This article explores citizenship's multiple meanings in Los Angeles by describing five different types of Americanization, or immigrant education, in the city of angels from 1910 to 1940. The federal racialization of access to citizenship influenced these alternative approaches to Americanization at a local level. In the context of Supreme Court…

Community-based heritage language (HL) programs can empower culturally and linguistically diverse students and families to construct hybrid practices linking home and school knowledges to promote learning. This study focused on the analysis of critical incidents in one Spanish HL program involving both youths and adults. Findings revealed the ways…

Changes to the pedagogy of foreign languages (FL) have taken place with the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). These changes provide instructors with opportunities to become meaning facilitators and designers. This article presents the rationale behind the pedagogy for a university course to enhance FL for academic…

The author primarily delivered comprehensible Spanish input to her novice 3rd and 4th grade Spanish students via stories she revealed and simultaneously illustrated on a white board. To document comprehension, she obtained student retells of the stories. This approach, used over six months, became an action research project with the goal of…

This dissertation explores seven second language (L2) undergraduates' learning experiences in a First-Year Writing (FYW) course at an American university. While the FYW course is designed from the perspective of first-language (L1) composition scholarship and focuses, broadly speaking, on analytical writing and the related development of critical…

Purpose: This study explored a technological contribution to education made by the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in the formative assessment field. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to identify the relationship between online formative (Online Diagnostic Assessment; ODA) and summative (Defense…

In the age of high stakes accountability, districts are being asked to provide and demonstrate academic achievement for all students including English Learners(ELs), who maybe also be identified as Emergent Bilinguals (EBs), or Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD). This becomes increasingly challenging especially for small rural districts…

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) currently offers three bilingual programs and two English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for English language learners (ELLs). These programs facilitate ELLs' integration into the regular school curriculum and ensure access to equal educational opportunities. This evaluation report summarizes the…

California's Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2010 revised the cutoff date by which children must turn five for kindergarten entry in that year and established transitional kindergarten (TK), defined as the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for all students affected by the birthdate eligibility change. Since it has been implemented across…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

A quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, non-equivalent control group design was used to examine the effect of a mobile gamification application on third and fourth grade students' Spanish language achievement and student academic self-efficacy. In this study, the treatment group's Spanish language instruction was through the use of…

According to 2016-2017 school enrollment data, 31.6% of K-5 students were English Learners (ELs) in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Of the many languages spoken at home by students, the most popular languages other than English are Spanish (19.14%) and Cantonese (15.88%). To respond to their needs, SFUSD offers programming that…

For a sample of low-income, Spanish-speaking Mexican-American families (n = 72), we investigated associations between family involvement in school-based activities and children's literacy in their preferred language (English or Spanish) during early elementary school. We gave special attention to the potential moderating role of teacher fluency in…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationships among proportion of instruction in Spanish, observed classroom quality, and preschool-aged children's academic skills. Study participants included 357 Spanish-speaking 4-year-old children who attended state-funded pre-kindergarten programs in 11 states that participated in one of…