In this article, the author presents the bilingual books suggested by Pistu Downey, a bilingual teacher that teaches Spanish to kids ages three to six at the Bank Street College School for Children. Downey claims that reading bilingual books--books that contain words in languages other than English--gives children a very good opportunity of…

We report results from 2 language-based processing tasks designed to investigate the performance of linguistically diverse learners. The tasks were the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT) and Non-Word Repetition (NWR). Participants were 100 school-age children in 1 of 3 different experimental groups: monolingual English-speaking children…

Maze use appears to be higher in bilingual speakers than in their functionally monolingual peers. One question is whether this is due to the speaker's bilingual status or to the characteristics of the bilingual's language(s). Narratives for 22 Spanish-English bilingual 4-6-year-olds and their functionally monolingual age-matched peers were…

Dyslexia is a persistent problem in written language, consisting of a severe difficulty in word recognition. It is characterized by low reading performance, while other skills are not impaired, being normal or even superior in some cases. This paper reviews different proposals for defining and clarifying causes of dyslexia. Additionally, we…

The purpose of this paper is to document the early Spanish speech development of a toddler, K, whose cochlear implant was activated at age 20 months. The contribution of K's developmental pattern to research is unique in that Spanish is the sole language of the home, as well as being the language of intervention up to 16 months postimplant (3…

The relation between thought and language was explored using 2 experiments testing monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking children's responses to visual motion event stimuli. In a match-to-sample task (Experiment 1) 7-year-old English speakers fixated on videos matching the manner (rather than path) of a target video more often than…

This review of research considers the occurrence and function of Spanish discourse markers and other particles in indigenous speech. I discuss important research that has examined these phenomena and refer to studies of bilingual discourse markers in other non-indigenous language contact situations to address unresolved issues concerning the form…

A mini-lesson in Spanish vocabulary was taught to undergraduates unfamiliar with the language using one of two predominant L2 teaching methodologies, the grammar-translation approach or the communicative approach. Both experimental groups showed significant improvement in learning the target language over the baseline measure set by the control…

This paper identifies a number of significant contemporary trends in the Latino population, including the striking growth of the community, new points of entry and settlement for recent immigrants, the mixed-status nature of families, and the increase in the proportion of U.S. households that speak Spanish. The implications of these trends for…

This case study investigated the ways pre-major and pre-minor students of Spanish interacted with a grammar application from four perspectives. Firstly, using the computer's tracking ability to collect learners' behaviors, the study set out to uncover the different ways learners approached the application. Secondly, the study assessed the…

Despite the problems presented by lexical errors in second language (L2) communication, most computer assisted language learning (CALL) programs tend to focus on the acquisition of grammar points rather than on the development of the L2 lexicon. In addition, CALL vocabulary tasks are typically limited in scope and mechanical in nature, covering…

Multilinguals appear to become better at learning additional languages the more languages they know, and in particular, to be faster at learning grammar. This study investigates the use of grammar learning strategies in 144 participants who knew between 2 and 12 languages each, using a language background questionnaire, a set of 40 grammar…

In line with recent critiques of communicative language teaching (Byrnes and Maxim 2004; Byrnes 2006), this paper considers how instances of spontaneous, creative language play can afford access to a range of linguistic practices that are often devalued or ignored in classrooms. To this end, it examines how university students in an advanced…

The fastest growing Hispanic population centers in the United States are currently in the Southeast. In one Georgia community, immigrant children from Mexico, Central America, and South America use Spanish and English together in sentences. This paper compares the bilingual structures of sentences that show codeswitching between Spanish and…

This study surveyed the literacy practices of 45 English-speaking parents of Latino kindergarten through second graders using English questionnaires. The results of the survey were similar in many respects to other studies of English-speaking Latinos and unlike studies of Spanish-speaking Latinos. Respondents reported numbers of children's books…