Despite the alarming rise of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs), in preadolescent children over the last two decades, no scales have been developed and validated to assess these troubling tendencies in this population. We describe how we developed English and Spanish language versions of a new scale to assess STBs in children, the Suicide Risk…

Spanish teachers' feelings of self-efficacy can provide an important measure of their abilities to be effective in the classroom and, perhaps, affect student achievement. There is a need for qualitative research focused on the lived experiences of inservice foreign language teachers while they are immersed in the target culture in order to better…

The growing demand for Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP) courses at universities in the United States in the last two decades (Klee, 2015) has brought to light the need for more theoretically driven research in this field, which can inform pedagogical decisions and materials design. The present study conceptually replicates Serafini and Torres…

Previous studies have shown that study abroad has a positive effect on second language (L2) learning outcomes for students who spend at least a semester abroad. It is unclear, however, whether a short-term experience also has a measurable impact on L2 development. The present study examines the relationship between speaking proficiency gains made…

A growing number of bilingual and multilingual national and international students are enrolling in graduate programs in the United States, creating an urgent need to understand how these writers build knowledge of unfamiliar academic genres and become part of their disciplinary academic communities (Selony, 2014). Such students struggle with…

This article reports on the results of undergraduate students that studied abroad (SA) and primary underlying factors behind their successful language study. The 189 participants were undergraduate students that studied abroad (Spain, Peru, and Honduras) in one of three advanced Spanish language semester-long programs through a Midwest four-year…

This paper presents the results of a study based on the change in language attitudes experienced by some allochthonous individuals through contact with the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia. Previous studies have suggested that in some cases, contact with Catalan--a minority language with a valued identity--acts as a stimulus for some…

This study examines the impact that membership in a Spanish language theater and poetry troupe had upon a group of Mexican and Chicano university students in terms of the development of academic identities, feelings of belonging, connections with friends and family, and other factors that correlate with academic perseverance. Also examined was the…

The purpose of this article is to counter widespread deficit discourses about Latino parental involvement in their children's education. In particular, we show Latino immigrant parents' views and understandings of curricular and pedagogical practices in elementary school, especially in mathematics. Using data from the Agency and Young Children…

This article explores Hispanics' concepts of cultural and linguistic identity. It is based on the findings of a recent study conducted by the author in Iglesia hispana de Cristo, a Hispanic church community in Western New York. Data come from ethnographic interviews conducted with 48 participants aged 13 to 80 years and with church leaders and…

English has become a compulsory lesson starting at the second grade in Turkey while younger learners are growingly introduced to it at earlier ages through various pre-schools, day-care programs and private courses. This descriptive study focuses on young learners' self-reported reasons for learning English and other foreign languages. Twenty…

As a result of a university partnership, elementary students at two midwest Catholic elementary schools have been provided with exploratory world language instruction (FLEX) from pre-service teachers. To investigate students' attitudes and learning of Spanish, researchers interviewed second and fourth graders. The students' parents and pre-service…

In recent years, much research has shown that the first language (L1) is being used in the majority of foreign language classrooms. However, these findings have often failed to include secondary foreign language teachers and their teaching context. The current mixed-methods study explores Spanish teachers' use of and beliefs about first and target…

Oral history is presented in this article as an interpretative exercise for historical events in a Spanish course for heritage language learners at the university level. Through the interview of a Latino immigrant family, students re-examined the history of their own families and increased their linguistic self-esteem. They were guided to become…

The purpose of this qualitative inquiry was to understand how four in-service Spanish teachers interpreted their participation in a summer study abroad program and how the experience contributed to their ongoing professional development and language proficiency. Using a multiple case design (Simons, 2009; Stake, 2005; Yin, 2009), the researchers…