This brief provides an overview of three federal laws that address native-language education and illustrates how these federal laws produce different results when coupled with state laws and other regional circumstances. For the purposes of this brief, native-language education refers to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians and…

Purpose: This study evaluated the extent to which the language of intervention, the child's development in Spanish, and the effects of English vocabulary, use, proficiency, and exposure predict differences in the rates of acquisition of English in Latino children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: In this randomized controlled trial,…

Reading fluency has been an area of struggle for students. Certain populations of students, such as English language learners (ELLs), have struggled even more so, affecting their overall achievement. Interventions have been implemented and studied regarding the reading fluency of ELLs, yet reading fluency has continued to be problematic in this…

This study is about how one middle school principal in Arizona uses Spanish throughout her day with students and their immigrant parents. Ordinarily, the use of Spanish to communicate with Spanish speaking students and their parents might not seem noteworthy, yet, in the State of Arizona several policies and laws have been enacted in recent years…

This article reports on research projects conducted primarily by first and second generation Mexican American high school students who document how school relationships are shaped by Arizona's racist political discourses. They conducted observations of their school experiences and then wrote up what they were observing in field notes. Field note…

This study compared two phonological assessment tools for use with young Spanish-speaking children in the American Southwest, FON and STAR. Each was administered to 27 1-, 2- and 3-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children in the greater Phoenix area. Analyses compared the children's rate of response, complexity of the children's productions,…

This paper reviews the research on the impact of segregation on Latino and English Language Learner (ELL) students, including new empirical research conducted in Arizona. It also reviews court decisions regarding students' rights to be integrated with their mainstream peers, and provides data on the increasing segregation of Arizona's Latino and…

Using a student's native language, either as a medium of instruction or as a scaffolding technique, has been used effectively in many classrooms throughout the U.S. In the past, many schools provided native language instruction to meet the needs of English Language Learners (ELLs). However, with the advent of antibilingual education proposals such…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children exposed to 2 languages would benefit from the phonotactic probability cues of a single language in the same way as monolingual peers and to determine whether crosslinguistic influence would be present in a fast-mapping task. Method: Two groups of typically developing children…

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments later this month from a class action Miriam Flores, 42-year-old Mexican-born homemaker, joined on behalf of her first child in 1996. The lawsuit, Flores v. State of Arizona, contends that programs for English-language learners in Nogales are deficient and receive inadequate funding from the state.…

This discussion emphasizes the importance of collaborative learning methods to compensate for the legal restrictions placed on school districts by Arizona's anti-bilingual education law, Proposition 203. Grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning, peerlingual education is described as an invaluable resource based on the linguistic…

This dissertation describes an ethnographic case study of an elementary school in a border city in Southern Arizona. Its purpose is to explore teachers' professional lives at Cactus Elementary School (CES; pseudonym) through classroom observations, interviews and informal conversations. The majority of the fieldwork was conducted in the 2004-2005…

Though much of the research looking at the issue of language in the Spanish heritage language field is intended to guide the Spanish heritage language teacher in the classroom, students' voices are often stifled. This article fills this gap by giving voice to students' opinions on language use in the Spanish heritage language classroom. Survey…

This study offers a small, highly contextualized counter-example to several recent large-scale analyses depicting Latino underachievement in higher education (R. Fry, 2002; J. Immerwahr, 2003; S. Miller & E. Garcia, 2004; W. Swail, A. Cabrera, & C. Lee, 2004; W. S. Swail, K. E. Redd, & L. W. Perna, 2003). The purpose is to analyze…

The main purpose of this study is to develop a Spanish language screening measure that (a) is valid and reliable for the purpose of identifying Spanish-speaking (SS) children at risk for Language Impairment (LI), (b) is valid and reliable across different Spanish dialects, different socioeconomic groups, and different ethnicities, (c) uses a…