A number of issues related to the production of literacy materials for the Chicano children of New Mexico are discussed. First, a historical survey gives some idea of the way in which instructional materials available for use with Spanish-speaking children have contributed to cultural estrangement and alienation from their own particular home and…

Techniques for assessing test validity and reliability are applied to an analysis of an unpublished test, in order to familiarize test users in local bilingual programs with the technical evidence that should be available for instruments of potential use in placing limited English-speaking students. The instrument studied, the Language Assignment…

A Los Angeles bilingual elementary school was evaluated for the effectiveness of its dual reading program for bilingual first graders, the effectiveness of the native language literacy approach for Spanish dominants, and evidence of bias in the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS). One hundred thirty-one Spanish and English dominant children…

An adaptation of a miscue taxonomy developed by G. A. Cziko was used to compare the reading performance of (1) monolingual English and bilingual third grade students reading in English, (2) monolingual Spanish and bilingual third grade students reading in Spanish, and (3) bilingual third grade students reading in both English and Spanish. Eight…

The Home Bilingual Usage Estimate was designed to measure a person's home-family language usage and to yield a single classification according to a criterion scale. The following classifications were established: English monolingual, English dominant, apparent bilingual, Spanish dominant, or Spanish monolingual. Validity was determined by the…

This report on the use of the Spanish language in the United States discusses the Spanish-speaking population, the language itself, and bilingual education in the United States. The background about the Spanish-speaking population includes the following topics: (1) "A Nations of Immigrants," (2) "The Population of the…

INCLUDED IN THIS DOCUMENT ARE THE RATIONALE AND OUTLINE OF THE "LINGUA PLAN," A BILINGUAL EDUCATION PROGRAM DEVELOPED BY THE STAFF OF THE GALTON INSTITUTE TO IMPROVE THE PRIMARY EDUCATION OF MEXICAN AMERICAN CHILDREN WHO ENTER KINDERGARTEN WITH LITTLE OR NO KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. THE MAJOR PURPOSE OF PROJECT LINGUA IS TO DETERMINE WHETHER (1)…

The study prepared reading tests in the children's first language, Spanish, that initially considered their comprehension of the language and subsequently evaluated their skill in drawing inferences or pertinent information from the material read. Two reading comprehension tests (Forms A and B) were constructed, using two different excerpts from…

The purpose of this project was to design a bilingual/bicultural kindergarten course of study based on the concepts of the Richards Education Through Music Method. This method is rooted in the Hungarian composer-educator Zoltan Kodaly's educational philosophy and was developed in the U.S. by Mary Helen Richards. This is a method of teaching all…

Bilingual schooling in the U.S. is meant to equalize educational opportunity for children of limited English-speaking ability. Despite the proliferation of bilingual programs in many parts of the country, only very modest progress is being made toward the goal of equal educational achievement. We are coming to realize that limited English-speaking…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of initial consonants, especially /s/, on the pluralization of English nouns by both native English- and native Spanish-speaking first grade pupils. A test instrument consisting of nonsense syllable trigrams was constructed based on linguistic descriptions of English noun pluralization.…

Through analysis of data collected during the third year of the San Antonio Language Project (1966-67), this study attempts to evaluate the effect of three treatments on reading achievement: intensive oral-aural English instruction (OAE); intensive oral-aural Spanish instruction (OAS); and non-oral-aural instruction (NOA). It involved two sample…

A summer school project which was designed to reorient the teachers and the curriculum to more successfully provide for individual needs was described. This project was based on the philosophy that since the migrant child's social and language patterns are different from those of the mainstream of America and since these differences were common…

The study reported here compares the performance on a mental ability test of children in grades two and three from homes in which English is the language spoken with those from homes in which Spanish is the language used. During the Spring semester, the InterAmerican Tests of General Ability, Level Two, and their Spanish parallel, were…

In this experimental study for developing a bilingual diagnostic language test, findings in English and Spanish about monolingual language acquisition were used in designing materials to investigate the bilingual language acquisition (English and Spanish) of children five to eight years old in Tucson, Arizona. Attention was focused on acquisition…