Two-way immersion (TWI) programs in the U.S. integrate learners with different home languages and varied proficiencies in Spanish and English. Although both English home language (EHL) and Spanish home language (SHL) TWI students succeed academically in English, they often experience incomplete acquisition (Montrul 2011. "Morphological Errors…

Background: Language sampling, recognized as a gold standard for expressive language assessment, is often elicited using wordless picture storybooks. A series of wordless storybooks, commonly referred to as "Frog" stories, have been frequently used in language-based research with children from around the globe. Aims: To examine the…

This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [ß? ð? ??] surface postvocalically,…

This study investigates the degree to which native-English-speaking learners of Spanish can generate expectations for information likely to occur in upcoming portions of an unfolding linguistic signal. We examine Spanish clitic left dislocation, a long-distance dependency between a topicalized object and an agreeing clitic, whose felicity depends…

In this article, we offer information about the specific challenges US Latino immigrant children face. We then determine which of these challenges are included in 72 award winning children's picture books, specifically created for and/or about Latino children. Our analysis offers information to assist school-based mental health professionals,…

Researchers have argued for an orientation to language as a resource that values bilingualism in mathematics classrooms. However, little is known about what mathematics teachers can do to translate a language-as-resource orientation into productive classroom practice. In this study, I analyze video data from two language immersion classrooms to…

A pervasive question in second language (L2) research is whether L2 learners can acquire parameterized functional features that are not instantiated in their first language (L1). While some researchers have argued for a representational deficit (e.g., Clahsen & Muysken, 1989; Hawkins & Chan, 1997), claiming that L2 learners' competence is…

The dominant discourse on midwifery has been characterized by myths that have been constructed and perpetuated through oral and written discourse. The purpose of this research is to engage in a critical analysis of that discourse, with special focus on Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Francophone contexts in the Caribbean from colonial times to the…

The purpose of this evaluation was to assess the impact of the Houston Independent School District's (HISD) Read Houston Read (RHR) on the reading levels of first-grade students. Students were assessed using Benchmark Reading Record (BRR) that was aligned to leveled books and Fountas and Pinnell Reading Levels. Descriptive statistics were used to…

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish-English speaking children's sentence repetition and…

Three source-memory experiments were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers matched on age, education, nonverbal cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. Bilingual language proficiency and dominance were assessed using standardized objective measures. In Experiment 1, source was manipulated visuo-spatially,…

Word segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1 because many, though not all, cues to signal word boundaries appear to be largely language-specific. Native English listeners use short-lag versus long-lag VOTs in segmenting pairs such as "Lou spills" versus "loose pills." Polish contrasts negative versus short-lag VOTs, so…

This qualitative case study draws on a theoretical framework of translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) and border pedagogies (Cashman, 2015) and seeks to shed light on the question of what role translanguaging can play in students' language learning in a German as a foreign language class at a Hispanic-serving university that is situated in the…

The 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) involved 57 countries and 43 different languages to assess students' achievement in mathematics and science. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether items and test scores are affected as the differences between language families and cultures increase. Using…