The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act emphasized the importance of parents' participation in all educational decisions concerning their children with disabilities. However, parents' ability to actively participate in, and contribute to, their children's special education process is influenced by a variety of parent and…

Several factors, including the Bologna process, the embargo on university posts, and a larger student population pursuing degrees, have contributed to radical changes in teaching, learning, and assessment in Irish higher education in the last few years. Challenges to academics have resulted in curriculum reform, and most importantly, in innovative…

Two overlapping issues have given rise to this study: the need for assessment instruments to use with Spanish-speaking Latinos and the need for normative data on current and future Spanish-language instruments. Numerous career assessment instruments exist for the English-speaking population. These instruments may be administered on computer-based…

Student achievement in literacy and mathematics for students involved in a Spanish language program at a large and diverse school district in Arkansas, were compared to peers' scores who did not participate in the program. The program was implemented to enroll native English speaking students in a Spanish enrichment program (SEP) with the intent…

Framed within a Sociocultural Theory of Mind (SCT) in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), this dissertation explores the role of verbalizing in the internalization of grammatical categories through the use of Concept-based Instruction (henceforth CBI) in the second language (L2) classroom. Using Vygotsky's…

This research report examines how two groups of bilingual algebra students made connections among representations while solving a non-routine generalization problem. Using a socio-cultural orientation to mathematics learning, together with a semiotic lens on students' joint mathematical activity, this report details the type of connections among…

This research work examined the impact of a science-reading instructional sequence ("InSciRead") on fourth-grade Spanish-English dual language learners' ability to monitor their comprehension of content-related (erosion, deposition, and transportation) texts. We used a quantitative measure of students' ability to detect incongruities in a related…

For 5 years, this research team has sought to learn from more than 700 students encountered in Mexican schools, who had previous experience attending schools in the United States. Although this study has used mixed methods, 1 tool--the written survey--has proven particularly valuable as a means to build profiles of such transnational students.…

Preschoolers' metalinguistic and visual capabilities may be associated with the writing system of their culture. We examined patterns of performance in phonological awareness, naming of letters, morphological awareness, and visual-spatial relations, in 5-year-old native speakers of Spanish (n = 43), Hebrew (n = 40), and Cantonese (n = 63) and the…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

Despite acknowledgement of the limited English vocabularies demonstrated by many language minority (LM) learners, few studies have identified skills that relate to variation in vocabulary growth in this population. This study investigated the concurrent development of morphological awareness (i.e., students' understanding of complex words as…

In the present study, we examine the roles of 1) explicit information about language provided to learners prior to treatment and 2) aptitude (specifically grammatical sensitivity) within Processing Instruction. Forty-two learners of Spanish in their third-semester of study were divided into two groups: those who received explicit information (EI)…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

Although there is some evidence in the vague literature available to indicate that African Americans are underrepresented in foreign language studies, this issue has never been investigated with a focus on Spanish. Six hundred and thirty-one students enrolled in high school Spanish in a racially diverse school district in West Texas were surveyed…

An analysis of the language attitudes in the adjacent regions of Els Ports (in the province of Castellon, Spain) and Matarranya (in the province of Teruel, Spain) using the matched-guise technique shows that in both areas, Catalan and Spanish coexist today in a diglossic situation in which Catalan has instrumental values that are lower than those…