LINGUIST List 11.919

Fri Apr 21 2000

FYI: Anti-Bilingual Education, New Lang Resources

Editor for this issue: Lydia Grebenyova <lydialinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • Jeff MacSwan, Anti-Bilingual Education Legislation
  • Valerie Mapelli, New Language Resources/ ELRA

    Message 1: Anti-Bilingual Education Legislation

     Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 12:18:31 -0700
    From: Jeff MacSwan <macswanasu.edu>
    Subject: Anti-Bilingual Education Legislation


    Dear colleagues,

    Please visit the website of the Arizona Language Education Council (ALEC) at www.alec2000.org to learn about the efforts of teachers, parents, researchers, and others interested in defeating the proposed anti-bilingual education initiative in the state of Arizona.

    Learn about joining and supporting ALEC at http://www.alec2000.org/join.htm

    ALEC Mission Statement - ------------------------------------

    WHO ARE WE?

    The Arizona Language Education Council (ALEC) is a non-profit association dedicated to educating the public about the historical and present context of the education of language minority children in Arizona. We are parents, teachers, business people, tribal leaders, community volunteers, and researchers. We are united by our concern for the academic success for children learning English and other languages in our state.

    ALEC seeks (1) To increase public awareness about language education issues (2) To dispel myths and misconceptions about bilingual education, (3) To provide a clearinghouse of information for Arizonans, policy-makers, and news media.

    ALEC is especially concerned about the English Only initiative that may be placed on the Arizona ballot in November, 2000.

    ALEC's primary activities include, but are not limited to: - Free bi-monthly workshops to raise awareness about language education issues - Quarterly roundtables, hosted by the regional Arizona chapters, which ddress myths about bilingual education, developments in state legislation, and issues of bilingualism and biliteracy. - Symposia at scholarly conferences and public language policy debates.

    If you are interested in participating in one of the above activities or would like to schedule a speaker for your gathering, contact ALEC at email: commentsalec2000.org

    Visit the ALEC website at www.alec2000.org

    Message 2: New Language Resources/ ELRA

     Date: March 11, 2000 11:06:37 +0200
    From: Valerie Mapelli <mapellielda.fr>
    Subject: New Language Resources/ ELRA


    ___________________________________________________________ ELRA European Language Resources Association ELRA News ___________________________________________________________

    *** ELRA NEW RESOURCES ***

    We are happy to announce new resources available via ELRA:

    ELRA-S0058 RVG1 (Regional Variants of German 1) ELRA-S0081 Norwegian SpeechDat(II) FDB-1000 ELRA-S0082 Siemens Synthesis Corpus - SI1000P ELRA-W0020 PAROLE French Corpus ELRA-W0022 ILSP/ELEFTHEROTYPIA Corpus (Greek corpus) ELRA-L0033 LusoLEX European Portuguese Lexicon ELRA-L0034 BrasiLEX Brazilian Portuguese lexicon

    A short description of each database is given below.

    _______________________________________ ELRA-S0058 RVG1 (Regional Variants of German 1) _______________________________________

    We would like to inform you that the ELRA-S0058 RVG1 has been extended by 421 speakers, recorded through high quality microphones. More information about this database is available on the ELRA Web site.

    _______________________________________ ELRA-S0081 Norwegian SpeechDat(II) FDB-1000 _______________________________________

    The Norwegian SpeechDat(II) FDB-1000 comprises 1016 Norwegian speakers (517 males, 499 females) recorded over the Norwegian fixed telephone network. The SpeechDat database has been collected and annotated by Telenor Research and Development. The FDB-1000 database is partitioned into 4 CDs. The speech databases made within the SpeechDat(II) project were validated by SPEX, the Netherlands, to assess their compliance with the SpeechDat format and content specifications. Speech samples are stored as sequences of 8-bit 8 kHz A-law. Each prompted utterance is stored in a separate file. Each signal file is accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

    _______________________________________ ELRA-S0082 Siemens Synthesis Corpus - SI1000P _______________________________________

    The SI1000P recordings were done to provide material for high quality concatenate speech synthesis. It contains 1000 newspaper sentences read by two German professional broadcasting announcers in studio quality together with the laryngographic signal and the glottal pulse stream. Parts of the corpus were labelled and segmented phonemically (SAM-PA) and prosodically (borders + accents).

    _______________________________________ ELRA-W0020 PAROLE French Corpus _______________________________________

    The PAROLE French corpus contains a total of 20 093 099 words, that include the following data: Miscellaneous: (CRATER, MLCC Multilingual and Parallel Corpora): 2 025 964 words Books: CNRS Editions: 3 267 409 words Periodicals: CNRS Info, Herm�s: 942 963 words Newspapers: Le Monde, provided by ELRA: 13 856 763 words

    The resulting resources are conformant to the PAROLE format.

    _____________________________________ ELRA-W0022 ILSP/ELEFTHEROTYPIA Corpus (Greek corpus) _______________________________________

    This corpus contains approximately 3 million words from the daily newspaper ELEFTHEROTYPIA, classified and annotated accordingly to the common core PAROLE encoding standard. The format of the corpus is SGML files. A subset of the corpus (250,000 words) is morpho-syntactically tagged; all the words are also lemmatised and checked.

    _______________________________________ ELRA-L0033 LusoLEX European Portuguese Lexicon _______________________________________

    Multifunctional monolingual lexicon of the European variety of Portuguese, consisting of about 61,000 entries (lemmas) and 1,600 correspondent inflexion paradigms. The set of entries includes compound words and the inflexion paradigms include information regarding enclitics, augmentatives and diminutives. Morphological information is encoded with maximum granularity and is conformant with the EAGLES recommendations.

    _______________________________________ ELRA-L0034 BrasiLEX Brazilian Portuguese lexicon _______________________________________

    Multifunctional monolingual lexicon of the Brazilian variety of Portuguese, consisting of about 65,000 entries (lemmas) and 1,600 correspondent inflexion paradigms. The set of entries includes compound words and the inflexion paradigms include information regarding enclitics and augmentative/diminutive degree. Morphological information is encoded with maximum granularity and is conformant with the EAGLES recommendations.

    For further information, please contact:

    ELRA/ELDA Tel +33 01 43 13 33 33 55-57 rue Brillat-Savarin Fax +33 01 43 13 33 30 F-75013 Paris, France E-mail mapellielda.fr

    or visit the online catalogue on our Web site:

    http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html or http://www.elda.fr