Two assessments of 26 Spanish-speaking, low-income, Latina mothers and their 26 toddlers, conducted 3 months apart, examined toddlers' behavioral difficulties, mothers' depression, mothers' self-efficacy (as parent), and mothers' social support. Mother's perceived social support at first assessment was predictive of depression level at second…

Examination of the nature and roles of two types of classroom talk that emerged from a bilingual multiethnic classroom focused on how students of differing language backgrounds participated in lessons, how teacher allocation of time affected students' learning, and how the latter related to teachers' attitudes and values in selecting and…

Investigation of ways to teach English reading comprehension strategies to Spanish-proficient students, focusing on the use of primary language strategy instruction, found that primary language instruction had a central role in improving reading comprehension and in teaching non-English-proficient students comprehension strategies. (38 references)…

Observation of a maintenance bilingual (Spanish-English) program to determine its effects on majority language students found that fully English-proficient students enrolled in the program did achieve competency in Spanish and that their attitudes toward Spanish, second-language learning, and Mexican-American culture and community were strongly…

Suggestions for helping students learn to write in a foreign language are offered. Areas for the teacher to consider include recognizing students' basic needs, rewarding risks that students take, listening for content before correcting, introducing vocabulary and usage, and writing with the students. (12 references) (LB)

The plausibility of including Legal Spanish (LS), especially for students who will pursue a career in law, in the undergraduate advanced-level Spanish curriculum is discussed. Topics covered include the rationale for LS majors and minors, background resources, pedagogical materials, an LS experimental course, and class meetings and required…

The syllogistic reasoning performance of Puerto Rican children in grades three through five was assessed in English and Spanish. The difference in formal reasoning in favor of Spanish was attributed to the additional processing demands imposed on children when they solve problems in their second language. (34 references) (Author/LB)

Examination of syntactic complexity in the movie retellings of 77 elementary school-age Spanish-speaking children revealed developmental differences in the length of T-units, index of subordination, use of relative clauses, and prepositional phrases. Analysis underscores the significance of subordination as a cohesive device and as an indicator of…

A set of Q-sort items to assess individual differences in infant-mother attachment was adapted for a Hispanic population of low-SES background. Completion of the Q-sort by observers and inner-city Hispanic mothers and testing of 43 infants with the Ainsworth Strange Situation established the Q-set's validity and indicated moderate reliability for…

The first part of a larger planned investigation, this study examines the use of "por" and "para" by nine Peace Corps volunteers in oral interviews at the end of training and roughly one year later, to trace their acquisition over time, in two learning contexts. (24 references) (LB)

Surveys California educators (teachers, principals, school librarians, and bilingual education coordinators) on attitudes regarding books in Spanish in school. Finds that positive attitudes toward having and using books in Spanish in public schools are closely associated with, and may be determined by, the percentage of Hispanic students in the…

The standardization of the Escala de Inteligencia Wechsler para Adultos (EIWA) and the original Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) were subjected to principal components analysis to examine their comparability for 616 EIWA subjects and 800 WAIS subjects. Similarity of factor structures of both scales is supported. (SLD)

Compared 719 first-, second-, third-grade students enrolled in partial-immersion (PI) programs in Japanese, Spanish, or French to 3 comparison groups. Outcome measures used were a mathematics test, Metropolitan Achievement Test in Reading, and Student Oral Proficiency Rating. PI students scored at least as well as, and to some extent better than,…

In September 1992, France opened 104 high school subject-area classes taught in English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The experience of the first year of these "European sections" is examined, and the implications for change in the French education system are considered. (MSE)

ALICE, a multimedia framework for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI) at Carnegie Mellon University (PA), consists of a set of tools for building a number of different types of ICALI programs in any language. Its Natural Language Processing tools for syntactic error detection, morphological analysis, and generation of…