An important component of the teacher knowledge base is how aware a teacher is of language, including how it is acquired and best taught. Equally important are teacher beliefs about language or language ideologies. Because this combination of beliefs and awareness guides most pedagogical decisions, our study used explanatory sequential mixed…

SciMath-DLL is a preschool professional development (PD) model including STEM instructional offerings that aims to improve the quality of instruction for all children, including dual language learners (DLLs). The purpose of the PD model is to create practical and authentic STEM and DLL supports for early childhood educators, who are generally not…

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…

Discusses the author's experience as director of the Program in English as a Second Language (ESL) at Lehman College of the City University in the Bronx, New York. ESL, bilingual, and mainstream (ie., curricula that assume English proficiency) programs should be better coordinated to meet their common goal. (BJV)

An impact evaluation of the Spanish/English component of the federal Bilingual Education Program (BEP) was done by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) between 1974-76. The AIR evaluation took three years, cost $2 million, and examined many aspects of the BEP. This paper explores the influence of the AIR evaluation on the 1978…

The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (also know as Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) recognized that the educational needs of Limited English Proficient (LEP) students could not be met by traditional, English-only instruction. This legislation provided funding to state education agencies and local school districts to…

There is a great need for bilingual/bicultural education, especially for Spanish-speaking students, who now number approximately three million in United States elementary and secondary schools. One educational experience for such students has been the presentation of bilingual plays in several of the New York City schools. Beginning with a play in…

The paper describes a program developed for the children of migrant farmworkers, which uses bilingual adults from these same migrant families as the primary teaching staff. The curriculum used in the teaching of academic areas and oral language in Spanish and English is described, as well as specific adaptations that would be useful in teaching…

A total of 21 full-day structured classroom observations were conducted in six classes of the Austin Independent School District Bilingual Preschool Project (Texas) having a high incidence of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students. Each class consisted of 15 LEP students and 3 English-proficient students. It was anticipated that…

Searching for additional bilingual-crosscultural teachers, the California State University (CSU) system plans to combine teacher education and the CSU International Programs approach. Basic elements of this program are: (1) intensive study of Spanish and immersion in a Spanish-speaking milieu; (2) a living experience in the Mexican culture; (3) a…

The purpose of this study is to understand how teachers negotiate decisions about goals and instruction for language minority students and how these decisions play out in classroom interactions. Much of bilingual education research focuses on program evaluation and implementation and, consequently, overlooks the critical role teachers play in the…

An approach to designing diagnostic/prescriptive staff development programs for bilingual education, in which bilingual education is viewed as an innovation in the process of change, was explored. The aims were to: provide a method for defining bilingual programs in progress and determining the degree of implementation; determine teacher concerns;…

Objectives, organization, and teaching strategies for adult Spanish-English bilingual education programs are discussed. It is maintained that these programs exist on a continuum; the position of a particular program on the continuum will be determined by the learning needs of the students vis-a-vis English skills on the one hand and knowledge of…

The Michigan Oral Language program was installed in the Santa Paula School District for a 2-month tryout and student performance before and after the program was assessed through multiple matrix sampling. Student performance over seven content areas was determined for both the English and Spanish language components. In all seven content areas,…

Linguistic and cognitive assessment of children whose home language is not English involves a number of complex issues: minority labeling, the relationship between cognition and bilingualism, "normal" data on bilingual development, and monolingual versus bilingual environment for children experiencing delay. This paper concentrates on reviewing…