The interview techniques developed by Carol Chomsky were used in a comparative study of the language acquisition of 32 bilingual and monolingual third grade students. After these students were matched for age, socioeconomic status, IQ, family environment (both parents in the home), and reading ability, they were placed in four…

Children's understanding of fables and the degree to which knowledge used by the child to understand first language input is also used to understand second language input were studied. In addition, the way that such a relationship changes as the second language is acquired was examined. Students in Spanish-English bilingual programs in…

The purpose of this paper is to examine pertinent research concerned with teaching English as a second language (ESL) to speakers of Spanish, to analyze fundamental problems Spanish speakers may experience when taught to read and learn in the target language English, and to suggest practices for teachers of ESL to assist Spanish-English bilingual…

A framework for discussing the issues associated with language policy in the United States is offered, highlighting the history of the country's diverse language groups and language policies. It is proposed that language politics, and often the policies themselves, reflect the social relations between groups within a society. The history of…

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…

In comparing the written and oral English syntax of Mexican-American bilingual and Anglo-American monolingual students, this study sought to learn specifically whether these two groups of students represent the same speech population in English syntactic use. A total of 70 subjects were randomly selected for the four groups (bilingual and…

A study tested the hypothesis that the production of derivational (as contrasted with grammatical) morphemes is acquired through a systematic development of three distinct psychological processes: comprehension, segmentation, and production, regardless of whether the individual is a first- or second-language learner. The subjects were 32 children,…

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…

This paper examines the schooling achievement of children from bilingual homes and compares them to comparable samples of children from monolingual homes. Extensive follow-up data were gathered in 1985 on a sample of approximately 4,000 high school seniors who entered kindergarten in 1973 as part of a Kindergarten Reading Follow-up (KRF) program.…

An adaptation of a miscue taxonomy developed by G. A. Cziko was used to compare the reading performance of (1) monolingual English and bilingual third grade students reading in English, (2) monolingual Spanish and bilingual third grade students reading in Spanish, and (3) bilingual third grade students reading in both English and Spanish. Eight…

This study investigated how Finnish-Swedish bilingual 10-year-olds (n=26) produce self-repairs in a narrative discourse, in comparison with monolingual agemates (n=10), in three respects: (1) types of repair; (2) number of repairs; and (3) the structural organization of repair. Altogether, 36 Finnish and 36 Swedish narratives were examined. The…

To further investigate the relationship between divergent thinking and bilingualism, 23 Anglos and 108 Mexican Americans from a semi-rural West Texas community and 24 Mexican Americans from San Antonio, enrolled in the fourth grade, of low socioeconomic status, and with an average age of 10 years 6 months, were divided into 5 experimental groups,…

A study in two El Paso (Texas) elementary school two-way bilingual education programs investigated factors in learning through first and second language, analyzed teacher development in a context of complex change, and identified promising school structures for collaborative professional development for these teachers. Of the 24 participating…

A study examined the language use of two teachers, one a native, bilingual Cantonese-English speaker and the other a monolingual English-speaker, as they alternated teaching assignments between two first grade classes in a Chinese-English bilingual education program. Teacher-student interaction and the variation in teacher and student language use…

This paper analyzes spoken usage of English prepositions by two groups of Ontarian elementary students at the Grade 2 and Grade 5 levels. The first group (29 subjects) consists of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from Welland and Sudbury. The second group (8 subjects) is composed of monolingual English students from Toronto. Examination of the…