One of the challenges of teaching a foreign language in non-immersive contexts, is extending the exposure of learners to the target language, beyond school hours. Since it is quite common to find linguistic and cultural exponents of foreign languages, in authentic contexts (i.e., the "Linguistic Landscape"), those exponents may serve as…

The present study was undertaken to find ways to help bilingual preservice teachers become more aware of diversity and more questioning of methods for literacy development in order to address issues of critical literacy. Twenty-five bilingual preservice teachers, enrolled in a Spanish Reading Methods at the university tutored 25 kindergarten…

The standard treatment of object pronouns in Latin American Spanish assigns a direct-object function to "lo" and "la" and an indirect-object function to "le." This study challenges this descriptive attribution in light of the contradictory and refractory evidence in Spanish morphosyntax. It is suggested that more…

This paper discusses research on the English of Mexican Americans, arguing that in focusing primarily on description of vernacular Chicano English, the literature describing English spoken by Mexican Americans presents an incomplete picture of the complexity of their linguistic situation. Researchers may lose sight of the range of linguistic…

A study was undertaken to gather attitudes of Spanish-speakers toward specific types of Chicano Spanish dialect lexical items. Reactions were randomly taken from 11 Latin American students who attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale during the 1975 spring semester; 20 Mexican residents of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, who attended English as…

The role and use of Spanish in the geographic areas outside of the U.S. Southwest are examined in a collection of 16 conference papers. The papers address the general topics of language contact, linguistic variation, sociolinguistic factors, and language maintenance policy, and planning. Among the specific issues discussed are: a dialectology of…

"Subtractive" bilingualism in Northern Belize is analyzed based on an extension of a model by Wallace Lambert. The impact of English language instruction on Spanish speaking children in Corozal Town, the northernmost urban center in the British colony of Belize, Central America, is described. This description extends an earlier account…

This paper reports on a preliminary quantitative study of syntactic constraints on code-switching within discourses in which no change in participants, setting or topic is evident. The goals of the study are to provide a syntactic description of the points at which switches from Spanish to English and English to Spanish are possible and to assess…

This is a study of tense variation in "si"-clauses in Buenos Aires Spanish which basically consists of the substitution of the conditional for the imperfect subjunctive. The highest frequency of imperfect subjunctive shows up in +Contrary examples, while the conditional substitutes much more often in -Contrary examples. When the…

Moroleon, Guanajuato (Mexico), is an industrial city on the Mexican Plateau. People from the surrounding hamlets known as rancherias frequently seek employment in the city. However, many men with low levels of education travel to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, to work on mushroom farms. A study explored the use of English in these two communities.…

This study analyzes how two bilingual classroom language distribution approaches affect classroom language use patterns. The two strategies, separate instruction in the two languages vs. the new concurrent language usage approach (NCA) allowing use of both languages with strict guidelines for language alternation, are observed on videotapes of a…

This study worked to develop the sociolinguistic competence of college learners of first-year Spanish using input enhancement techniques that required learners to actively view video. Research shows that native speakers are more sensitive to sociolinguistic errors than to grammatical errors made by nonnative speakers. Therefore, the study…

The social, economic, political and cultural changes brought about by the Cuban Revolution have elicited linguistic changes. Although the Revolution is only fifteen years old, these changes have reached the morphological and semantic components of the language. This paper explains the Russian influence and discusses and classifies…

The practice of "chismeando" (gossiping, in Spanish) is examined as it is defined and engaged in by a group of women from the Dominican Republic. It is argued that the stories told in chismeando are repositories of sociocultural knowledge. Women's participation in the practice provides the women with a framework for understanding and…

This study examines one aspect of sociolinguistics: social cues affecting the choice of language in the speech of children bilingual in Spanish and English. The study is based on data collected from the speech of two children, from birth to age nine in the first case and from birth to five in the second. Analysis focussed on the identification of…