Details some of the issues regarding the publication and distribution of Spanish language children's books in the United States. Discusses books selected for translation, quality of translations, Spanish language books from outside the United States, and Spanish language books from the United States. Challenges educators to work toward improving…

Approximately 90 books, published between 1946 and 1969, related to Spanish-speaking people and their culture, are presented in this annotated bibliography. It is intended as a guide for schools wishing to develop literature selections depicting the culture and history of Spanish-speaking people at the elementary level. Books written in both…

Current literature in the field of foreign language describes the benefits and challenges of elementary foreign language programs that meet several days a week over the course of a year, however little is known about elementary school foreign language programs that provide daily instruction within limited time frames of several weeks during the…

This teacher resource book describes the Spanish-Mexican contribution to the cattle industry, rodeo, and cowboy culture. It provides background material, resources, and activities for developing a bilingual-bicultural education course for primary, intermediate, and upper grades. The first three sections discuss the cattle industry, American rodeo,…

The Bilingual Mini School focused on educational services of a bilingual nature for students in kindergarten through grade six. At the kindergarten, first and second grade levels all classes were comprised of Spanish-dominant or bilingual students. At grades three, four and five the students were grouped based on language dominance (Spanish or…

This study examined effects of intrasyllabic units on lexical decision performance in 15 normal reading (NR) children and 15 children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography (Spanish). Findings suggest that Spanish children with RD do not use correspondences based on higher level units (onsets and rimes) in visual word…

The purpose of this research was to ascertain if the reading comprehension skills of English-speaking fifth grade students improve when they study a second language. The research was done in an inner-city elementary school in Rochester, New York. The researcher provided a weekly after-school workshop in foreign languages for a group of children…

Essentially an antipoverty measure, the Bilingual Education Act, which is supporting 76 bilingual programs in public elementary schools, comes far from meeting the needs of any significant proportion of the disadvantaged children whose language is other than English. One of the various federal and regional organizations striving to ameliorate…

Discusses approaches to teaching reading skills in Spanish to native Spanish speaking children before transfer to reading skills in English. (BK)

Since most children like to sing, singing Spanish songs is a learning experience that will be remembered. For Spanish speaking children, singing Spanish songs will build their self esteem and create a more comfortable environment. Children who do not speak Spanish will obtain a good feeling for the beauty of the language and will enjoy learning…

This study compared Spanish and English reading skill with concept usage and was directed at predicting oral reading level. A total of 144 bilingual migrant children, aged seven through twelve years, from six summer programs in Colorado were administered the Test of Concept Utilization (TCU) and the Silvaroli Informal Reading Inventory in both…

This qualitative study in an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) elementary classroom examined teacher and student functional uses of language, particularly code-switching and code-mixing use. Results found that, of the instances of code-switching and code-mixing observed, none were grammatically inappropriate for either English, Spanish, or the…

Forty Spanish-speaking children with reading disability (RD) were matched for age and reading level with normal readers. Since RD children performed more poorly than younger normal readers on a word/nonword naming task in orthographically transparent Spanish, results suggest their poor phonological skills were due to a deficit in phonological…

A questionnaire was administered to 50 first-grade teachers who reported strategies used in teaching reading to 1,145 Mexican-American, Black, and Anglo children in three school districts in Texas. Seven null hypotheses were tested. It was concluded that (1) reading instruction is delayed with Mexican-American children; (2) on the average, 68% of…