This research addresses the types of assessment tasks, the assessment criteria, instruments and procedures of communicative competence used by primary school teachers in Andalusia. This multiple-case study drew on the experiences of teachers from four schools in the south of Spain. The data source has been the focus groups in which the teachers…

This research aims to examine Spanish-speaking students' attainment to improve our knowledge about students at the end of secondary school in England. The sample consisted of students who completed the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in inner London Local Authority. The findings of the analysis of GCSE results by language spoken…

Monolingual speakers of a national language continue to be the ideal figures on which national identities and senses of community are built. Yet this longstanding equation between nation and language is being contested by other ideologies. Alternatives are emerging from such disparate social locations as the European Union, now advocating for…

Guided by sociocultural theory and the theory of multiliteracies, learning is perceived as a shifting participation in practices, which is mediated by multiple physical and symbolic tools. Drawing on the situated multiliteracies approach, which integrates these two theories, the purpose of this ethnographic research is to examine the participation…

School districts that offer bilingual education often find it difficult to hire enough teachers for their growing Latino populations. To expand the pool of bilingual teachers, some districts recruit teachers from Spanish-speaking countries. Yet there has been little research on how these teachers fare or what supports they need to succeed. This…

The study explores the effectiveness of the implementation of blended teaching (BT) by combining the Spanish online resource "Aula Virtual de Espanol" (AVE) with the face-to-face (F2F) delivery approach in second language Spanish programs in two high schools in Alberta, Canada. Findings demonstrate the effectiveness of combining the…

Starting a mariachi band sounds like a good idea as the Hispanic student population increases in many urban schools. However, it's not that simple as Spanish-speaking children come not only from Mexico, where mariachi is popular, but from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Spain. The same is true for other ethnic groups. Different…

"The Story of California" is a history and geography of the state of California, intended for classroom use by limited-English-proficient, native Spanish-speaking students in California's urban middle schools. The book is designed with the left page in English and the right page in Spanish to facilitate student transition into…

This article contains a description of the Dual Proficiency (DP) program in an urban elementary school located in the heart of a large south-western city, as well as the teachers who designed and now implement DP, and the immigrant community participating by choice in DP. We write from a context where, ironically, the number of English language…

The workbook is designed to accompany a textbook, "The Story of California," a Spanish-English bilingual history and geography of the state intended for classroom use by limited-English-proficient, native Spanish-speaking students in California's urban middle schools. The teacher's edition, presented here, consists of reproductions of 51…

The Specialist Schools Initiative in England has urged schools to plan their teaching of foreign languages in relation to the linguistic needs and preferences of their local communities. The changing multilingual fabric of many parts of Britain make such a goal a potentially difficult and controversial process. This paper explores the views of a…

This paper examines racial composition in the Dominican Republic from the pre-Columbian period, conquest, and colonization to the formation of the Dominican nation. Even in the prehistoric era, the culture of the area that was to become the Dominican Republic was diverse, with a variety of dialects among the native peoples. With the arrival of the…

This paper reports the findings of a study that assessed the effect of two classwide instructional grouping adaptation strategies on the math performance of English-language Latino learners in an urban public school in the Southwestern United States. An ABAB within-case design was implemented over a 12-week period to contrast the effectiveness of…

These eight journals include articles on such topics as the following: adult literacy; incorporating song lyrics and music into the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classroom; using poetry with adult ESL learners; reading "Time" and "Newsweek" in ESL classrooms; teaching intuitively; teacher-created materials; New England…

A study investigated techniques and practices for teaching second languages (French, German, Spanish) in 25 urban schools in different areas of England. It was found that the overall quality of work in modern languages was very good in 1 school, good in 5, satisfactory in 7, less than satisfactory in 10, and poor in 2. Three of 10 lessons seen…