Tasks provide engaging ways to involve learners in meaningful, real-world activities with the foreign language (FL). Yet selecting classroom tasks suitable to learners' linguistic readiness is challenging, and task-based research is exploring the relationship between learners' overall abilities (e.g., reading, grammatical) and the complexity and…

Discusses resource material to help teachers locate children's books in Spanish. (NCR)

A successful bilingual English/Spanish program for Puerto Rican elementary school children in Rochester, New York, is described. The program placed particular emphasis on reading instruction. (CK)

Presents a model for preparing secondary school Spanish students for short-story reading comprehension. The model focuses primarily on eliciting students' personal responses to stories so that they will "invest" more into comprehending and appreciating the text. (CB)

A child's pre-school years may be the most active learning period; for children in a bicultural community, the home language is the best in which to begin reading study, and a teacher should endeavor to minimize cultural shock to maximize learning in the primary grades. (CK)

The development of two children who learned to read Spanish before age two is traced. Both children soon became bilingual in English and Spanish. The process of teaching them to read is described. (CHK)

Describes an adaptation of the Guided Reading Procedure which was used both to help bridge the gap between students' abilities in Spanish and the reading material contained in their content textbooks and to prepare them for taking the Advanced Placement Spanish Language Examination. (SED)

A Spanish course is described in which reading ability was gained as a preliminary to a conventional first-year language course. Through passive learning, recognition of vocabulary and grammatical structure was achieved, and correct pronunciation and writing drills reinforced learning. Good results were obtained in the subsequent conventional…

Parents are urged to provide a superior education for their preschool children by encouraging the development of the first language in the home and by teaching the young child to read in at least one of his languages before going to school. (PMJ)

The Spanish Native Language Arts program at Sarah J. Hale High School (New York) integrates the study of reading, writing, and vocabulary with the study of texts that present cultural, literary, and artistic achievements of Hispanic cultures. (CB)