The current emphasis on "teaching in the language of the child" has led to a demand for bilingual programs in Mexican-American communities. Ninety preschool children, assumed to be Spanish speaking, were referred to a summer program for amelioration of English language deficiency. Spanish and English versions of the Preschool Language…

This article presents a practical approach to assessing Spanish-English bilingualism in Mexican-American children entering school. The general aim of bilingual assessment is discussed. The approach to assessment includes a method of selecting subjects, the use of a sociolinguistic survey, and tests for measuring bilingual communicative competence.…

The purpose of this working paper is to review current literature on literacy programs for parents of English language learners (ELLs). The paper includes a summary of five literacy programs for ELL parents throughout the United States of America. Four of these were system-wide interventions affecting more than one school or classroom. Each…

This study investigated the relation of teacher characteristics, including ratings of teacher quality, to classroom instructional variables and to bilingual students' literacy and oral language outcomes at the end of the kindergarten year. Teacher characteristics included observational measures of oral language proficiency, quality, and classroom…

The phenomenon of limited bilingual language proficiency is reported to have negative academic and/or cognitive consequences, especially among Mexican-American minority language students. Where such students have been diagnosed, fears of concomitant congitive retardation are also expressed. Research was undertaken to understand the phenomenon…

Emerging issues and recent literature associated with language and curriculum development for exceptional bilingual students are discussed. Studies are cited which document student gains in achievement as a result of native language, English-as-a-second-language, or bilingual education strategies with handicapped limited-English-proficient (LEP)…

Research indicates that Hispanic technical students exhibit patterns of performance in problem solving tasks that are clearly distinct from those exhibited by Anglo students. This may be because problem solvers working problems in a nonnative language are in more danger of misinterpreting problems due to sentence construction, jargon, etc., than…

A list of nine completed investigations and two progress reports of incomplete investigations makes up this annual research report. One incomplete project is concerned with bilingual instruction and other compensatory education programs for Mexican-American children in the southwest. The objective of the other incomplete project is to examine…

Spanish and English versions of a 38-item grammar test were administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels K, 1, 3, and 5 (10 subjects per grade) in a bilingual education program. The test was a revision of part of an earlier test for oral proficiency in Spanish and English. The reliability of the new test was…

Presents the instructional episodes engaged in by bilingual first graders. Findings indicate that peer instruction occurred frequently and that proficiency in English was not a determining factor in the language choices made by individual students. (Author/CB)

This paper examines the language dominance and oral bilingual proficiency of Tarahumara-Spanish speaking students from Chihuahua, Mexico, within the framework of Cummins' model of bilingual proficiency development. Cummins' model distinguishes between basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency…

Describes the author's efforts to use the ideas of the psychologist Vygotsky to build on the home language skills of young bilingual children in England and to turn communication breakdowns into learning opportunities. Talking to children about the forms of speech and their roles in communication can accelerate conceptual development. (SLD)

This study examined the receptive vocabulary of 102 first-, third-, and sixth-grade Spanish/English bilingual students of Hispanic origin. It found that, although students in all three grade levels functioned comparably well on the Spanish instruments, performance on the English instruments increased with grade level. (41 references) (MDM)

Among 42 second-generation Japanese-Canadian young adults who had attended Toronto secondary schools and a Japanese language Saturday school, Japanese oral and reading skills were related to each other and to ethnolinguistic identity and beliefs and interpersonal relationships with Japanese speakers. Japanese reading scores positively predicted…

A new measure of reading comprehension, the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension (DARC), designed to reflect central comprehension processes while minimizing decoding and language demands, was pilot tested. We conducted three pilot studies to assess the DARC's feasibility, reliability, comparability across Spanish and English,…