English teachers together with multilingual and multidialect students can create new standards for language use and learning in the classroom. A teacher of writing and ethnic studies finds herself telling her students "I still have time to learn Spanish." Many to whom she speaks these words are native speakers of Spanish, struggling in classroom…

The Spanish commerce course at Douglass College and the development of the Certificate and Diploma from Madrid option are described. Spanish commerce is offered to students who have a good knowledge of written and spoken Spanish. Students select a business around which their course assignments will revolve. The course covers business practices in…

Awareness of a new and altered method of teaching literature, similar to that described by Adrienne Rich, grew from the experience of teaching a small introductory course in twentieth century Hispanic women writers to students with diverse language, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Although about half the students were native Spanish speakers,…

Bull (1965) has proposed that grammatical gender in Spanish is not an intrinsic characteristic of nouns but rather a matter of matching terminal sounds of nouns with those of adjectives and determiners. One implication of this theory is that the child has a cognitive understanding of the matching of terminal noun sounds with particular adjective…

Bilingual education, the objective of which is to render bilingual a group of monolingual or quasi-monolingual speakers, is distinguished from the "education of bilinguals," whose goal it is to teach the content of school subjects through the medium of two rather than one language. The present paper establishes this distinction and justifies the…

A case study of the use of reflexive constructions by a Spanish-speaking child from age 2;5.2 to 3;5.2 is presented. Sixty hours of audiotaped utterances were recorded monthly over a one year period. The utterances are analyzed in terms of self-induced actions, impersonal constructions, and two-argument predicates. The data show the regular…

Nontraditional Hispanic students, though often pedagogically problematic in other ways, possess language resources that should not be overlooked and that ought to provide a model for other language learners. The paper illustrates: (1) the resources needed for foreign language capacity that exist in non-English-speaking sectors of U.S. society; (2)…

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…

The late fifties and early sixties were periods of great strides for blacks in America. At the same time, Hispanics, American Indians, women, the aged, and the physically and mentally handicapped came forth to meet the challenge of discrimination. This challenge will continue to face the United States. The argument that Americans need time to…

The internalized grammar of the bilingual is different from that of a monolingual. The bilingual has, in addition to the entries that are proper to each of the two languages he speaks, certain union entries. These are extensive in the case of the Spanish/English bilingual since there are many items in the two languages that manifest systematic…

Millions of people of African descent in Spanish-speaking countries are commonly omitted from the cultural, literary, and linguistic content of Spanish classes. Afro-Spanish literature can be integrated into the Spanish curriculum from the first year. This literature is not easily defined, but does reflect and aid in understanding the black…

The conference papers presented here are grouped under the six topics around which the conference was organized. The section on program goals and models for bilingual education contains papers by Joshua Fishman, Salomon Nahmad, John C. Molina, Alberto Escobar, G. Kent Gooderham, and Dillon Platero. The section on teaching the second language…

The occurrence of misleading cognates in the English compositions of students whose first language is Spanish can lead to a significant failure of communication between non-Spanish-speaking teachers and their students. Such a failure can produce attitudinal changes in both teacher and student that are potentially destructive to the learning…

The investigation described in this paper was concerned with language alternation (code-switching) in the speech of Chicano migrant workers in Florida. In order to study Chicano bilingualsim, three principal sources were utilized: (1) a revised version of Wolck's sociolinguistic background questionnaire; (2) pictorial questionnaires such as…

The linguistic role of the right hemisphere in bilingual language processing was examined. Ten right-handed Spanish-English bilinguals were tachistoscopically presented with mixed lists of Spanish and English words to either the right or left visual field and asked to identify the language and the word presented. Five of the subjects identified…