The engagement of immigrant children in literature discussion groups in an elementary school classroom in the United States is studied in this article. The analysis shows how the students' responses are embedded in translocal movements across places, time, and people that can be characterized as constructing dynamic cultural flows. The findings…

This article reports on a collaborative action research study carried out on three groups of Spanish beginners during the implementation of a strategy awareness raising programme (SAR). The objective was to analyse the impact of the SAR programme on the students' learning process in three main areas: strategy awareness, strategy use in learning…

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) is the most commonly used intelligence test for children. Five years ago, a Spanish version of the WISC-IV was published (WISC-IV Spanish; Wechsler, 2005), but a limited amount of published information is available regarding its utility when assessing clinical samples. The current study included…

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER-SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that…

Spelling is an important, but often overlooked, component of literacy instruction and development. Although it is related to other aspects of literacy, there are independent theories of spelling development as well as assessment and instructional strategies that align with these theories. This article summarizes the rationale for linking…

SRI International's EduSpeak[R] system is a software development toolkit that enables developers of interactive language education software to use state-of-the-art speech recognition and pronunciation scoring technology. Automatic pronunciation scoring allows the computer to provide feedback on the overall quality of pronunciation and to point to…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

The article examines 21 biliteracy teachers who studied and taught in schools through an eight-week in-service professional development program with indigenous children in the state of Altacomulco, Mexico. In the process of documenting their international teaching experiences, a study was conducted to ascertain biliteracy teachers' development of…

In 2007, for the first time in Denver radio history, a Spanish-language station finished atop the Arbitron ratings. Earlier this year, KXPK-FM, known as "La Tricolor," ranked first among 18- to 49-year-olds and 25- to 54-year-olds, considered to be radio's two most-coveted listener groups. And two years ago, industry giant Clear Channel…

The writer will be co-author of a lexicon of Texas Spanish, and he reviews some of the expected difficulties in producing such a work, in vocabulary, orthography, and word meanings. (CK)

This paper recounts a brief history of Spanish exploration in the territory of the United States and surveys Spanish influence in industry, agriculture, foods, architecture and vocabulary. (Text is in Spanish.) (CK)

Contains a brief summary of Mexican American history and of the effect such a history has had on the current generation of Spanish speaking Americans. (JF)

The purpose of this study was to examine the short and long term effects of a Two-Way bilingual education program on the literacy development of students in K-3 and high school. Two groups included students in English Language Learners (ELL) as well as students who were not ELL. Both groups were instructed in equal 50-50 percent English/Spanish.…

This dissertation describes the phonetic characteristics of a phenomenon that has previously been denominated "unstressed vowel reduction" in Andean Spanish based on the spectrographic analysis of 40,556 unstressed vowels extracted from the conversational speech of 150 residents of the city of Cusco, Peru. Results demonstrate that this…

The growing importance of Spanish in the U.S. has generated an impressive growth in the number of university Spanish programs that offer community service learning. However, students' and community partners' misaligned expectations can create tensions and problems in these programs. Instructors must make a special effort to articulate and align…