PBS -- Positive Behavior Support

PBS Positive Behavior Support PBS stands for Positive Behavior Support, which seeks to support and reinforce appropriate behavior in school and eliminate negative, problem behaviors. Focusing on reinforcing and teaching the behaviors that lead to learning and school success, PBS has proven to be significantly better than the old methods of punish and suspend. Using Positive Behavior Support There are a number of successful strategies for supporting positive behavior.  Among them are color behavior charts (as in the illustration,) color wheels, token economies and other means of reinforcing good behavior. Still, the other important components of a successful positive behavior plan include routines, rules, and clear expectations.  Those expectations should be posted in the halls, on classroom walls and all the places students will see them.   Positive Behavior Support can be class-wide or school-wide. Of course, teachers will write behavior plans in collaboration with behavior specialists or psychologists that will support individual students, called BIPs (Behavior Intervention Plans) but a class-wide system will put everyone in the class on the same path. Positive Behavior Support plans can be adapted to support students with disabilities.  By making modifications to the plans, and using the reinforcers designed for the whole school, or the strategy (color chart, etc.) to describe the behaviors and the consequences (i.e. Quiet hands when the clip goes to red.  No calling out when the clip goes to red, etc.)   Many schools have school-wide positive behavior support plans.  Usually, the school has a single set of cues and prompts for certain behaviors, clarity about school rules and the consequences, and means to win prizes or special privileges.  Often, the behavior support plan includes ways that students can win points or school bucks for positive behavior which they can use toward prizes donated by local businesses. Also Known As: Positive Behavior Plans Examples: Miss Johnson started a Positive Behavior Support plan for her classroom. Students receive raffle tickets when they are caught being good. Each Friday she pills a ticket from a box, and the student whose name is called gets to pick a prize from her treasure chest.

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Ecology

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Ecology Linguistic ecology is the study of languages in relation to one another and to various social factors. Also known as  language ecology or ecolinguistics. This branch of linguistics was pioneered by Professor Einar Haugen in his book The Ecology of Language (Stanford University Press, 1972). Haugen defined language ecology as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment. Examples and Observations The term language ecology, like language family, is a metaphor derived from the study of living beings. The view that one can study languages as one studies the interrelationship of organisms with and within their environments presupposes a number of subsidiary metaphors and assumptions, most notably that languages can be regarded as entities, that they can be located in time and space and that the ecology of languages is at least in part different from that of their speakers. . . .The ecological metaphor in my view is action oriented. It shifts the attention from linguists being players of academic language games to becoming shop stewards for linguistic diversity, and to addressing moral, economic and other non-linguistic issues.(Peter Mà ¼hlhusler, Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. Routledge, 1996)Language is not an object that can be considered in isolation, and communication does not simply occur by means of sequences of sounds . . . . Language . . . is a social practice within social life, one practice among others, inseparable from its environment. . . .The basic idea is thus that the practices which constitute languages, on the one hand, and their environment, on the other, form an ecolinguistic system, in which languages multiply, interbreed, vary, influence each other mutually, compete or converge. This system is in interrelation with the environment. At every moment language is subject to external stimuli to which it adapts. Regulation, which I will define as the reaction to an external stimulus by an internal change which tends to neutralize its effects, is thus a response to the environment. This response is first and foremost the mere addition of individual responses- variants that, over time, lead to the selection of certain forms, certain characteristics. In other words, there is a selective action of the environment on the evolution of language . . ..(Louis Jean Calvet, Towards an Ecology of Wo rld Languages, translated by Andrew Brown. Polity Press, 2006) The biological analogy may be the most pertinent- linguistic ecology is now a recognized field of study, not just a figure of speech. What dialects are to languages, subspecies are to species. Chainsaws and invaders menace them indiscriminately. . . .What the survival of threatened languages means, perhaps, is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth. With our astonishing powers of technology, its easy for us in the West to believe we have all the answers. Perhaps we doto the questions, we have asked. But what if some questions elude our capacity to ask? What if certain ideas cannot be fully articulated in our words? There are amazing things about Aboriginal languages, Michael Christie told me when I visited his office at Northern Territory University in Darwin. Their concepts of time and agency, for example. They go right against our ideology of linear time- past, present, and future. I reckon theyd completely revolutionize Western philosophy , if only we knew more about them.(Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Houghton Mifflin, 2003) Also see: CodificationLanguage ChangeLanguage DeathLanguage PlanningLanguage StandardizationLinguistic AnthropologyLinguistic ImperialismLinguistic TypologySociolinguistics