It is important to give medical personnel being trained in second languages and cultures access to information necessary to their specific immediate needs. The University of California, San Diego, is used as an example of a communicative approach to helping health care providers establish an appropriate relationship with their Latino patients and…

This participant observation study describes how one beginning, bi-lingual, Puerto Rican, elementary art teacher instructs a class of Puerto Rican, inner-city children. The study concentrates on the types and frequency of teaching behaviors that occur for a beginning teacher; cultural perspectives that affect instruction, content selection, and…

This report describes a program developed to improve the school involvement of Hispanic parents of children enrolled in an elementary school bilingual program. The parent involvement program included three objectives: (1) more than 50 percent of Hispanic parents would participate in two parent education workshops; (2) Hispanic parents would…

An English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) curriculum is presented that was developed and implemented by the Spanish Education Development (SED) Center in Washington, D.C. SED's ESL program, which offers beginning and intermediate instruction during the day and evening, expands from a traditional survival skills base by incorporating a problem solving…

The curriculum and resource guide is designed to help elementary school teachers organize their classroom and instructional activities to increase achievement of pupils whose first language is Spanish. The guide offers a curriculum plan, instructional strategies and activities, suggested teacher and student materials, and assessment procedures…

This paper discusses how the business Spanish courses offered by the University of Mississippi are conducted, focusing on the use of videotaped materials in the classroom and the development of appropriate handouts for students to use in conjunction with video materials. Introductory-level instruction is offered in the Spanish 101, 102, and 201…

The working papers by students and professors of linguistics on research in progress include the following: "Are Cariban Languages Moving Away From or Towards Ergative Systems?" (Desmond D. Derbyshire); "A Double-Verb Construction in Mbya Guarani" (Robert A. Dooley); "Semantically Ergative Languages in Typological…

This supplementary math curriculum guide for use with Spanish-speaking students in Chicago public schools' seventh and eighth grade classes employs a contrastive analysis approach. Lessons are presented for objectives for which the instructional strategies used in the United States differ from those in Spanish-speaking countries. (Objectives for…

The symposium from which these papers are gathered was one component of the Assessment of Bilingual Persons Project to pursue research on the nature of language proficiency and to keep teachers informed of related assessment issues for classroom assessment improvement. The papers include: "A Sociolinguistic/Discourse Approach to the…

The first year of an individualized bilingual magnet project was evaluated. A total of 254 elementary and secondary students in Philadelphia participated. Multimedia bilingual education was provided to students of non-English speaking backgrounds at two sites. At the elementary site, bilingual education was offered in Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese,…

An external evaluation of the Title VII Bilingual Education Project was designed to: (1) gather a subjective assessment from personnel working with the project; (2) observe classroom teaching and activities utilized in bilingual instruction; and (3) to measure differences in levels of achievement on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS)…

Although she is now teaching Spanish in a new school full time, Linda Smrokowski, spent 9 years teaching in a once-per-week second language program. Because many once- or twice-per-week programs still exist, she shares strategies for writing and implementing detailed lesson plans that worked for her while she was teaching in a once-per-week…

A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

A study compared the foreign language proficiency levels and language and cultural attitudes of students involved in two kinds of elementary school Spanish language programs: immersion and Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES). The study also investigated the variation in achievement among children in the same program. Fifth and sixth…

The Paraprofessional Training Project at California State University, Chico, is operated through a consortium of the University, Colusa County Schools, and Butte Community College. The 3-year program provides trainee paraprofessional teaching staff to work with the predominantly Spanish-speaking, limited-English-proficient school population of the…