Studies whether Latin or French as a foreign curricular language is a better preparation for learning Spanish. Participants who had learned French at school made markedly fewer grammar errors and slightly fewer vocabulary errors in the Spanish test that participants who had learned Latin. Concludes that knowledge of Latin is probably not an…

Investigates the Spanish-English code switching of 60 elementary Mexican-American students in a story retelling activity. Suggests there is a positive relationship between code-switched story retelling, oral language usage, and enhanced narrative skills. Suggests that teachers explore the use of code switching in a story retelling activity as a…

Discusses the importance of providing Spanish-speaking students with high-quality reading materials in Spanish and avoiding materials that have been badly translated into Spanish. Provides an annotated list of 10 books recommended for young children and a Spanish grammar for more advanced readers. Lists 29 badly translated books. Describes a Web…

Used Rasch measurement to study the psychometric properties of data obtained from a newly developed Diabetes Questionnaire designed to measure diabetes knowledge, attitudes, and self-care. Responses of 26 diabetes patients to the English version of the questionnaire and 24 patients to the Spanish version support the cross-form equivalence and…

Surveys of 181 Mexican American grandparents, 148 parents, and 173 grandchildren found the following: Spanish-speaking grandparents had greater information needs than English speakers and experienced more frustration dealing with adolescents than with younger grandchildren. Length of time spent with grandchildren increased effectiveness in the…

Explores the process of language recovery in an English-Spanish bilingual 6-year-old child. Documents the rapid process of recovery that took place and, based on these results, considers the value of maintaining "passive bilingualism" in children. Examines the strategy employed by the family to achieve this. (Author/VWL)

Discusses IN-VISION, a 5-year technology challenge grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education that supports K-12 Spanish and technology use in rural schools. (Author/VWL)

Reports results of an acquisition experiment with a group of Spanish-speaking children regarding their knowledge of a semantic restriction that prevents a referring expression from coreferring with a pronoun in certain syntactic configurations if its referent lacks consciousness. Sixteen children participated in a modified Truth-Value Judgment…

In a study of classroom second language acquisition, sought to determine reasons why the context in which a word appears does not always lead a language learner to an accurate interpretation of its meaning. Expands the existing research by using a natural intact, unmanipulated test as the context. Analysis of students' answers, self-reported…

In this letter to her teacher, the author shares her experiences in the classroom and her reasons for studying Spanish. (Author/VWL)

Presents the results of a study aimed at (1) examining the nature of oral production processes during foreign-language learning (Spanish); (2) utilizing retrospective verbal report protocols for collecting improved data; and (3) proposing teaching strategies based on the qualitative data of subjects' self-revelations. (AS)

Presents the results of two studies that examined epenthesis before three word-initial onsets of the form /sC1/ in English (where C1 represents a voiceless stop). One study examined whether frequency of epenthesis before /sC1/ was influenced by environment; the second study tested three specific statistical hypotheses based upon results from the…

Analysis of speech data from three adult elementary Spanish students, focusing on the acquisition of noun-phrase agreement and the copulas "ser" and "estar," revealed that learners could be classified as either form based or meaning based in terms of their strategic orientation to acquisition of the target language. (CB)

Argues for the existence of a pro-prepositional phrase category whose licensing condition requires it to be theta marked by a head. This licensing condition explains the difference found regarding silent prepositional phrases between Class A and Class B prepositional verbs. (CB)

A study of popular attitudes toward and use of Catalan and Castilian Spanish sought to clarify the prestige level of the languages in different areas in Spain. The study focused on the degree to which Catalan has undergone linguistic normalization by extension to all social levels and situations. (Author/MSE)