Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States (U.S. Census, 2014), yet this term comprises individuals from multiple ethnicities who speak distinct varieties of Spanish. We investigated whether Spanish-English bilingual children (N = 140, ages 4-17) use Spanish varieties in their social judgments. The findings revealed that children…

Purpose: Narratives have been a useful tool for evaluating language skills in young bilingual children. This study extends that work to bilingual adolescents by (a) describing their narrative skills and (b) evaluating the role of current language experience on measures of narrative micro- and macrostructure across Spanish and English. Method:…

The preparation of bilingual prospective teachers (BPTs) in mathematics encompasses a challenge because many U.S.-born BPTs had limited opportunities to learn mathematics in their native language, in this case, Spanish. Consequently, BPTs feel ill-prepared to teach mathematics bilingually. This study describes the experiences of seven Latinx BPTs…

The Mexican Nation State has been created upon the Doctrine of Mestizaje which includes one single language, Spanish, and one single identity, the mestizo. This doctrine hides social practices of discrimination (Gómez Izquierdo, 2008). Although multiculturalism in Mexico recognizes diversity and difference, it still perceives them as problems to…

Literacy practices have changed over the past several years to incorporate modes of representation much broader than language alone, in which the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, etc. This book focuses on research and instructional practices necessary for integrating an expanded view of literacy in the classroom that…

Dyadic teacher-student interactions represent a potentially valuable opportunity for adolescent emergent bilingual students to access academic knowledge, develop language proficiency, and acquire literacy skills in secondary school contexts. But to what extent are these conversations actually an affordance for students? Drawing upon insights in…

Present conceptualizations and measures of self-esteem do not account for linguistic self-esteem, an aspect of the self specifically relevant for bilingual students. This study examines the utility of a newly developed measure of linguistic self-esteem. This novel measure is compared with a commonly used self-esteem measure, two standardized…

The Latino/a population of the United States continues to increase dramatically; consequently, educators face the challenge of how best to provide educational services for those whose primary language is Spanish. The purpose of this study was to examine student discourse between bilingual students in gifted programs and bilingual students in the…

This study examined discourse markers (DM) in Spanish that distinguished themselves by their frequency of use in dyadic interaction among young bilingual speakers in Sweden. It also established the distribution of DM in conversation. The DM were classified as initial markers (IM), corpus markers (CM), and terminal markers (TM). The study involved…

The Problem Oriented Screening Inventory for Teenagers (POSIT) was analyzed in a Hispanic majority school district to determine the test/retest correlation of the English and Spanish versions of the instrument. Data analysis indicated fairly weak agreement between the English and Spanish POSIT version results for this sample of bilingual…

Twelve teenagers of Puerto Rican origin were interviewed to determine their proficiency in speaking and understanding Spanish. Three levels of oral Spanish proficiency were established as reference points on a continuum by using self-ratings, peer-ratings, and self-reports of usage. These impressions were verified by the number and type of errors…

The goal of this study is to describe the sociolinguistic situation of a small group of bilingual Chicano adolescents residing in a California border town. This report is the first stage in a research project into the social dimensions of language use within the Chicano speech community, and the first phase of a cumulative research strategy in…

With a multicultural approach to education, picture books and story books which provide children with their first experience in art and literature must be selected with consideration of the needs of the individual child, and of the culture he or she belongs to. This paper provides a list of criteria that children's literature should adhere to,…

This book proposes that children from non-English speaking families who are selected to serve as family interpreters perform at remarkably high levels when compared with others of their age, experience, and environment, and should be included in the federal definition of giftedness. The book reports on a research project carried out with young…

As society becomes increasingly diverse, the issue about language used for assessments becomes critical. Research suggests that completing measures in a language other than one's native language may result in inaccurate scores. The Children's Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1997), a scale assessing dispositional hope in children ages 8 to 16, was…