In order to bring music of Puerto Rico to the general music classroom, it is important to understand the sociocultural and sociohistorical context of the music. The traditional genre of plena shares cultural threads with West Africa, Spain, and indigenous (Taíno) culture. Commonly known as "El Periodico Cantado" (the singing newspaper),…

While interest in pedagogical translanguaging has grown, it continues to be an underresearched area of study. The purpose of this study is to better understand student response to the use of strategic and pedagogically informed translanguaging practices in the university-level classroom. This article takes an in-depth look at the coursework and…

This article demonstrates how the digital technologies of video recordings and webcams in a virtual learning after school program made it possible for teacher candidates to practice and reflect on asset-based pedagogies for multilingual students. Implications to engage teacher candidates in asset-based pedagogies in virtual science and engineering…

Scholarship in language education has produced a specialized knowledge base for educating multilingual learners (MLs) that encompasses what teachers should know, i.e., the knowledge of learning a new language, and what teachers should be able to do with this knowledge in the classroom, i.e., effective pedagogical practices. In this article, we…

The term translanguaging has received a great deal of attention in recent years in applied linguistics. Originally coined to describe a bilingual pedagogical approach Ofelia García extended the definition to encompass the multiple discursive practices of bilingual communities. This broader definition has been taken up in many different ways by…

Framed within Ruiz's language-as-resource orientation, this article uses data from a college ESL classroom where a translanguaging approach was used for the teaching of a novel. After defining key terms, the article describes the linguistic context of higher education in Puerto Rico and its influence on one instructor's Basic English course. Using…

Using elements of the ethnography of globalization and teacher research, two Puerto Rican researchers and educators worked collaboratively with a teacher on a study conducted in a third grade classroom in a public school in an urban community in Puerto Rico. They conceptualized children's curricular engagement with the Spanish television genre of…

This article illustrates how a classroom community characterized by "confianza"--a feeling of mutual understanding, respect, and emotional closeness--facilitated the English language learning of Spanish-speaking students in a content-based English as a second language class at a Puerto Rican public university. To understand the processes…

This article traces the ways in which New York City schools have responded to the multilingualism of its children in the last forty years. I review here the past to construct the future--the future of the past. I argue that in the predominantly Puerto Rican community of the 1960s and 1970s a simple approach toward languages and bilingualism in…

This information dissemination report presents a brief introduction to the Building Bridges to Better Bilingual Education Program of the Central Board of Education of the City of New York. The primary aim of the program is to promote the linguistic and academic progress of those Title I eligible Spanish-speaking children whose achievement levels…

This story and coloring book is one in a series of Puerto Rican folktale books and is designed for use in a bilingual/bicultural education setting. This volume is a Spanish edition of a short story geared toward those students just beginning to read. (AM)

This study examines writing apprehension in bilinguals, a common problem among Puerto Rican college students who take composition courses in both their native Spanish and English as a second language. A questionnaire designed to determine the sources of apprehension was administered to three student groups: graduate students of English, freshman…

This module provides theoretical aspects of listening comprehension and practical teaching suggestions. Learning activities are designed to achieve the following objectives: (a) explain briefly a theory of the speech process; (b) define redundancy, semantic encoding, phonic patterning, and phonological decoding; (c) enumerate and explain the…

This paper provides an overview of recent developments in the science of linguistics, and considers their relevance to the teaching of Spanish in Puerto Rico. First, three significant trends are explained and summarized: (1) structuralism, which emphasizes phonetics, pattern, and distribution, and rejects meaning as a tool of analysis; (2)…

The results of a questionnaire designed to investigate Puerto Rican students' attitudes toward learning English show that there is a predominantly positive attitude toward English-as-a-second language in the Puerto Rican town studied in this survey. The questionnaires solicit information from students in grades five through eight concerning…