Event time:
Thursday, March 18, 2021 - 12:45pm
Location:
via Zoom
Event description:
After receiving an undergraduate degree in biology and his Ph.D. in sociology, Steve Leveen became a science journalist. But he abandoned that career to become an entrepreneur, starting, with his wife, a company selling “tools for serious readers,” they named Levenger. Their company became Inc. Magazine’s 8th fastest growing private company in America and Leveen worked as CEO for 25 years. Then, in mid-life, he left the business world and returned to his first love of researching and reporting on social science, more particularly, bilingualism in America.
His new book suggests that Americans are forging a new narrative about their languages and that our country, “rather than being a monolingual mouse, is a linguistic lion.” The US, he reports, has more bilinguals than any European country, and now has the ingredients in place for an era of flourishing bilingualism. Hear him present some of his findings from America’s Bilingual Century.
Included in his presentation will be how American bilinguals are overcoming some of the stubborn myths that can pose challenges within the university community, such as “Why bother? The whole world speaks English,” “Why bother? Technology will make language learning obsolete.” And “Fine, but other skills are more important.”
Guest Speaker Bio:
Steve Leveen is the author of America’s Bilingual Century: How Americans are giving the gift of bilingualism to themselves, their loved ones, and their country (America the Bilingual Press, January 2021). Based on a decade of research, plus hundreds of interviews with language teachers and scholars as well as bilinguals, this foundational work puts forth a new vision for America, one that Steve maintains is already coming into focus throughout the country—namely, an America where nearly all who live here speak English and another language.
In researching America’s Bilingual Century, Steve spent two fellowship years at Harvard and Stanford, interviewing some of the country’s major scholars of bilingualism. He also drew on the dozens of podcasts he recorded as part of ACTFL’s Lead with Languages campaign.
America’s Bilingual Century drew early praise from a host of first readers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy; CNN executive Calvin Sims; bestselling authors David Allen, Amy Chua and Kevin Kelly; popular linguists John McWhorter and Gaston Dorren; and Duolingo cofounder Luis von Ahn. Guadalupe Valdés, Ph.D., a professor of education at Stanford University, calls the book “a key must-read for our time.”
America’s Bilingual Century is part of the America the Bilingual Project, an advocacy initiative that Steve began in 2017 to help foster a stronger and healthier nation through bilingualism. The project welcomes not only bilinguals both also those aspiring to be.
This event is open for registration in Yale Connect through the Center for Language Study (CLS) group and the CLS Graduate Students and FLTAs. An invite email will also be sent to Faculty, Students and other guests. If you would like to attend, but an email invite was not sent, please contact Maria Ideliu