The narratives of three Mexican immigrants to El Rincon, a fictitious name for a California town, illustrate the process of empowerment fostered by education. Narratives include those of a mother, a fourth-grade teacher, and a high school student aspiring to an engineering degree. Cultural context, working conditions, and the role of language in…

A study of 93 Spanish-speaking Latin American children of low socioeconomic background with reading difficulties found that, 4 years later, 17% had average reading ability, but 11% remained with severe reading difficulties. Characteristics examined include IQ, phonological processing, decoding ability, reading comprehension, and other verbal…

Reports on teaching strategies employed to teach Spanish to eighth-grade students with learning disorders, such as auditory problems, attention deficit disorders, and dyslexia. The teacher, who became her students' personal support system, conducted a structured, multisensory, and "alive" class and used many visual aids, such as flashcards, books,…

Recommends a less Eurocentric view on second language learning, suggesting that French and German, and even Spanish, must give way to other world languages. This will involve reallocating resources among adjacent institutions so a variety of languages can be taught at the secondary and collegiate level, thus creating students competent in many…

Bilingual Latino high school students who studied Spanish as an academic subject demonstrated a heightened awareness of how to use their two languages as complementary resources in school and professional settings. A case study traces one student's literacy development in Spanish over 4 years and her ability to use it as a resource in her…

Finds very encouraging results on the effectiveness of a preschool emergent literacy intervention in a "skid row" child-care facility in downtown Los Angeles. Shows that both preschool teachers and parents established regular habits of shared book reading and numerous ways for children to write and display their work. (SR)

Reviews the different approaches to multicultural science teaching that have emerged in the past decade, focusing on the Spanish-English two-way immersion classroom, which meets the needs of Spanish speakers learning English and introduces students to the idea of collaboration across languages and cultures. Two urban two-way immersion classrooms…

Presents guidelines for developing close translations of tests into other languages, presenting an example that applies these guidelines to translation into Spanish of the Cognitive- Based Literacy Assessment-Revised (CBLA-R) for first and second graders. A case is made that translations which ignore the language systems and culture of limited…

Two programs that have been successful at integrating a number of suitable conditions for learning a foreign language in the online environment are Spanish at Rio Salado Community College in Tempe, Arizona, and French at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, California. Discussion includes instructional delivery; course lab experience;…

Explores the process of implementing the Nebraska Foreign Language Frameworks in an urban, Midwestern school district. Participants were two elementary, two middle school, and two high school teachers; the languages taught were French and Spanish. Findings show that the six teachers implemented the frameworks differently, depending mainly on…

Nationally, foreign language faculty have been adjusting their curricula to ensure that today's college students know how to use technology to communicate effectively in languages other than their native tongue. Once upon a time, students were considered fluent if they could read, write, speak and aurally comprehend a foreign language. However…

Three experiments examine the acquisition of word-initial consonant clusters by adult second language learners. Native speakers of Spanish acquiring English participated in a metalinguistic judgment task, a perception task, and a production task. The judgment task indicates that beginning, intermediate and advanced second language learners have an…

The increase of Latino immigrants in the United States places more pressure on school counselors to assist in the adjustment of Latino students entering school systems (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004). This may particularly affect schools that only a few years ago had no Latino immigrants. This article addresses how one Southern school district's…

Outcomes assessment is a process by which an academic unit defines and articulates its program goals and assesses its attainment of those goals. This article chronicles one language division's efforts at outcomes assessment for beginning and intermediate Spanish. The evidence used for program assessment consisted of WebCAPE placement scores,…

Five experiments are reported in which the picture naming performance of bilingual speakers in a language-switching task was explored. In Experiment 1, Spanish learners of Catalan and Korean learners of Spanish were asked to perform a switching task between their first and dominant language (L1, Spanish or Korean) and their second language (L2,…