The proportion of California's limited English speaking students is increasing rapidly. Language minority students represent more than one-third of all students in California public schools. The most central educational outcome for these students is English proficiency. Research varies on how long it takes for students to become English…

This handbook is intended for parents of children who will be attending French immersion kindergarten in Alberta (Canada). A question and answer format involving a fictitious teacher, parents, and child was adopted to facilitate reading and ease of use. These hypothetical questions and answers address a variety of topics, including the parents'…

This collection of papers demonstrates the role of the Intercultural Educational Partnership in the United Kingdom. It offers contributions from teachers, educationalists and academics in the field of second/additional language learning. The papers include: "Introduction: 'Learners' or 'Learned'" (Susan E. Shaw); "Second Language…

This chapter uses the insights of Dorothy Smith and Anna Yeatman, both feminist scholars, to explore the nature of policy formation through two examples from Australia. Smith and Yeatman argue that all description is both biased and interested. The article documents how the values of pluralism and equity were not served well by Australian policy…

This document asserts that dual language education is a program that has the potential to promote the multilingual and multicultural competencies necessary for the new global business job market while eradicating the significant achievement gap between language majority and language minority students. The appeal of dual language programs is that…

Schools and teacher education programs have begun to rethink preservice and inservice professional development to take into account the need for teachers to work effectively with students learning English. New approaches to teacher education are based on the belief that English language learners' access to challenging content can be enhanced…

This issue has a special, multi-article section on student testing in Texas and contains three additional and unrelated articles. "The Texas Testing Case Documents: G.I. Forum, et al. v. Texas Education Agency, et al." section has five articles: "Overview" (Roger Clegg); a copy of the "First Amended Complaint";…

NCLEnotes is published twice yearly by the National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education and the Center for Applied Linguistics. Volume 8 includes the following articles: "Speaking of Pronunciation" (MaryAnn Cunningham Florez); "NCLE Coordinates ESL Research Priorities"; "Reading in English"; and "A Standards Sampler." The regular features,…

This regional dossier aims to provide concise, descriptive information and basic educational statistics about minority language education in a specific region of the European Union-- Alsace, a part of France along the German border. Details about the features of the educational system, recent educational policies, divisions of responsibilities,…

Officials with the National Center for Education Statistics asked the National Research Center's Board on Testing and Assessment to convene a workshop to assist them with their decisions about reporting results for accommodating test takers. The day-long workshop brought together four panels of representatives from state assessment offices,…

This collection of conference papers begins with "Introduction" (Ronald P. Leow and Cristina Sanz), then presents five sections. Section 1, "Morphosyntax," includes "Preterit and Imperfect in Spanish: The Early Stages of Development" (Joaquim Camps); "The Relationship between Syntactic and Morphological Abilities in Advanced FL Learners of…

This toolkit has been developed in an attempt to ensure that limited-English-proficient (LEP) students are provided with fair opportunities to learn that reflect the resources, conditions, and practices they need to achieve higher standards. This framework embraces the concept that local decisions must be made regarding how to best support and…

SALSA is a 30-episode video series for early elementary school children produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting. It is intended to do three things: (1) introduce non-Spanish speaking children to the Spanish language and Hispanic cultures; (2) promote appreciation for the Spanish language and Hispanic cultures; and (3) promote cultural pride and…

This article presents results from a survey involving 83 predominantly white, female, undergraduate and graduate preservice teachers at a small liberal arts college in Virginia. The preservice teachers were asked to complete a survey describing challenges they perceived they would encounter as future teachers required to work with culturally,…

Most of the population of Japan remains ethnically Japanese. For this reason, bilingualism has never been a subject of significant concern in Japan. With the recent influx of new groups of non-Japanese speakers into Japan, the society is becoming more multilingual. This book introduces the way languages are used in Japanese interlingual families,…