For young Spanish-speaking children entering U. S. schools, it is imperative that educators foster growth in the home language and in the language of instruction to the fullest extent possible. Monitoring language development over time is crucial for promoting language development because it allows educators to individualize student instruction.…

When asked to identify objects having unique shapes and colors among other objects, English speakers often produce redundant color modifiers ("the red circle") while Spanish speakers produce them less often ("el circulo (rojo)"). This cross-linguistic difference has been attributed to a difference in word order between the two…

The translation and adaptation of an assessment instrument into another language can be problematic, due, among other reasons, to sociocultural differences. This proved to be the case with the Spanish adaptation of the Students' Understanding of Models in Science (SUMS) questionnaire, a Likert-type scale developed originally in English. In light…

A rise in antiracist reform sparked by summer 2020 events have prompted a reexamination of course material across all levels and subjects in schools. This article will focus primarily on Desirée Bela-Lobedde's "Ser mujer negra en España" (2018), and demonstrate how fragments from her culturally rich autobiography, with the support of…

This chapter draws from an ethnographic study of Syrian displaced young adults living in México, who are commencing their university studies. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, many of these young adults spent several years in refugee camps or in cities under siege before arriving in México through special arrangements made by a…

The suitability of mobile apps for language learning finds increasing recognition in the field of language education. Recent research investigates the new learning experiences apps provide, taking the perspective of the language learner. This chapter seeks to contribute to this new line of autoethnographic research. As researcher-participant, I…

This dissertation investigated the current experiences of school-age English Language Learners (ELLs) placed in English reading interventions, having never learned to read in Spanish, their first language. Research on ELLs receiving literacy interventions, from a meaning-based, socio-cultural perspective, hasn't been sufficiently addressed in the…

In this dissertation, I explore the sociolinguistic perception of stylistic variation by native Spanish speakers and second language learners of Spanish. Within the field of Hispanic sociolinguistics and there is growing interest in studying the social information that listeners extract from language variation that speakers employ (e.g., Chappell,…

The role of children's verbal repetition of parents' utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults' and children's spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child…

The present study expands the literature on the Foreign Language Effect by investigating differences in moral judgment for 280 English-Spanish late bilinguals when processing the button and bridge moral scenarios of the canonical trolley dilemma (Thomson, 1985) in an online questionnaire in either a native (NL), foreign (FL), or code-switched (CS)…

The present study examined the effect of a pedagogical intervention about humorous verbal irony in Spanish with a mixed group of 40 second language (L2) and heritage speakers of Spanish. Unlike previous studies that have considered only irony comprehension, this project incorporated both comprehension and production of irony into instruction and…

The ability to think about nonpresent time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now." They also intrinsically differ: The past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or…

The analysis of a community's linguistic landscape has proven to be an excellent tool not only in portraying, but also in evaluating and interpreting what languages are used in a single place (and what languages seem to be invisible), what the vitality of any of these languages is, and the relative influence that each linguistic variety within…

The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview--computer (OPIc) employs a self-assessment instrument to determine the nature of the speaking prompts to which the test taker will respond and, thus the difficulty of the test. Grounded in research demonstrating varying levels of accuracy in self-assessment among language learners, this study examines the…

In this article, the author offers recommendations for pedagogical practice based on the assessment results of uppercase letter-name knowledge among Spanish-speaking preschool children from low-income backgrounds.