Purpose: The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

Within discourses of language endangerment, life stages such as child language acquisition, adolescent language shift, and the death of community elders figure prominently, but what of the role of other, intermediate life stages during adulthood and professional life in the course of language obsolescence or revitalization? Drawing from long-term…

In line with a broader Latin American turn to the left, since 2006 Bolivia's "politics of change" of president Evo Morales includes a new "decolonising" education reform called "Avelino Sinani Elizardo Perez" (ASEP). With the aim to break down deep historical processes of indigenous denial and exclusion in education,…

Like many elementary foreign language teachers, the author traveled from room to room to teach. Each room had different materials and a different classroom culture. This article describes how the author taught her students about Bolivia and how to motivate them through culture. It discusses a service-learning project that brings life-changing…

This dissertation uses the generative framework to study the syntax and pragmatics of word order variation in the Andean Spanish of Bolivia and Ecuador. While Standard Spanish has basic order SVO, in Andean Spanish the object frequently appears in preverbal position, resulting in alternative orders (e.g. OVS). Previous studies have attributed this…

The student manual contains no grammatical explanation or other commentary. The Aymara material is presented in a pedagogical manner for ease in reading the dialogues and reviews and for structural clarity in the exercises. The translations are provided in both Spanish and English, making the volume ready for use with students whose first language…

The teacher's manual for the Aymara materials includes: phonology exercises, for use in improving pronunciation when needed; indexes of all volumes, including cross-indexes; grammatical, pedagogical, and cultural notes for each unit; supplementary exercises, concentrating on verb forms and material essential to the mastery of these forms; answer…

Although Aymara is the native language of more than one million people, there has been up to now very little material available in Aymara. The Aymara Language Materials Project, begun formally in 1969, has concentrated on providing simultaneously a culturally accurate set of materials for learning the Aymara language and an introduction to the…

In this article, we take up the call for more multilayered and ethnographic approaches to language policy and planning (LPP) research by sharing two examples of how ethnography can illuminate local interpretation and implementation. We offer ethnographic data collected in two very different institutions--the School District of Philadelphia and the…

This collection of papers explores language socialization from very early childhood through adulthood. After "Introduction: Toward a Dynamic Model of Language Socialization" (Robert Bayley and Sandra R. Schecter), there are 16 papers in 4 parts. Part 1, "Language Socialization at Home," includes: (1) "Transforming…