In the United States, approximately 7% to 10% of children are raised in bilingual households. Despite inherent advantages to bilingualism, some bilingual children experience a significant lag in academic success relative to other groups. Bridging the fields of cognitive psychology and education, this volume presents research-based knowledge on…

The author reviews literature on the acquisition of language in bilingual children, and discusses issues in the assessment of language impairment in this population. Cited among findings of bilingual research are that children can and do acquire more than one language during early childhood and the acquisition of two languages can be parallel, but…

Examines instructional interaction in kindergarten, third, and fifth grade classrooms chosen for their academic success with Hispanic students. Looks at instructional discourse and language use. Confirms previous findings about the possibility of successful bilingual instruction. (DE)

This study offers an analysis of bilingual acquisition with particular emphasis on conditions that required the child to use negative syntactic structures. English monolinguals scored differently than bilinguals in English. There also was evidence that Spanish negative constructions were used in English negative constructions. (Author/BW)

Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children imitated Spanish and English lexical and syntactic constructions. Lexical items contained "high risks" phonemes. Sentence constructions emphasized plurality, possessiveness, and adjective-noun word order. Monolingual and bilingual children did not differ on English imitations; bilinguals…

Bilingualism has been defined predominantly in linguistic dimensions despite the fact that bilingualism is correlated with a number of nonlinguistic social parameters; the linguistic handle is inadequate as the single focus of educational intervention. Suggests directions for future research. (Author/BJV)

Early education of language-minority students has considered linguistic, cognitive, and social attributes of children and schooling contexts. Although far from comprehensive, language-minority education has a broader theoretical and empirical foundation for which present educational practice can be judged and future research can be designed.…

Despite growing interest in children's policy and in research regarding childhood bilingualism and language acquisition, the early care and education of linguistically and culturally diverse preschoolers remains a matter of much concern. Relative inattention at the level of policy to the needs and interests of such children is due to several…

This chapter addresses the theoretical and empirical knowledge bases related to bilingualism and second language acquisition in Chicano children. Research concerning bilingual acquisition has found that the linguistic, cognitive, and social characters of the bilingual child develop simultaneously. Furthermore, all three areas of development are…