Research Findings: Shared book reading is important for children's early literacy development. Although there is an increasing number of dual language learners, few studies have examined families' shared book reading practices in their two languages. The current study examined Hispanic parents' beliefs and practices during shared reading in…

In this article, Montgomery College discusses the adoption of H5P, a free and open-source content collaboration framework based on JavaScript that was used in substitute paid practice opportunities for students in Spanish 101 and 102. Utilizing a participatory action research model, three faculty and 47 students collaborated to inform the design,…

In this article, we explore digital storytelling as a community-engaged pedagogy to create students' immigration stories in Maryland as part of the project "Intercultural Tales: Learning with Maryland's Immigrant Communities." Stories highlight students' lived experiences of immigration, language, and identity. By envisioning themselves…

Scaffolding, an instructional strategy for providing support until learners can perform a task on their own, holds a potential to improve assessments for test takers who need support to demonstrate their abilities, such as English learners (ELs). In this study, we evaluated the benefits of including scaffolded tasks in standardized speaking…

The goal of this study is to analyze the implication of integrating activities driven from critical pedagogy into the curriculum of a Spanish language classroom using a critical ethnographic research methodology. The activities used in this course were out-of-class activities, multicultural activities, analyses of written and visual texts…

Capitalizing on preschoolers' inherent enthusiasm and capacity for learning, the authors developed and implemented a dual-language program to enable young children to experience diversity and multiculturalism by learning two new languages: Spanish and American Sign Language. Details of the curriculum, findings, and strategies are shared.

The goal of this study was to examine written translation as a means to: a) build on the theoretical notion that a bilingual individual's languages are shared; b) operationalize biliterate ability; and c) propose a new method of assessment for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Drawing from the fields of cognitive psychology and…

Correctional Education English as a Second Language (ESL) literacy programs vary from state to state, region to region. Some states enroll their correctional ESL students in adult basic education (ABE) classes; other states have separate classes and programs. At the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, the ESL class is a self-contained…

In this correlational study, we analyzed data from 71 Spanish-English biliterate students in grades 3 (n=21), 4 (n=23), and 5 (n=27) with the goal of investigating the applicability of the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) in English and in Spanish for this population. The simple view posits that decoding…

It is late at night, after working all day on her postdoctoral research Laura Colombo is trying to wind down while drawing and jotting down thoughts in her notebook. She is in the living room/office of her apartment in Buenos Aires, the city where she was born and left when she was 26 years old to pursue her graduate studies in the United States…

Greater interest from students, universities, and communities has increased pressure on faculty to design and implement service-learning courses. Often with no prior experience and limited institutional and programmatic guidance, faculty must make their way through a growing body of literature on service-learning. This article presents a novice…

The purpose of this study was to explore Latina students' identity as Latina first-generation college students. Constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006) was used to explore two research questions: (a) For Latina students who are the first in their family to go to college, what is their understanding of being a Latina…

As the 21st century's first decade draws to a close, America's public school students are participating in online academic classes in increasingly large numbers. More than one million K-12 public school students took online courses in the 2007-2008 school year, according to an estimate in a recent Sloan Consortium survey. This represents a 47…

This article describes oral language and early literacy skills in Spanish and English for a sample of 319 bilingual children in Massachusetts and Maryland (ECS) and a comparison group of 144 monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Puerto Rico (PRC). Children were assessed as they entered and exited pre-kindergarten programs. Data collection…

A mini-lesson in Spanish vocabulary was taught to undergraduates unfamiliar with the language using one of two predominant L2 teaching methodologies, the grammar-translation approach or the communicative approach. Both experimental groups showed significant improvement in learning the target language over the baseline measure set by the control…