In this article, the author focuses on the best way to teach English to English-language learners. Some researchers say the English-only approach short-changes English learners in the long run. Here, results from a five-year study by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, which examined 200,000 K-12 Spanish-speaking…

This study is an examination of the use of captioned video with beginning students of Spanish. Two groups of students watched a Spanish-language video with or without Spanish captioning and the groups' comprehension scores were compared. Students in the captioning group described how they used the pictures, sound, and captioning to understand the…

Children of immigrant parents often translate written and face-to-face communication for parents and other adults, also known as language brokering. Fifty-five sixth-grade, Latino adolescents report their experiences and feelings toward language brokering, their level of acculturation, and their ethnic identity in a questionnaire. Generally, the…

This study examined psychometric characteristics of the Spanish translation of the Marital Satisfaction Inventory-Revised (MSI-R) in a community sample of 205 couples from Spain. Overall, analyses of the scales' internal consistency compared favorably with findings for both the English and Spanish versions of this instrument with U.S. samples.…

This pilot project was designed to provide professional development to teaching assistants (TAs) and improve undergraduate instruction in an intensive Spanish course through the use of collaboration and experiential instruction. TAs improved their teaching strategies, learned techniques to solve classroom problems, and reported satisfaction from…

This study sought to extend previous research on ethnographic interviews as a method of culture learning in foreign language classes by employing a qualitative case study methodology. Fifty-four university students in a first-year Spanish course worked in pairs to conduct a series of three ethnographic interviews with a native speaker of Spanish.…

While acknowledging the undeniable differences between a shallow, transparent orthography like that of Spanish and a deep, asymmetrical spelling system such as is found in English, this article asserts that there are also marked similarities between them. Both orthographic systems violate the universal phonemic principle in exactly the same three…

This study examined diagnostic efficiency of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV), criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD). One hundred thirty monolingual Hispanic adults (90 men, 40 women) at an outpatient psychiatric and substance abuse clinic were assessed with the Spanish-Language Version of…

Language is an essential element of one's culture. Conducting research in Spanish allows monolingual Latinos to be active participants, usually for the first time, and thereby demonstrates an appreciation for Latinos' cultural worldview. Porter and Villaruel (1993) wrote specific guidelines for the design, conduct, and critique of research…

The concepts of social and cultural capital explain how inequality is reproduced in schools. High-status cultural practices and knowledge, and access to these through elite social networks, become the indications through which success is recognized and rewarded. However, it is in the dynamics of negotiating social and cultural capital that…

This qualitative study, framed by a language socialisation perspective, explores parental language attitudes of families living in Paraguay, where Spanish and the indigenous language of Guarani coexist in what many sociolinguistics have labelled a diglossic society. During home visits, 27 parents or primary caregivers participated in individual…

This paper investigates the development of L2 Spanish students' cultural awareness through the teaching of literature by the application of the method Focus-on-Cultural Understanding. The paper partially reports on a one-semester study in which 17 intermediate L2 Spanish students at a state university in Midwestern US were exposed to a variety of…

In this article, the author presents the bilingual books suggested by Pistu Downey, a bilingual teacher that teaches Spanish to kids ages three to six at the Bank Street College School for Children. Downey claims that reading bilingual books--books that contain words in languages other than English--gives children a very good opportunity of…

We report results from 2 language-based processing tasks designed to investigate the performance of linguistically diverse learners. The tasks were the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT) and Non-Word Repetition (NWR). Participants were 100 school-age children in 1 of 3 different experimental groups: monolingual English-speaking children…

Maze use appears to be higher in bilingual speakers than in their functionally monolingual peers. One question is whether this is due to the speaker's bilingual status or to the characteristics of the bilingual's language(s). Narratives for 22 Spanish-English bilingual 4-6-year-olds and their functionally monolingual age-matched peers were…