The Padres a la escuela (PAE) or Parents in the School program in San Antonio (Texas) encouraged the participation of Hispanic parents in the education of their children. The successes of the PAE program are used in this guidebook to help parents, program staff, and policy makers in similar efforts. This handbook describes the history,…

The Limited English Proficient (LEP) Parent Involvement Project, a collaborative project between two state agencies, aims to help refugee and immigrant parents to be effective in their new American culture. Materials are provided that were developed for use in various adult education settings such as English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes,…

This book, issued in observance of the Columbus Quincentennial and on the occasion of the 27th International Geographical Congress, addresses a broad range of contemporary topics including environmental change, dynamics of the world economy, human needs, wants and rights, political order and change, and contemporary cultures. The format is one of…

This report describes the major linguistic minority groups residing in New York (New York). Hispanics are the largest language minority in the city. In 1990, nearly one-quarter of the city's population was of Hispanic origin, and 35% of school children were Hispanic. The Latino population continues to grow through natural increase and immigration.…

This supplementary secondary school program reports on the fourth year of a program focused on instructional intervention, parental involvement, and staff development in a school district with a 46% at-risk student population; more than 630 students were preliterate or limited education Hispanics. In this fourth year, the program continued to…

As an introduction to the use of the DIALOG online retrieval service, this guide presents material that was developed during a fellowship at Carlos III University, School of Library Science and Documentation, Madrid (Spain) and that is based on a course on the same subject taught in English at Texas Women's University. Although the use of DIALOG…

A comparative study of turn-taking in North American and Spanish conversation investigated (1) differences in styles for the two cultures and (2) any resulting misinterpretation of communicative intentions. Data for the first were drawn from two dinner parties, one with four American women, conducted in English, and one with four Spanish-speaking…

This paper explores what is meant by "thinking" in a target language. Factors that determine both unplanned and planned use of more than one language for thinking are discussed, and empirical data from a mini-survey and from personal language learning and language using experiences are presented. The role of target-language thinking in improving…

At the University of Miami, the Bilingual Study Group has been evaluating linguistic and academic performance of children from a broad spectrum of socioeconomic status who appear to be well-matched across bilingual and monolingual groups. Because the studies vary in the degree of exposure to English and Spanish among bilingual subjects who are…

This report describes a program that was designed to end the isolation typically experienced by language minority students in traditional bilingual education and to provide language majority students the opportunity to acquire proficiency in a second Language. The program served 4 classes of approximately 22 students each (85 students) in…

To evaluate the implementation of the Bilingual Education and English as a Second Language (ESL) programs, the Houston Independent School District (Texas) studied the participation and academic achievement of limited English proficient (LEP) students who participated in these programs in the 1995-96 school year. The Fall 1995 database reported…

A survey investigated the attitudes of one community college's English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers concerning the use of native language in the classroom, particularly by the teacher. Twenty-one ESL teachers, both part- and full-time, responded. Most were Hispanic, many were bilingual, and they represented a range of experience and…

Since the mid-1980s two-way bilingual education programs have attracted renewed interest as an effective way to educate both language-minority and language-majority students. This report, which describes and assesses the current state of such programs in the United States, is based on data collected from 169 schools during the 1991-92, 1992-93,…

The purpose of this guide is to pass on to new teachers keys to opening the school year successfully. The primary objectives for teachers in the first month of school are as follows: (1) to build a sense of inclusion with students; (2) to establish routines and procedures of the classroom; (3) to learn students' strengths and needs; and (4) to set…

This document is the first of 17 volumes on indigenous Mexican languages and is the result of a project undertaken by the Archivo de Lenguas Indigenas de Mexico. This volume contains information on Zapotec, an indigenous language of Mexico spoken in the Isthmus region of Juchitan, Oaxaca. The objective of collecting such a representative sampling…