In spring 2006 California released its first ever school-level Academic Performance Index (API) scores for English Learners (ELs). These EL-API scores were based on California Standards Tests taken in the spring of 2005, and make it possible to identify how well schools were doing with this student population. It is not unexpected that elementary…

Fifty-four students were followed over 10 years and tested with native language measures in first through fifth grades and measures of foreign language aptitude and foreign language proficiency in high school. All students had completed two years of Spanish, French, or German. Students were divided into three groups based on their scores on the…

Taking a position that is unusual these days, New Jersey officials are promoting research that says bilingual education methods have an edge over English-only methods in teaching English-language learners to read. This article talks about the importance of bilingual education or a blended approach in the implementation of Reading First Program in…

Language differences in the United States are largely viewed as problems that schools must remedy. This paradigm has created the pervasive belief that Spanish is a root cause of underachievement for Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs). This article examines teacher beliefs systems with regard to the above paradigm. It also examines…

This action research study explored if changes in the reading curriculum, specifically implementation of critical literacy approaches that acknowledge bicultural students, increase student learning as perceived by teachers and students in a Catholic elementary school, where students have been chronically performing at the lowest level in the…

These proceedings contain the papers of the International Conference e-Learning 2015, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information and Society and is part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, July 21-24, 2015). The e-Learning 2015…

"Peer Tutoring and Response Groups" aims to improve the language and achievement of English language learners by pairing or grouping students to work on a task. The students may be grouped by age or ability (English-only, bilingual, or limited English proficient) or the groups may be mixed. Both peer tutoring pairs and peer response…

Preservice teachers from a Hispanic-serving university and Latino families reflected on their interactions during an after-school children's tutoring program conducted at an elementary school. This paper focuses on issues that both preservice teachers and families found important to communication and relationship building. These issues were…

This article discusses the author's use of a performance-based evaluation in his fifth grade Spanish class in a K-5 public elementary school located in Princeton, New Jersey. The author realized the need to break the old testing paradigm and discover a new way of demonstrating student language acquisition since the traditional tests did not seem…

The topic of migrant workers is commonplace among headlines in the national news, but such workers have been part of the United States economy for at least seventy-five years, as can be seen in decades of enrollment records in K-12 schools. In this article, the authors discuss an integrated unit of study which integrates language arts and social…

This paper investigates how bilingualism is understood and practiced by adults and students in a dual-language elementary school. In this dual-language program, native English speakers and native Spanish speakers receive language and content instruction in both languages in linguistically integrated settings. I examine the participants' use of…

This article contains a description of the Dual Proficiency (DP) program in an urban elementary school located in the heart of a large south-western city, as well as the teachers who designed and now implement DP, and the immigrant community participating by choice in DP. We write from a context where, ironically, the number of English language…

This report summarizes results of a 2007-2008 survey of AISD parents, students and staff about how well students are prepared for transitions to middle and high school.

While acknowledging the undeniable differences between a shallow, transparent orthography like that of Spanish and a deep, asymmetrical spelling system such as is found in English, this article asserts that there are also marked similarities between them. Both orthographic systems violate the universal phonemic principle in exactly the same three…

In this article, the author presents the bilingual books suggested by Pistu Downey, a bilingual teacher that teaches Spanish to kids ages three to six at the Bank Street College School for Children. Downey claims that reading bilingual books--books that contain words in languages other than English--gives children a very good opportunity of…