An experiment is described that is designed to test for the operation of an input switch mechanism in bilinguals. Their ability to selectively avoid processing words presented in one of their languages while they are attending to words presented in their other language is described. The 20 subjects were all French-English bilinguals. The specific…

Spanish-English bilingual and monolingual English children aged 3-5 years were recorded in interaction with their mothers. Bilingual children were recorded twice each month, once in Spanish and once in English, and were also observed in a home situation. An analysis of the recorded language was done using selected morphological and syntactic…

Explores several models of cognitive and structural perspectives involving minority-language situations, and attempts to integrate them into a framework of predictive propositions that elaborate psychosocial climates of maintenance, majority-minority encounter, and interactive strategies. (65 references) (Author/CB)

This study attempts to determine factors which would predict Spanish ability in experienced bilingual teachers in order to plan language development lessons for prospective bilingual teachers. A review of literature on personality, social, and psychological factors in learning a foreign language suggests that there may be some correlation between…

This study investigated the degree to which Portuguese students (n=100) educated in France switched or mixed languages in a written essay. Subjects were told to express themselves liberally in either or both languages. A linguistic history was also taken for each student. The measures were administered in a French-language school, and instructions…

This is an in-process report on over 100 English-as-a-Foreign-Language argumentative compositions written by Spanish university students in first and fourth year philology. The project aim was to compare writing development over 4 years in a cross-sectional design. As data were collected, factors other than developmental stages began to appear,…

A contrastive analysis (CA) does not require commitment to directionality. Even asymmetrical interlingual correspondence can be handled by adirectional statements. If well executed, a CA is capable of handling three pairs of L2 learning phenomena: (1) going from language A to language B and vice versa; (2) productive and receptive command; and (3)…

Two case studies of language use in bilingual classrooms are presented. The first case study focuses on the functions of the teacher's speech in a twelfth grade civics class. One 50-minute lesson was recorded and transcribed. The two classroom languages, English and Spanish, were coded according to their use for information, elicitation,…

This paper describes an instrument used to assess the receptive language of children. The bilingual child is tested first in the non-dominant language. When the ceiling is reached in the non-dominant language, the tester switches to the dominant language. (The ideal situation would be to give the test in one language one day, then repeat the test…

This study explores the relationship between different home and school variables and reading achievement in bilingual children. The subjects of the study are 130 first- and third-grade children attending bilingual programs. Language proficiency and dominance tests were administered to the children and a questionnaire was sent to their parents. The…

This paper examines the schooling achievement of children from bilingual homes and compares them to comparable samples of children from monolingual homes. Extensive follow-up data were gathered in 1985 on a sample of approximately 4,000 high school seniors who entered kindergarten in 1973 as part of a Kindergarten Reading Follow-up (KRF) program.…

This study was undertaken to examine the suspicion that a young Greek girl in the short time span of two years had become more fluent in a second language (English) than in her native tongue. To provide a basis of comparison the tests used in this study were also given to the child's older brother who had been in the United States for…

Hypothesizes that the relationship between L1 and L2 writing is not one of interference, but rather application of L1 to L2 writing. Includes writing samples of first-, second-, and third-grade students enrolled in a bilingual program. (EKN)

This study investigated how Finnish-Swedish bilingual 10-year-olds (n=26) produce self-repairs in a narrative discourse, in comparison with monolingual agemates (n=10), in three respects: (1) types of repair; (2) number of repairs; and (3) the structural organization of repair. Altogether, 36 Finnish and 36 Swedish narratives were examined. The…

Three objectives of research reported here were to describe the neural organization underlying language usage and language loss, to study activities occurring in both cerebral hemispheres, and to study neural changes related to changes in syntactic complexity of stimuli. A dichoptic procedure was chosen. A subject faced a viewing screen on which…