Discusses using students' native language (L1) versus second language in testing instruments for reading comprehension in the second language (L2) classroom. Students of college-level Spanish were tested under different conditions involving combinations of the L1 and L2. Suggests using open-ended reading comprehension tests if some questions are…

Discusses the Matrix Language Frame model. Analysis of noun phrases in a Spanish-English corpus illustrates this compatibility and shows how recent minimalist proposals can explain the distribution of nouns and determiners in the data if they adopt the notion of matrix language as bilingual instantiation of structural uniformity in a CP.…

Shows that incorporation of units for syllable CV structures in a connectionist model of phonological encoding enables explanation of empirical patterns of speech errors. The model accounts for the finding of a bias toward additions of segments. Corpus analysis in Dutch and Spanish showed an addition bias in both languages. Showed that in…

Investigated the influence of gender on certain linguistic strategies that promote camaraderie, specifically in the discourse of Chilean Spanish speakers. Gender was not found to play a completely determining role, although male and female strategy preferences were exhibited. (Author/VWL)

Relative to both same-age peers and younger typically developing children with similar mean lengths of utterance, 15 Spanish-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment showed more limited use of several different grammatical morphemes. These limitations were most marked for noun-related morphemes such as adjective-agreement…

Analyzes the experiences of one Texas university with the integration of legally residing foreign-trained Mexican teachers in their bilingual teacher education program. The preliminary analysis reveals that a university can assist in the integration of foreign-trained teachers, but that thinking "out of the box" to alleviate the teacher…

Explores the role of a course on Spanish cinema in an undergraduate, university-level curriculum in terms of its potential to acquaint students with significant cultural issues and to develop language skills. (Author/VWL)

Discusses language planning and policy in Paraguay, a country that is unique among the countries of the Americas because nearly 90% of the non-indigenous population speaks Guarani, an indigenous language. Highlights an initiative to implement universal, two-way bilingual education in Guarani and Spanish that has resulted in widespread use of…

Think-aloud protocols were gathered to establish that first-year college level participants noticed targeted linguistic forms (Spanish formal imperatives) while reading an enhanced or unenhanced text. Suggests there are no significant benefits of written input enhancement over unenhanced written input for the amount of reported noticing of Spanish…

Spanish-speaking children, like children everywhere, are naturally interested in the world around them. If teachers are to encourage their understanding and appreciation of the natural and physical sciences, they should provide them with a wide variety of books they can read and understand. From board books about farm animals to a high-interest…

In the 1990s, teacher educators began to hear about the importance of studying and reporting on "best practices" in literacy learning to narrow the gap between high-and low-performing students. Of the studies produced, few of them looked to research in areas such as bilingual education for guidance on how to improve teaching reading for…

The present study investigates the developmental aspect of the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) concerning the access to the conceptual store from the second language (L2). We manipulated the level of proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. We tested Spanish-Catalan bilinguals (49 early proficient bilinguals, 28 late proficient…

The overarching question in this article is: What contextual and individual-level factors influence the decision to maintain Spanish, or see to it that one's children learn and maintain it? I first model the configuration of area-specific circumstances that influence the degree to which Spanish-English bilingualism (as opposed to English…

In general, language for business courses do not include the study of literary texts, despite significant research that demonstrates the value of literature as a way to gain competence in a foreign culture. Carefully selected, adapted, and programmed as a culture complement to the main textbook, literary texts can be a valuable resource in the…

The facilitative role of explicit information in second language acquisition has been supported by a significant body of research (Alanen, 1995; Carroll & Swain, 1993; de Graaff, 1997; DeKeyser, 1995; Ellis, 1993; Robinson, 1996, 1997), but counterevidence is also available (Rosa & ONeill, 1999; VanPatten & Oikkenon, 1996). This experimental study…