A study of public awareness of issues in bilingual education was conducted using a random sample of 336 college educated and college-bound adults from 23 states and the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Alaska, continental United States, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Alaska, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Subjects were mailed a 32-item…

A survey of the status of language usage in Lebanon begins with an overview of the status and usage of Arabic, the official language, and three languages that are much less commonly used as native languages but are commercially and administratively significant: French, English, and Armenian. A matrix follows that rates these four languages on: (1)…

A survey of the status of language usage in Iran begins with an overview of the usage pattern of Persian, the official language spoken by just over half the population, and the competing languages of six ethnic and linguistic minorities: Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Arabic, Gilaki, Luri-Bakhtiari, and Mazandarani. The development of language policy…

The effectiveness of teaching academic courses such as mathematics and science in a foreign language has been investigated by several international studies in the literature. Even though the studies conducted have brought up contradictory results, most of them reveal that learning academic courses through a foreign language medium may pose…

The Office of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the Center for Applied Linguistics cooperated in a state-of-the-art study of the field of bilingual education. State-of-the-art papers were commisioned in four general areas concerning bilingual education: social science, languages and linguistics, law, and education. Each paper formed the central…

The purpose of this guide is to provide Americans working with the Hmongs with: (1) some practical information on the Hmongs, their origins and language; (2) a detailed description of the sounds of the Hmong language; and (3) a discussion on Hmong as an unwritten language. This is the first of three guides to be published on the Hmongs, a people…

This booklet is designed for those interested in an overview of the past five years of progress in bilingual education in Massachusetts. Topics discussed include the need for bilingual education; reasons for the development of bilingual education programs specifically in Massachusetts; the contribution of individuals in the writing of the…

During the past decade, it has become fashionable to include an evaluation component with each new bilingual education program. The proliferation of empirical evaluation studies seems, however, not yet to have shed much light on very basic issues, such as the relationship between language of instruction and cognitive growth, academic achievement…

The success of various French immersion programs in Canada and of one Spanish immersion program for English speakers in Culver City, California, has prompted the author to define "successful" and to attempt to identify ingredients desirable in an immersion program. A tentative 14-point checklist for a successful immersion program is provided, both…

This profile in outline form discusses the English language teaching situation in the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking areas of Belgium. The situation in the Dutch-speaking region, which includes Flanders and Brussels (the latter having both Dutch and French as official languages), is described in terms of the extent of English instruction…

This volume contains the published version of selected papers from the 2000 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT). Plenary speeches include the following: "The Talk of Learning Professional Work" (Shirley Brice Heath); "Linguistics, Education, and the Ebonics Firestorm" (John R. Rickford);…

An examination of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction in York County, South Carolina focuses on community attitudes toward limited-English-proficient (LEP) residents. Factors discussed include the perception that virtually all residents speak English and that children who don't speak English fluently, generally Hispanics, will have left…

A study examined the problems faced by the Warsaw School of Economics (Poland), a prestigious university that must change rapidly from a training ground for central planners and bureaucrats into a Western-style business school. Issues include course offerings, mix of academic and practitioner-oriented courses, language of instruction, and the role…

Portrays the effects of demographic, social, and cultural dislocation experienced by members of the Australian Strelley Aboriginal community on observed shift in languages, such as Nyangumarta and other Western Desert languages. Examines changes in code mixing and the need for English as the language of formal education. (23 references) (Author/OK)

Suggestions for teaching in a multicultural college classroom, based on experiences at American International University (England), include acknowledge and respect individual students' uniqueness; encourage and facilitate self-reflection; clarify institutional goals and objectives without implying that they are "right"; choose materials…