An experienced foreign language methods instructor presents his "private history" about teaching Spanish to fifth-graders as part of an elementary school's afternoon enrichment program. (Author/VWL)

Longitudinal data on the effects of first language loss on verb inflection and use by two Spanish-speaking siblings who were in an English-speaking environment were gathered. Both children were videotaped interacting with a familiar Spanish-speaking adult. A lexical morphology model was used to predict the course of first language loss. Examined…

Traces the experiences of two Spanish-speaking children of Puerto Rican origin learning to read and write English as they learned to speak it in mainstream first-grade classrooms in an urban school where instruction followed a basal series. Discusses their accomplishments in language and literacy in terms of issues in second language acquisition…

This tutorial reviews auditory research conducted with monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. Based on a functional view of bilingualism and on auditory research findings showing that the bilingual experience may affect the outcome of auditory research, it discusses methods for improving descriptions of linguistically diverse…

Investigated students' expectations of advanced business-Spanish courses at a graduate school of international management. Surveys indicated that students did not expect to discuss the same topics, use the same materials, and practice the same activities in Spanish-language seminars and in business classes. They preferred cultural topics in a…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

Reviews 15 children's books in Spanish. Titles reviewed include: "Perro y gato [Dog and Cat]" (Ricardo Alcantara); "Baldomero va a la escuela [Baldomero goes to School]" (Alain Broutin); "Duerme bien, pequeno oso [Sleep well, Little Bear]" (Quint Buchholz); "El mas bonito de todos los regales del mundo [The Most Beautiful Gift in the World]…

Presents a lesson about frontier life in Texas and is based on the National Register of Historic Places registration file "Castolon Historic District" and other source materials about Castolon and ranching in the Big Bend region. States that the lesson could be incorporated into units on westward expansion or U.S. geography. (CMK)

A questionnaire on the attitudes of school children on both sides of the border between Aragon and Catalonia in Spain was administered to detect any attitudinal differences towards Catalan and Spanish between the two communities and any attitudinal effect of attending optional Catalan classes on the Aragonese side. Responses are classified into…

This article determines the interlanguage relationships between oral language skills and phonological awareness abilities in 100 Spanish-speaking Head Start children learning English. Children's oral language abilities, measured using the pre-Language Assessment Scale 2000, along with their phonological awareness, measured using the Phonological…

This ethnographic study explores the contradictory literacy practices of 10 high school students of Mexican background from the rural Midwest. The author uses the term "Mexican background" to encompass both settled Mexican Americans and recent-immigrant Mexicanos. Literacy is investigated through English and Spanish in a sociocultural…

Approximately 1,700 English language learners (ELLs) and former ELL students, in Grades 4 and 10, were tested using both an English-language (Stanford Achievement Test, 9th ed.) and a Spanish-language (Aprenda, 2nd ed.) achievement test. Their performances on the two tests were contrasted. The results showed that ELL students, for the most part,…

The authors determined whether the cognitive processes that underlie second-language acquisition difficulties are the same as those that underlie reading difficulties. First-grade (N = 101) bilingual and nonbilingual children were administered a battery of measures in Spanish and English. English word identification and vocabulary were predicted…

This study investigated three questions: Do phonological processes show cross-linguistic transfer? How does the language of instruction influence the relationship between phonological processes and decoding? Does performance on Spanish and English phonological processing tasks similarly predict English decoding for the same English learners (ELs)?…

This descriptive study analyzed the emergence of the imperfect in the written production of 30 beginning learners of Spanish. The analysis focused on the use of the imperfect and the morphological marking of state verbs. The results follow the patterns predicted by the aspect hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994), and support some refinements of…