A description of Miami Public Library's work with Cuban refugees. (JB)

Examines perceptions of dialect along the Texas-Mexico border, where researchers have found many similarities between the Spanish dialects spoken on the Mexican and the American sides of the national boundary. Looks at social change along the border, and discusses results of a dialect perception survey. (Author/VWL)

Describes Mosaico, a new Spanish-language book club from the Bookspan group. Discusses Mosaico's direct mail marketing campaign and advertisement in magazines; snapshots of the average Hispanic reader/customer; most popular titles; Mosaico's special relationship with publishers in its role as editorial publication, distribution network, publishing…

Examines the structure of titles in Spanish. These structures have a sealed character with respect to the extraction of their constituent parts. Certain instances in which this generalization appears not to be followed are analyzed, and it is shown that the extraction is a verb rather than a noun form. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Earning a high school diploma is one of the milestones for students who come to the United States from other countries. But for those who arrive in their middle to late teens, learning enough English to earn a diploma can seem all but impossible. Some students from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, however, are discovering an option that has…

L1-Spanish learners of English have been reported to distinguish English /i/ and /I/ on the basis of duration cues, whereas L1-English listeners primarily use spectral cues. Morrison (2008a) hypothesized that duration-based perception is a secondary developmental stage that emerges from an initial stage of multidimensional-category-goodness…

Can second language (L2) learners acquire a grammar that allows a subset of the structures allowed by their native grammar? This question is addressed here with respect to acquisition of phonotactics. On the assumption that the L2 initial state equals the native grammar's final state, learnability theory would predict that a lack of negative…

Skagit/Islands Head Start (SIHS) in Washington State has always taken pride in its high-quality learning program. But in spring 2002, a problem was discovered: the child assessments from 13 centers serving children from birth to age 5 indicated that although Spanish-speaking 3-year-olds entered with language and literacy skills at a level similar…

Code-switching is a natural part of being bilingual. Yet two-way immersion programs are known to insist upon separation of languages, discouraging both teachers and students from drawing on both linguistic codes at once. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power, I examine one second-grade classroom in which the teacher instituted a…

The study examines emergent literacy skills in a group of young English Language Learners who are dominant in their native language, Spanish. We investigate the relative contribution of syntactic comprehension in the L1 and L2 to the development of emergent reading skills in English. Participants were bilingual kindergarteners from two public…

This paper is about a writing and literary translation program called Poetry Inside Out (PIO). Students in the PIO program study poetic form and structure, figurative language, and the fundamentals of literary translation in an extended workshop format. During a typical Poetry Inside Out workshop, participants read, discuss, translate and recite…

The incidence of nativelikeness in adult second language acquisition is a controversial issue in SLA research. Although some researchers claim that any learner, regardless of age of acquisition, can attain nativelike levels of second language (L2) proficiency, others hold that attainment of nativelike proficiency is, in principle, impossible. The…

The authors developed and tested a 35-min psychoeducational program with the goal of increasing Spanish-speaking persons' literacy of psychosis. The program uses popular cultural icons derived from music, art, and videos, as well as a mnemonic device--La CLAve (The Clue)--to increase (a) knowledge of psychosis, (b) efficacy beliefs that one can…

This study investigated self-assessed anxious learners who enrolled in online Spanish courses to determine if their anxiety was mediated by the lack of face-to-face (F2F) and other synchronous learning interactions. Participants were enrolled in courses at two postsecondary institutions located in south-central Texas. Narrative analysis was used…