This paper describes the Imazighen of North Africa, known in the West as Berbers; threats to their language and culture from schooling and the dominant Arabo-Islamic culture; and recent effects of mass media. As the indigenous people of North Africa, the Imazighen have been invaded frequently during the last 3000 years, but only the Arabs…

This paper discusses the potential of bilingual education and its possible implementation in Kyrgzystan, focusing on why bilingual education can be useful in solving linguistic tension in Kyrgzystan and which organizational questions must be considered to make bilingual education effective. The paper begins by examining and refuting common…

"Focus on Basics" is the quarterly publication of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy. It presents best practices, current research on adult learning and literacy, and how research is used by adult basic education teachers, counselors, program administrators, and policymakers. "Focus on Basics" is dedicated to…

Developed in the early 1980s, the Hill Areas Education project provides basic education to children and adults of Thailand's six ethnic minority groups, who live in the remote mountainous region of northern Thailand. The project delivers a locally relevant curriculum, equivalent to the six compulsory grades of the formal education system; promotes…

About 10 million inhabitants of Germany are of non-German origin and use German and one or more other languages in their everyday life. The number of foreign students in German schools is constantly growing. About 25 percent of Germany's foreign population are citizens of other European Union states. The largest group of minority language speakers…

It is argued that the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in public schools requires teachers to be more sensitive to how children maintain effective cross-cultural communication, and be aware of barriers that affect interaction in culturally diverse classrooms. Sociocultural factors that shape the perspectives of all students should be…

At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic Latvians were only 52 percent of the total population of Latvia, and official use of the Latvian language had greatly diminished while Russian had become the dominant language. It took 15 years to develop the legal instruments necessary for stabilizing the official status of the Latvian…

Parental involvement has been promoted by politicians and educators as the cure all for academic ills in the American educational system. Programs have been funded and structured to involve all parents in schools in ways valued by middle class parents to the exclusion of language minority families, their language, and their culture. These middle…

Canada's Constitution guarantees the right to the English-speaking minority in Quebec and the French-speaking minority elsewhere in Canada to have their children receive K-12 public education in the language of the linguistic minority of that province. A working group recommended a guarantee to Francophones of a distinct right of management and…

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…