Two studies on the phonology of Spanish spoken by Cubans in the United States are critically analyzed. The studies are: "Markedness and a Cuban Dialect of Spanish," by Jorge M. Guitart, and "Some Theoretical Implications from Rapid Speech Phenomena in Miami-Cuban Spanish," by Robert M. Hammond. The methodologies of Hammond and Guitart are…

A study analyzed patterns in one speech act, that of refusal, in 60 native English speakers (responding in English only) and 120 native Spanish speakers (60 responding in English and 60 in Spanish). Native English speakers were college students in the United States and Spanish speakers were students in Spain. A questionnaire was used to elicit…

A study of the relationship between Spanish and English writing proficiency had as subjects 344 native Spanish-speaking college freshmen, students of English as a second language (ESL), in five universities in Puerto Rico. A questionnaire and four writing tasks in English and Spanish were administered in ESL class, and student scores on…

Bilingual business education is increasing in importance in response to the growing Spanish speaking population, bilingual student population, and need for bilingual employees. The continued immigration from Mexico and growth in the number of unskilled Spanish speaking workers will lead to an increased need for bilingual supervisors and managers.…

The linguistic interactions in the speech of bilingual children is systematically examined to determine their ability to differentiate between their two language systems. The speech samples of eighteen bilingual (Spanish-English) children aged two to six were examined for instances of deviation from the norms of the language of utterance due to…

Is it possible to translate an existing test from the source language to a target language and then to empirically link the translated test to the source language standard? Some tests are amenable to translation of their content and some are not. Within tests, some items may be translatable and others may not. Some items may measure meaningful…

A study of transfer of native language training and/or interference in learning English idioms had as its subjects 12 Venezuelan students in an American university who were advanced learners of English as a second language. Fifteen equivalent and commonly used English and Spanish idioms were used in tests of recognition, comprehension, recall, and…

A study compared the reading strategies in Spanish of three third-graders: two monolingual Spanish-speakers and one bilingual English-Spanish speaker. The Miscue Analysis Inventory was used for data analysis. Results indicated that the three readers performed below the proficient reader level, and their miscues followed similar patterns. The main…

Seventeen Spanish-speaking children received mathematics instruction in either Spanish or English. Numeric concepts were chosen as the content area so that the results could be understood non-verbally at the outset, the teachers ranked the children's abilities in English and math, and no significant difference between groups was found. However,…

Analysis of the interaction of the grammatical and copulative aspects of the Spanish verbs "era,""estaba,""fue," and "estuvo" revealed that for most of the data obtained, copulative and grammatical aspect operate independently, with syntactic-semantic constraints selecting one copula and grammatical aspect…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Total Physical Response by Storytelling and the traditional teaching method on a foreign language in a selected high school. The sample consisted of 30 students who were randomly selected and randomly assigned to experimental and control group. The experimental group was taught using Total…

One teacher's experience suggests that interpretive writing stemming from the reading and discussion of a literary work, in a second language, promotes development of higher-level cognitive skills. College students in an upper-division Spanish course in one institution are engaged in a writing process with three phases: preparatory; interpretive;…

A study investigated the changes in English and Spanish oral expression and comprehension skills of 18 male and 25 female Spanish-speaking Latino children attending a preschool that emphasized English language learning but supported maintenance of Spanish skills. For comparison purposes, the English skills of African American children (n=16 boys,…

A study was made of the effects of three types of preparation on the accuracy of prospective teachers in conducting an Informal Reading Inventory (IRI), with 73 undergraduate students exhibiting features of Spanish in oral reading in English: (1) the study of Spanish (two or more semesters), (2) training in conducting an IRI (provided in a…

The term "Regional Standard English" should refer to any kind of English spoken by educated individuals in a particular region. Vernacular is spoken by individuals with little education. Sociolinguistics as a field embraces ethnography of communication, social coding, societal analysis, social-psychological analysis and anthropoloty, all…