"Heritage language speaker" is a relatively new term to denote minority language speakers who grew up in a household where the language was used or those who have a family, ancestral, or racial connection to the minority language. In research on heritage language speakers, overlap between these 2 definitions is often assumed--that is,…

Multilingualism is an international fact of life and increasing in the United States. Multilingual families are exceedingly diverse, and policies relevant to them should take this into account. The quantity and quality of a child's exposure to responsive conversation spoken by fluent adults predicts both monolingual and multilingual language and…

THE BASIC CONCEPTS USED IN DEVELOPING THE LANGUAGE AND READING EDUCATION PROGRAM WERE--(1) ALL HUMAN ORGANISMS ARE ESSENTIALLY ALIKE AND THEREFORE MAN'S BASIC NEEDS ARE THE SAME, (2) FUNDAMENTAL LIKENESSES EXIST IN ALL CULTURES, (3) CHILDREN FIRST INTRODUCED TO THE DIMENSIONS OF THEIR OWN CULTURE ARE READY TO MOVE TOWARD UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER…

The language competence of adults in Great Britain was examined in a national study involving interviews between April 28 and May 9, 1999, with a representative sample of 3,967 adults over the age of 16 years. Of those surveyed, 58% spoke only their mother tongue, 29% spoke one additional language, and 10% spoke two additional languages. Fifteen…