This quantitative study conducted in the ESL program at a large community college investigated the symbiotic relationship between reading and second-language learning from the perspective of the class of post-secondary functional bilinguals sometimes referred to as Generation 1.5. These students are long-term, resident second-language (L2) English…

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 is the fourth biennial report to Congress on the implementation of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act's" Title III State Formula Grant Program (also known as the English Language Acquisition State Grants Program). This report provides information reported by states to the U.S. Department of Education regarding services…

This study investigates language minority experiences of 7 heritage bilinguals via ethnographic interviewing and analytic induction. Themes are identified after qualitative clustering and contrasting of the data. Results are presented for all levels of participant-reported linguistic proficiency and researcher-inferred bilingual identity.…

Educators need to document progress for English language learners, and the best structures to put into place in order to record their growth. Beginning with the stages of language proficiency, student progress can be tracked through the use of a baseline in all four language strands and the creation of rubrics to monitor performance. Language…

Given that summer abroad programs are becoming more and more popular, the aim of the present study is to find out whether foreign language proficiency can be significantly improved during a summer stay of 3-4 weeks. The present study examines learners' linguistic gains through oral fluency and accuracy measures as well as a listening comprehension…

This dissertation aims to expand the definition of literacy beyond its usual text and school-based practice. It studies the online diary as a sociocultural and literacy practice that allows people from various languages and cultures to share their personal experiences and values. The participants are five Thai English as foreign language (EFL)…

This case study was conducted at a large four year institution of higher education located in southern California. The purpose was to answer the question, "What are international graduate students' perceptions of the connection between English language proficiency and academic success?" The participants were six international graduate…

On average, Austin Independent School District kindergarten English learner students (ELs) had lower scores on two types of early reading assessments (English, Spanish) at the end of the 2009-2010 school year than did non-ELs. For first graders, no significant difference was found between Spanish-speaking ELs and non-ELs on the test.

In this article, the author shares two ideas that have guided her as she has attempted to ground curricular design in a web of diverse elements, on one hand, and also communicate more explicitly to students how and why an undergraduate Spanish major encompasses more than just development of oral proficiency in face-to-face interactions in order to…

This article brings together salient findings regarding communication and identity through studies of everyday social practices, studies of discourses about these practices and policy documents pertaining to special schools from "previous" and "ongoing" ethnographic projects based at the KKOM-DS (Communication, Culture and…

English language learners are increasingly present in early care environments. In 2005, for example, 14.7 percent of children in nonparental care in the United States came from homes where only one parent or neither parent spoke English. Approximately 29 percent of children participating in Head Start programs spoke a language other than English.…

Based on sociocultural theory, this article examines two activities constituted by a parent and child as jointly constructed bi-literacy practices. Bi-literacy practices enable the parent and child to co-construct conceptual meanings and sense across two languages. Concept development in young children "begins" with meaning in one language and…

While it is well known that languages have different phonemes and phonologies, there is growing interest in the idea that languages may also differ in their "phonetic setting". The term "phonetic setting" refers to a tendency to make the vocal apparatus employ a language-specific habitual configuration. For example, languages may differ in their…

Given that this special issue is devoted to the acquisition and processing of inflectional morphology by second language (L2) learners, the question in the title may appear redundant. However, recent research on first language (L1) and L2 morphological processing has challenged basic assumptions about the status of inflectional morphology in…