The nation's culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) classrooms face a critical shortage of high-quality teachers. Representatives from dozens of major national educational associations and institutions convened September 24-26, 2003, at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin, to grapple with this issue. The conference marked…

Describes an approach to lexical meaning in multilingual primary classrooms illustrated in the "Word-Weaving" project in a British school. Word weaving is a set of strategies to identify lexical demands of learning topics and to build opportunities for word meaning exploration into classroom discourse. (SLD)

Preservice teachers in Spain showed clear support for the theoretical principles of bilingual education, but less support for its practical implementation. (Author/VWL)

A study compared 47 Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking, and Spanish-English bilingual children's performance on a battery of semantic tasks. Children in all three groups achieved similar average levels of performance. The profiles of bilingual children in each language were somewhat different from those of the other children.…

Discusses teaching languages in Israeli schooling, exploring the difficulties that groups with different cultural origins encounter when they communicate in the same language. These obstacles make proficiency extremely important and place politics at the center of the problem of language teaching and learning. (SLD)

Minority students generally perform more poorly than whites, due to low teacher expectations, tracking practices, lack of a multicultural curriculum, school/home incongruencies, and a substandard learning environment. The current shortage of minority teachers is exacerbated by frustration, low salaries, crowded classrooms, and other intolerable…

This article discusses using cross-language transfer as a diagnostic tool for identifying reading difficulties of language learners. It is argued that if children have enough exposure to and instruction in their first language, their skills and insights can be assessed and compared to skills and insights in their second language. (Contains…

Response to an article on multiculturalism and the status of community languages in Australia, focusing on issues of language maintenance and shift emerging from the article and adding examples from other countries. Questions addressed include who is responsible for maintaining community languages, which are maintained, how this is done, and why,…

Considers the real authenticity of performance-based assessments, exploring their relationship to pedagogical practices that address ethnic and linguistic diversity. Describes an effort to transform English instruction and assessment in ways that draw on the cultural funds of knowledge of African-American students. (SLD)

Studied the relationships among students' backgrounds in terms of parental education and socioeconomic level, Finnish linguistic influence, and reading literacy for students in Swedish-speaking schools in Finland. Data from two national studies indicate that home background is more significant for reading literacy than is linguistic background.…

English-only proponents cite linguistic divisions in Canada and Belgium as reason to avoid bilingualism. Data on language shift, language demographics, and language prestige indicate that the situations in these two countries are not comparable to the United States. A better lesson to draw from these two countries' experiences is that coercive…

Traces the context in which the minority English-language community in Quebec is coming together to take ownership of the reforms in its schools. Provides a glimpse of the English-speaking community and focuses on the Linguistic Boards, school governance, and curriculum reform. Discusses the context and model of implementation for reforms in…

Reviews an anthology that provides undergraduate and graduate students with theoretical and practical discussion on various ideological convictions in the fields of multiculturalism and bilingual education. Discusses theoretical conflicts and ideologies affecting the field of multiculturalism, and the more immediate effects of politics on teaching…

Presents the story of a Nicaraguan immigrant who came to America as a child in 1955, describing his experiences moving through an English-speaking school system that did not make accommodations for his linguistic and cultural minority needs. The paper discusses bilingual education and explains that educators, researchers, and policymakers must…

Compares the empiricist approach of structural linguistics with the rationalist approach to language learning. In practice, a combination of ideas from both philosophies is usually applied to the instruction of second-language learners. Language learning occurs even in the absence of theory. (SLD)