Native Spanish early and late acquirers of English and Vietnamese early and child acquirers of English made grammaticality judgments of sentences in their second language. Native acquirers of English were not distinguishable from native English speakers, whereas native Spanish late acquirers had difficulty with all aspects of the grammar tested…

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

Provides a detailed description of a way to encourage students to write for a purpose and to actively engage in the evaluation of their product. (Author/VWL)

This study examined the use of dynamic mediation procedures for assessing language modifiability of Spanish-speaking students with learning disabilities. Pre- and post-mediation measures included language scores and behavioral observations of language learning and modifiability during mediation. Results indicated significant improvement in…

Describes how a team of urban middle school educators developed a dual-language program to address the needs of their low-income, predominantly Puerto Rican students. Demonstrates how the structural, sociolinguistic, and ideological context influenced the way that this bilingual program functioned on the local level, challenging the dichotomous…

Reports on a study involving a group of 10 U.S-raised adults who have managed to attain relatively high levels of heritage language (HL) literacy (in Spanish, Cantonese, and Japanese), defying the typical patterns of intergenerational language shift. In-depth retrospective interviews were used to explore the types of access to HL print and the HL…

Investigated the effects of written input enhancement and text length on college students' second-language comprehension and intake. First-year Spanish students were exposed to one of four conditions with enhanced and non-enhanced short and long text. Exposing students to short authentic reading materials facilitated reading comprehension but not…

Explores some of the reasons for spotlighting Spanish language and Hispanic Internet sites on libraries' public access computers and recommends some sites for use by librarians working with Latino youth. (Author)

Examines the extent to which a highly motivated older adult can acquire a new language by focusing on a case study of a 57-year-old woman's endeavor to learn Spanish in an immersion setting. The learner's experiences, as recorded in diary entries, are examined in relation to the literature on cognitive aging. (Author/VWL)

This study compared word definition skills of 8 Spanish-speaking children with and 9 without language impairments (LI) (all aged 9). Children without LI tended to use formal definitions, while children with LI exhibited fewer formal definitions and appeared to show a limited use of their syntactic knowledge in their word definitions. (CR)

Seeks to establish connections between two different language contact phenomena, interlanguage, and code switching. Data for the study come from an interlanguage corpus that has English as the target language, but also contains material from the speaker's two first languages, Spanish and German; and a German-English code switching corpus…

Educating newcomers to help themselves provides the knowledge and security they will need to function better in the community, but it can also be a learning experience for students. This article describes an integrated curriculum at Community High School in West Chicago, Illinois, that combines Spanish native speaking (SNS) students and child…

Gaps in reading performance between Anglo and Latino children are associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge. An intervention was designed to enhance fifth graders' academic vocabulary. The meanings of academically useful words were taught together with strategies for using information from context, from morphology, from knowledge about multiple…

A cooperative project between middle-schoolers and elementary students makes clever use of a flight theme, and, as the author reports in this article, students' learning soars. In this project, the pilots are enthusiastic members of Ms. Herring's eighth-grade English class at Hampton Roads Academy (HRA) in Newport News, Virginia. The copilots are…

Although advocates of critical education such as Darder (1991), hooks (1994), and Macedo (1994) have critically assessed ethnic and language minority education, few studies have empirically examined bilingual education practices from a critical perspective. In this project, we investigated the pedagogical practices of educators, with classroom…