This paper outlines the design, implementation, and analysis of a computerized Spanish heritage language (SHL) placement exam. The exam created by the authors exemplifies how to design a simple yet effective placement exam with limited resources. It is suggested that an SHL placement exam should be developed in-house due not only to the diversity…

The Hispanic literature of New York has often been classified as belonging to a handful of canonical authors or selected national groups. However, examples from the early years of the newspaper "La Prensa" and Felipe Alfau's novel "Chromos", as well as consideration for New York's cultural climate during the first decades of…

Cross-linguistic studies suggest that the orthographic system determines the reading performance of dyslexic children. In opaque orthographies, the fundamental feature of developmental dyslexia is difficulty in reading accuracy, whereas slower reading speed is more common in transparent orthographies. The aim of the current study was to examine…

Located in East Oakland, Bridges Academy serves nearly 430 students, the majority of whom are Spanish speakers. Students who are considered socio-economically disadvantaged comprise 98% of the population and English Learners make up 83%. The school also hosts one of Oakland Unified School District's (OUSD) bilingual programs. In 2016, Bridges…

Mirroring the heterogeneity of Spanish-speaking bilingual teachers and students in the United States, the authors reflect on their diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to interrogate what it means to be "linguistically qualified" to prepare bilingual teachers in the United States. Through critical collaborative autoethnographies,…

Social work student participation in global experiences continues to increase despite limited research on the impacts of these educational experiences on knowledge and skill development. This article reports on professional identity and skill development for 25 U.S. Latinx students who completed internships or service-learning projects in Costa…

Creative classroom constructions imbued with arts integration, a transmediational multimodal pedagogy, are examined in exploratory action research in three bilingual elementary classroom learning experiences. In each of the lessons, there was a whole-group introduction and small-group hands-on arts-based activities inclusive of peer dialoguing,…

The State Compensatory Education (SCE) program is designed to reduce dropout rates and increase academic performance of students identified as being at-risk of dropping out of school. For this year's evaluation of SCE, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) served as the state assessment measures for grades 3 through 8 and…

Scholars of task-based language teaching (TBLT) advocate for the identification of learners' communicative needs to inform syllabus design, particularly in language for specific purposes contexts (e.g., Long 2015). However, little research has applied TBLT principles in designing Spanish for specific purposes curricula. Moreover, despite the…

The maze task is a psycholinguistic experimental procedure that measures real-time incremental sentence processing. The task has recently been tested as a language learning tool with promising results. Therefore, the present study examines the merits of a contextualized version of this task: the story maze. The findings are consistent with…

This paper explores the impact of the tourism discourse on the self-representation strategies that a university in Catalonia adopts towards international students, and the extent to which these strategies connect with the stance of international students towards their study-abroad experience. The data were ethnographically collected during the…

Much of what is known about the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in second language Spanish is based on studies of English-speaking learners. This body of research has demonstrated common pathways in the acquisition of multiple variable structures, as well as how second language learners come to use (or not) Spanish in linguistically and…

This quasi-experimental study tested the efficacy of a research-based biliterate reading strategy, Lotta Lara, that is part of a larger paired literacy instructional program. Its purpose was to investigate whether Lotta Lara, which focuses on reading fluency, comprehension, and oracy through whole group instruction, impacted first grade emerging…

English learners and students with disabilities both need educational supports to succeed in school. However, the kinds of support these two groups of students need may be different, and not receiving appropriate supports may have negative consequences on student learning (Callahan, 2013; Scott, Boynton Hauerwas, and Brown, 2014). To provide…

During the 2015-2016 academic year, the parents of 4,974 students participated in APTT [Academic Parent Teacher Teams] at 10 Title 1 elementary schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Students were predominately economically disadvantaged and at risk of dropping out of school. The impact of the program was assessed using the…