Describes a comparative study of interrogative words in Spanish and English, which resulted in a series of hypotheses about the way Spanish speakers convey the interrogative how plus adjective or adverb. To test the hypotheses, surveys were conducted with native Spanish speakers. Surveys and results are discussed. (AMH)

A study determining that a single test incorporating several special features can adequately place and evaluate native speakers and nonnative learners of Spanish is described. The description of native speaker proficiency is also refined. (MSE)

From 1998-2001, students in Spanish classes at the University of Texas San Antonio competed surveys regarding how they defined their language skills and how they felt about special courses. A total of 642 students, of whom 482 were Hispanic, completed surveys. Overall, 70 percent of the students thought that if heritage courses were offered, they…

Four groups of respondents comment on and evaluate oral communication of university level students. Implications of results are that students must feel desire to communicate; teacher must seem interested, not critical; teacher must deal openly with cultural sensitivities; lexical items should be dealt with in context; and objectives in classroom…

Investigates the self-reported reading habits and levels of ability in reading of ten heritage speakers of Spanish enrolled in Spanish classes at Purdue University. Results warrant more explicit focus on form instruction and activation of background knowledge for heritage speakers. (Author/VWL)

Offers an alternative to the two approaches to teaching Spanish to adolescent and college-level bilingual native speakers interested in developing their Spanish abilities. This theory draws heavily from Freire's problem-posing procedure for critical dialogue and Vygotsky's theory of social learning. (28 references) (Author/VWL)

Provides a description of the Nuevos Destinos CD-ROM, a joint production for students learning Spanish at the advanced-beginning, intermediate-low, or native-speaker level. Nuevos Destinos involves students in meaningful ways by asking them to solve real-world problems encountered in law offices. (Author/VWL)

This study investigates typological distance and order of acquisition (i.e., the order in which languages were acquired) in the context in which Spanish-English bilingual students, whose first language is English or Spanish, are learning Portuguese as a third language (L3). Participants were asked to think aloud as they worked on pedagogical tasks…

This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activation model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more…

The influence of syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of known words on the acquisition of the English stress system was investigated in ten native Thai speakers. All participants were adult learners of English with an average length of residence in the US of 1.4 years. They were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on…

A study investigated the correct syllabification of intervocalic /tl/ consonant clusters in Spanish dialects that lack word-initial /tl/, using data from Peruvian Spanish. The study attempted to discover native speaker preference through the playing of a popular game involving, in part, dividing a word into syllables. Words containing the /tl/…

To determine the normal sequence of the development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish speakers, ages 2-5, a study of the acquisition of interrogative formation was undertaken. Two male and two females from each of nine age intervals between two and five were selected as informants; all were…

Native Spanish speakers learning English as a second language, asked to mimic an American speaking Spanish with an American accent, displayed a tacit awareness of English-Spanish sound distinctions and, in particular, allophonic differences. (Author/CB)

Describes Spanish practicum course at Lewis and Clark College in which students of Spanish act as English tutors for Spanish-speaking individuals on campus and in the community. Students benefit culturally and linguistically and Spanish curriculum is enhanced. (Author/BK)

Cross-linguistic investigation of the importance of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in French and Spanish four through six-year-olds' sentence comprehension revealed that topological cues helped French subjects most, while local cues helped Spanish subjects most. (Author/CB)