In this paper the Spanish International Business Program Abroad at Concordia College (Minnesota) is examined. Students in the program live, work, and study in Mexico City (Mexico) for one 4-month semester after completing prerequisite courses in management, accounting, economics, marketing, finance, statistics, Spanish grammar, composition,…

A report on the Language Assessment Battery (LAB) explains, in question-and-answer form, the causes and results of some changes made in the test norms. The LAB is a test of communicative language competence, written in English and Spanish versions and used for student placement in the New York City Public Schools. The report describes the test…

The partial immersion program at Key Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, was prompted by work being done in Virginia and Connecticut public schools by the Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) at the Center for Applied Linguistics. Established within the gifted and talented strand at the school, for most of the year the class…

Results are presented of an experiment involving the reactions toward accented speakers by immigrated native and near-native proficient English speakers from the same Spanish-speaking ethnolinguistic background. It was hypothesized that: (1) the negative reactions of listeners reflected an observable association with a geographic location such as…

This study sought to examine to what extent language learners in an immersion classroom used their native language and the foreign language when performing the cognitive operations involved in math word problems. Thirty-two third- through sixth-graders in a Spanish immersion program participated in the study. Data were collected through: (1)…

A project introducing English as a third language in 30 elementary schools in the Basque Country (Spain) is described. The program, emerging from a national curriculum reform effort, begins English instruction when students are eight years old, three years earlier than previously. Students are already bilingual in Spanish and Basque, both official…

This report analyzes the moment-by-moment construction of interaction by language minority children in a cooperative learning activity. The interaction occurred among students in a Spanish-English bilingual 3rd grade classroom as part of a cooperative learning curriculum known as Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC), which was…

This article reports on an ethnographic research project that investigated the relationship between home language use and acquisition of academic English as determined by the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) scores. The subjects were 33 children ages 10 to 14 from bilingual Spanish-English families. Data on home language use was collected…

This study addresses the validation of an oral proficiency test by examining the language that is obtained from the items presented in the test. The study focused on the language elicited by a form of the Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview (SOPI), the Spanish version of the Texas Oral Proficiency Test (TOPT). The TOPT is used to measure the oral…

An approach based on sociolinguistic theory is reported that was devised to describe the way written language operates in the different domains that make up the everyday lives of a given group of people. The approach involves the practices that the people use to deal with written language, and the perceptions (uses, beliefs, attitudes) they have…

This study examines the academic performance of 6th-grade pupils who participated as Spanish-speaking limited English proficient (LEP) pupils in the district's bilingual education program; were reclassified as fluent-English proficient (FEP); and are now enrolled in all-English classes. The investigation was designed to answer the following…

This report presents final (fifth year) results of Project Recurso, a federally funded project which provided 147 Spanish-speaking special education students (grades 3-5) in 12 New York City schools with instruction in English as a Second Language (ESL), Native Language Arts (NLA), and bilingual content area subjects. The project also provided…

An effort to foster intergenerational bilingual literacy by setting up technology-mediated partnerships between geographically distant parents of school children is described. The ethnic and linguistically minority parents who participated were from San Diego; Denver; and Caguas, Puerto Rico. This partnership between distant parents is part of a…

The fourth phase of a longitudinal study focusing on the cognitive and language development of children in a primary-grade Spanish immersion program (SIP) is reported. Subjects were the remaining 13 members of an SIP cohort beginning in 1987, 15 members of a standard program comparison classroom, 18 members of another class in the 1987 SIP cohort,…

A microethnographic study and intervention were conducted in a mixed-age preschool classroom with 3- to-5-year-old native speakers of English, Khmer, and Spanish. All were learning English and had native-language support. In the study's first phase, the language of five children was audiotaped during play time. In the second phase, the whole…