Purpose: Emergent bilinguals (EBs) from Spanish-speaking households are a sizable and quickly growing segment of the preschool population in the United States. However, there is limited research on the provision of opportunities for EBs to engage in language-rich classroom discussion, particularly in English-dominant contexts where most EBs attend…

This qualitative study examined how specific instructional supports intended to scaffold emergent bilinguals' oral production of explanations facilitated or constrained students' attempts to explain. Findings demonstrate that explanations were very rarely produced, and when they were produced, the explanations were not particularly informative.…

Immigrant students and their families sometimes experience conflict or alienation in U.S. schools owing to differences between the collectivistic values of home (focused on the well-being of the family and group) and the individualistic values of schools (focused on the well-being of individuals) that drive instructional practices and school…

This article examines the culminating activity--"la cosecha" or the harvest--in a yearlong project in which teachers at a bilingual afterschool program and staff from a citywide environmental advocacy group taught students to plant, harvest, and sell produce grown at the school site. The authors show how students are socialized to become…

Achievement motivation is something that all members of the school community want to support in students, however few may recognize that it is influenced by culture. The very meaning of "achievement" is culturally variable, and the motives that students have for achieving may be quite different, depending upon their cultural background.…

In this study, we explore language--specifically the use of Spanish, in a sixth-grade science classroom, where the district recognises English as the official language of instruction. The question guiding our analysis is: How is Spanish positioned in Ms. Cook's science class? Transcribed interaction from twelve weeks of videotaping is coded and…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs 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…

The workbook is designed to accompany a textbook, "The Story of California," a Spanish-English bilingual history and geography of the state intended for classroom use by limited-English-proficient, native Spanish-speaking students in California's urban middle schools. The teacher's edition, presented here, consists of reproductions of 51…

The guide to the use of computers and video recordings in foreign language instruction was designed to assist California teachers in implementing and extending the foreign language component of the statewide curriculum. It contains: (1) an introduction on the use of the guide; (2) background on its development; (3) lists of high quality software…

The training manual is designed to accompany "The Story of California," a set of bilingual instructional materials for limited-English-proficient, native Spanish-speaking students in urban middle schools intended to ease their transition into comfortable use of English while maintaining Spanish language skills. The manual is to be used…

The report describes a federally funded project for the development of an innovative approach to bilingual curriculum and instruction and inservice teacher training. A needs assessment and research process resulted in development and field testing of a set of bilingual Spanish-English instructional materials for limited-English-speaking urban…

These 12 issues of the journal include articles on such topics as the following: classical languages; early literacy; ancient languages; study abroad; teacher training; dialects; computer uses in education; classroom techniques; illustrated dictionaries for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students; communication through poetry; bilingual…