This book addresses the question of what tests are measures of. Intelligence, achievement, and personality tests not based on empirical investigation have questionable validity. Some researchers now suspect that almost all tests given to students in all subjects, as well as general tests of intelligence and personality, are essentially language…

Presented in this document are a selection of articles written by professional educators which offer insights into education as a social institution. In a section on educational issues, some of the subjects addressed include: curricula, integration, decentralization, staffing, school financing, bilingual education, test analyses, career education,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the language in a Spanish bilingual reading classroom; (2) the early stages of language acquisition of black children; (3) the dependency relation between oral…

This study describes certain communication strategies used by Anglophone children learning French as a second language as well as by children whose mother tongue is French. Three groups of children in the third and fifth grades participated in the study: French native speakers, Anglophone children learning French in an immersion setting, and…

This is a report on a survey of the heads of education units, faculty, and students in United States higher education institutions that prepare teachers. Questionnaires were sent to administrative officials of teacher education institutions, faculty of these institutions, and students. The size of the selected schools ranged from small colleges to…

After a critical examination of four assumptions of current procedures in language assessment, it is argued that the pragmatic domain of language ability should be the first to be assessed. A study designed to determine the usefulness of language variation (the number of different structures a child can produce or comprehend) as an alternative…

This volume on the language education of minority children is divided into three sections: (1) Multilingualism in the United States, (2) Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, and (3) Language Education in Practice. Following an introductory essay, "The Language Education of Minority Children," by Bernard Spolsky, the articles in the first section…

Data on language competence and language use were obtained for 99 Spanish/English bilingual elementary school children (kindergarten through fourth grade) from Albuquerque. The children's language skills were assessed by teachers, interviewers, and the children themselves. The teachers and the children also estimated the extent to which the…

In Serrano v. Priest, the California Supreme Court in 1971 initiated a modern era of elementary and secondary school finance reform. This paper first examines the present problems of urban school finance to ascertain why urban adjustments are necessary today in the new school finance formulas. All urban school finance adjustments in use at the…

This collection was prepared with the purpose of making National Education Association members more aware of the current issues and efforts in bilingual/ multicultural education. It consists of an introduction by Carmel E. Sandoval and the following chapters: (1) "Bilingual Education in Public Law 93-380," by the U.S. Office of Education, Region…

This paper outlines an Australian bilingual education program for aboriginal children, and describes the role of linguists in such programs. The program consists of four stages, roughly coinciding with the first four elementary grades. During the first stage, the child becomes literate in the vernacular, is exposed to beginning content material,…

Bilingual education is not entirely a new idea. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was practiced in church schools, particularly in German and Spanish. Most communities, however, assumed a strongly assimilationist stance for their public schools, especially after World War I. In recent years, however, this attitude has been partly reversed under…

In cooperative learning environments, small groups of students work together to accomplish specific pedagogical tasks, and teachers act as facilitators. One highly significant characteristic of cooperative learning that has received little consideration so far is the shift in the participation frame that takes place when students are left alone to…

While numerous studies on bilingual education have looked at student test scores, drop-out rates, and parental responses, this study looks at the attitudes of the students directly affected by bilingual education. Interviews with a representative sample of 132 elementary school students (grades 4-6) in El Paso, Texas were conducted for this study.…

This article draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of six Spanish-dominant English language learners, enrolled in both English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and Spanish Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) "pull-out" programs, in an English kindergarten classroom. The study is based on a theoretical framework that…