the course itself."

McGraw-Hill Education recently announced the launch of the ONboard Series for Advanced Placement, an all-digital learning solution designed to improve students' performance in AP classes and on exams.

"We've provided digital, online, self-paced guides specifically tailored so that a student can spend a part of his or her summer preparing for AP environmental science or AP world history," says Livingston.

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Why 50% of Students Fail AP Exams and How to Change That

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High school students often take college-level classes to save time and money in college, but there is one catch: You have to pass the exams in order to get the credit. According to a recent study by The College Board, nearly 50% of high school students taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses do not pass the exams to qualify for college credit.

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This is the dialect map that we all used in the beginning of the semester. I included this in my portfolio because it was a really interesting way to decide and examine dialect.

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Create an account or log in to take the quiz and share your results.

You're viewing another reader's map. Click here to take the quiz and see your own.

Your Map

See the pattern of your dialect in the map below. Three of the most similar cities are shown.

These maps show your most distinctive answer for each of these cities.

About This Quiz

The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz and has since written "Speaking American," a visual exploration of American regional dialects.

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website.

The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.

Additional work by Eric Buth.

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Create an account or log in to take the quiz and share your results. You're viewing another reader's map. Click here to take the quiz and see your own. Your Map See the pattern of your dialect in the map below. Three of the most similar cities are shown.