Intended for use by those conducting research in Spanish literature, this guide lists selected reference materials in literature from Spain, in Spanish, Galician, and Catalan languages. Annotations in the guide are divided into the following sections: (1) General Encyclopedias (1 annotation); (2) Guides to the Literature (4 annotations); (3)…

A description of Miami Public Library's work with Cuban refugees. (JB)

Examines perceptions of dialect along the Texas-Mexico border, where researchers have found many similarities between the Spanish dialects spoken on the Mexican and the American sides of the national boundary. Looks at social change along the border, and discusses results of a dialect perception survey. (Author/VWL)

Describes Mosaico, a new Spanish-language book club from the Bookspan group. Discusses Mosaico's direct mail marketing campaign and advertisement in magazines; snapshots of the average Hispanic reader/customer; most popular titles; Mosaico's special relationship with publishers in its role as editorial publication, distribution network, publishing…

Examines the structure of titles in Spanish. These structures have a sealed character with respect to the extraction of their constituent parts. Certain instances in which this generalization appears not to be followed are analyzed, and it is shown that the extraction is a verb rather than a noun form. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Earning a high school diploma is one of the milestones for students who come to the United States from other countries. But for those who arrive in their middle to late teens, learning enough English to earn a diploma can seem all but impossible. Some students from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, however, are discovering an option that has…

The current era of neoliberal capitalism has witnessed the domination of public education by business interests which openly promote the spirit of competition among schools, educators and students through a policy of high stakes accountability for immediately measurable educational outcomes. In the USA, this policy proposes to make teacher…

This dissertation describes an ethnographic case study of an elementary school in a border city in Southern Arizona. Its purpose is to explore teachers' professional lives at Cactus Elementary School (CES; pseudonym) through classroom observations, interviews and informal conversations. The majority of the fieldwork was conducted in the 2004-2005…

Ecuador's 2008 Constitution--and a subsequent law on higher education passed in its wake--effectively suspended student fees for public universities. The goal of this reform was to increase equality of opportunity. In this article I use newly-available individual-level retrospective information from the 2001 Census to explore gender and ethnic…

This research study evaluates the effectiveness of a Spanish-English dual language immersion (DLI) program. Many researchers have found that high-quality and long-term DLI programs promote academic achievement and high levels of language proficiency for both language groups. Despite the evidence, leaders from the field of bilingual education have…

L1-Spanish learners of English have been reported to distinguish English /i/ and /I/ on the basis of duration cues, whereas L1-English listeners primarily use spectral cues. Morrison (2008a) hypothesized that duration-based perception is a secondary developmental stage that emerges from an initial stage of multidimensional-category-goodness…

Can second language (L2) learners acquire a grammar that allows a subset of the structures allowed by their native grammar? This question is addressed here with respect to acquisition of phonotactics. On the assumption that the L2 initial state equals the native grammar's final state, learnability theory would predict that a lack of negative…

Skagit/Islands Head Start (SIHS) in Washington State has always taken pride in its high-quality learning program. But in spring 2002, a problem was discovered: the child assessments from 13 centers serving children from birth to age 5 indicated that although Spanish-speaking 3-year-olds entered with language and literacy skills at a level similar…

Code-switching is a natural part of being bilingual. Yet two-way immersion programs are known to insist upon separation of languages, discouraging both teachers and students from drawing on both linguistic codes at once. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power, I examine one second-grade classroom in which the teacher instituted a…