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…

A study is reported in which 14 bilingually schooled and 16 conventionally schooled Mexican-American children and their parents were subjects of research over a two-year period. The bilingual program students were found to be using Spanish more after several years and continued this pattern over time. (Author/RM)

The causes and effects of resistance to the acknowledgement and appreciation of the language skills and characteristics of United States Southwest bilinguals can be seen in both the Hispanic and Anglo communities. The cultural inferiority ideology of Americans to Mexicans is a historical cause of this resistance, and it is reflected in the…

Problems encountered in the teaching of Spanish to bilingual Spanish-speaking students are discussed. The implications of teaching the standard dialect of Spanish are considered, and a normative approach to language instruction is compared to a comprehensive language development program. (CLK)

The definitions of and differences between language acquisition and learning in early reading are discussed. Preschool children who are bilingual can learn to read Spanish more easily than English; early and bilingual reading would be a great educational benefit. (CHK)

A survey of 64 University of New Mexico undergraduates examined their attitudes toward the different varieties of Spanish and the use of Spanish. (HP)

An evaluation study indicated that teachers differentiated standard American English from three marked varieties, with Hispanicized English rated more favorably than ungrammatical English and code switching. Four varieties of Spanish were differentiated on standard language continuum, with code switching the least acceptable. (CB)

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)

Describes a study intended to determine whether providing special reading time with a wide variety of reading materials in Spanish affects the reading abilities, reading attitudes, and academic self-concept of Hispanic high school students. US-born Hispanics rarely made use of the materials, but recent Hispanic immigrants used them extensively.…

Dual immersion classrooms combine students who speak a non-English language (in this case Spanish) with English speaking students learning the native language of the nonnative English speaking students. This case study recorded the output of Spanish first language (L1) and second language (L2) fifth graders over 5 months of Spanish language…

Describes how one college professor at California State University Monterey Bay changed her pedagogy in an English composition class to draw upon her Spanish speaking students' assets. This effort created an innovative model for second language acquisition in the English language writing classroom that combines student research of local…

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)

Study used 103 bilingual college freshmen to evaluate psychometric characteristics of the Personality Inventory for Youth (PIY) translated into Spanish. Scales and subscales of the Spanish PIY demonstrated internal consistency and temporal stability comparable to English counterparts, and multivariate analysis did not identify a language effect…

Compares the types of metacognitive reading strategies and comprehension problems that four Mexican-American, fourth-grade bilingual students demonstrated while reading expository and narrative texts in English and Spanish. Finds students successfully using code-mixing, code-switching, and paraphrased translating to enhance their comprehension.…

Attempts to measure phonological acquisition have largely focused on segments, with less effort made to examine whole-word productions. This article proposes four measures designed to estimate a child's whole-word abilities: 1. the "phonological mean length of utterance", a measure of whole-word complexity for both child and target words, 2. the…