This article presents an overview of family learning at the Children's Museum of Houston. Based on educational theory, and designed to support learning literacy and success in school, Museum programs provide parents with tools to help them nurture children's intellectual development. The goal of this work is for parents to become better prepared…

This article features personal narratives that condemn ideologies that work to render invisible the identities of translingual individuals. The author engages members of the language and literacy field, particularly teachers and researchers, in conversations that will not only denounce antiminoritized groups rhetoric but also counter prejudiced…

Meeting the academic needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students requires new perspectives on behalf of school leaders. Using the concept of the border epistemology of school leadership, this case study reveals the work of one "borderlander" in a dual-language school. Telling her story through self-reflection, the voices of…

The question regarding the appropriateness of the use of tests of intelligence and cognitive abilities developed in the United States to assess people from other countries was renewed in the debate between Suen and Greenspan (2008) and Sanchez-Escobedo and Hollingworth (2009). This controversy arose from challenges in the translation, adaptation,…

Texas requires a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of limited English proficient (LEP) students in a particular elementary grade and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data, we find a significant increase in the probability that a district offers bilingual education above this 20-student cutoff. Using…

Based in case studies conducted in the US, Europe, and Latin America, this book explores the feasibility and benefits of trilingual/multilingual education in the United States. Currently, there are few programs in the country of this nature, as educators tend to conclude that English-language learners would be overwhelmed by study in additional…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…

Intonational development has been an area of interest during the past four decades, from the perspectives of both production and perception. But relatively few conclusions have been made about how children acquire the intonational component of their grammar. To date, prior studies of intonational development have not included a fine-grained…

This paper reports on the development and piloting of an adaptive, online placement exam that will be administered to L2 and heritage learners of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Particular attention is given to the structure of the exam and the linguistic strategies employed to distinguish heritage speakers from L2 learners.…

Neighborhood density--the number of words that sound similar to a given word (Luce & Pisoni, 1998)--influences word learning in native English-speaking children and adults (Storkel, 2004; Storkel, Armbruster & Hogan, 2006): novel words with many similar sounding English words (i.e., dense neighborhood) are learned more quickly than novel words…

Reading texts with historical and sociopolitical content in a foreign language is often a challenge for second language students. The obstacles encountered by students should be of concern to language instructors. Lack of background knowledge frequently causes the reader to abandon the reading activity with a sense of disappointment and…

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Quechua is the largest indigenous language family to constitute the first language (L1) of second language (L2) Spanish speakers. Despite sheer number of speakers and typologically interesting contrasts, Quechua-Spanish second language acquisition is a nearly untapped research area,…

Many multisyllabic words contain shorter words that are not semantic units, like the CAP in HANDICAP and the DURA ("hard") in VERDURA ("vegetable"). The spaces between printed words identify word boundaries, but spurious identification of these embedded words is a potentially greater challenge for spoken language comprehension, a challenge that is…

Although standard exclamatives have been studied for the last thirty years, (as far as I know) rhetorical exclamatives have not been studied at all in any language, (as far as I know). The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the systematic internal characterization of rhetorical exclamatives in Spanish, from a syntactic, semantic and…

Recent studies have shown that word frequency estimates obtained from films and television subtitles are better to predict performance in word recognition experiments than the traditional word frequency estimates based on books and newspapers. In this study, we present a subtitle-based word frequency list for Spanish, one of the most widely spoken…