Introduction: The year 2015 marks the fourth year of a drought in California. With no signs of the drought improving, communities in California are left to prioritize their water usage. In the Central Valley, the limited water supply has forced farmers to prioritize on acreage and planting, decisions that trickle down and may impact farmworker…

Conceptual replication within a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment provides an understanding of the generalizability of second language acquisition (SLA) research (Porte, 2013; Smith & Schulze, 2013). The present study replicates Collentine (1998a), a classroom-based experiment framed within a larger discussion on the…

Although enrollments in secondary school Spanish have risen over the past few decades, the Spanish-speaking world (Latin America, in particular) tends to be underrepresented or absent in history textbooks. Given that not all students who take entry-level Spanish classes will continue to more advanced levels, the first-year Spanish textbook may be…

Teachers and students can have ambitious educational goals, including critical reflection on the world around them, both that which is "home" and that which is "foreign." The environmental questions which face us all can be part of the elementary school curriculum, and the Foreign Language Elementary School (FLES) contribution…

This paper describes an investigation into the written feedback provided by tutors on Language assignments, together with students' responses to it. The study replicates a previous study of assignment feedback in Technology, in order to determine the extent to which the characteristics underlying common feedback practice and students' perceptions…

Purpose: This study explored the utility of language sample analysis for evaluating language ability in school-age Spanish-English sequential bilingual children. Specifically, the relative potential of lexical diversity and word/morpheme omission as predictors of typical or atypical language status was evaluated. Method: Narrative samples were…

Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the…

This paper reports an online reciprocal peer tutoring project for improving language competence in Spanish and English. Students aged 9-12 years from Scotland and Catalonia were matched to act as tutors in their own language and as tutees in a modern foreign language. Students were intended to improve both their first language (through helping the…

The literacy growth of 260 second-grade English learners (ELs) with varying degrees of English language proficiency (e.g., Beginning, Early Intermediate, Intermediate, Early Advanced and Advanced English language proficiency) was assessed with English literacy skill assessments. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills measures were…

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions ("Nicolas es feliz" versus "'Feliz' es Nicolas," "Es Nicolas 'feliz,'" "Es 'feliz' Nicolas," "Nicolas is 'happy'") in the Spanish of first- and second-generation…

This article demonstrates how one woman's identity changed as she was empowered through her participation in a sewing cooperative community of practice. A community of practice framework allows examination of participation in ongoing negotiated interactions in which people construct expert and novice identities as they work together. Identity, as…

No consensus has been reached on whether phonological information is activated in reading Chinese. Further, semantic activation has not been well-studied in the context of orthographic depth. To contribute to these issues, this dissertation investigated semantic and phonological activation in reading Chinese and English. This dissertation also…

This paper is an experimental investigation on the tonal structure and phonetic signaling of declarative questions by speakers of Manchego Peninsular Spanish, a dialect of Spanish for which little experimental research on intonation is currently available. Analysis 1 examines the scaling and timing properties of final rises produced by 16 speakers…

Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998;…