Purpose: This study assessed home and community language proficiency in Spanish-English bilingual university students to investigate whether the vocabulary gap reported in studies of bilingual children persists into adulthood. Method: Sixty-five early bilinguals (mean age = 21 years) were assessed in English and Spanish vocabulary and verbal…

The purposes of this study were to report on a systematic approach to validating a Spanish version of the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale and then to apply the scale in a cross-national comparison of principal instructional leadership. The study yielded a validated Spanish language version of the PIMRS Teacher Form and offers a…

Advanced grammar courses often present standardized grammar rules to students without considering sociolinguistic variation. As a result, many native/heritage students feel that they speak "incorrectly," and many second language learners do not get an accurate picture of the target language's real-world grammar. This article describes…

Guided by Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological theory of human development and Moll's theory of funds of knowledge, the aim of this qualitative study was to examine the beliefs of parents and early childhood teachers on (a) the language development of Spanish-speaking preschool dual language learners (DLLs) and (b) how they can collaborate to support…

While current Spanish dual-language immersion (DLI) programme models frequently promote strict adherence to structured Spanish and English times, we present an alternative approach, which frames children as language acquirers rather than as language learners. The approach, situated within a Spanish, DLI preschool, framed with a Reggio-inspired,…

This article presents a model for a short-term interdisciplinary study abroad program designed specifically to foster intercultural competence. It provides a description of a one-month interdisciplinary General Education Summer Abroad Program in Valencia, Spain, that attempts to sensitize students to cultural differences, to engage students to a…

As the 2007 report from the Modern Language Association attested, foreign language departments must undergo radical structural changes in order to meet student needs in a changed world. The implications of this report (e.g., to broaden the curriculum beyond the study of literature, linguistics, and culture to include courses with other…

Since 1970, higher education in general, and Spanish departments in particular, have experienced a seismic shift, with skyrocketing student enrollment and dramatic increases in the numbers of non-tenure-track faculty. While contingent faculty numbers have continued to rise since 2000, over the past several years, enrollments in college-level…

Although corrective feedback (CF) has attracted much attention in the field of second language acquisition, there is scant research pertaining to CF in naturalistic written computer-mediated communication (CMC). This exploratory study addressed this gap by describing the types of CF that occurred and evaluating their relative effects on learner…

The achievement of mathematics within Hispanic youth is of great concern across the nation. In order to improve student achievement in mathematics, the nature of a mathematics teacher's complex belief system must be understood (McGee & Wang, 2014). The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study is to investigate the K-5 bilingual teachers'…

This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns…

The purpose of the 2015-2016 NC Pre-Kindergarten (NC Pre-K) Evaluation study was to examine the long-term effects of participation in NC Pre-K at the end of kindergarten. Two groups of children were compared--those who attended NC Pre-K (treatment) and those who had not attended NC Pre-K (comparison). Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to…

This study investigated "learning teaching" in the Ann Arbor Languages Partnership (A2LP), a partnership between Ann Arbor Public School District and the School of Education at U of M to bring Spanish instruction to elementary classrooms. A2LP prepares undergraduates from different programs, called Apprentice Teachers (ATs), for Spanish…

This study examines young English readers' ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37…

Like other anglophone countries, the UK is experiencing a language 'crisis', in that fewer and fewer students opt to study a foreign language (FL) beyond the compulsory phase, and that the UK's language skills do not match its economic needs. Despite strong statements of commitments to increase FL uptake, decline in FL uptake in the UK's four…