The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to uncover how high-achieving university Spanish instructors engage in the core practice of building a classroom discourse community at a doctoral-level university in the southwestern United States. The second goal of this study was to determine whether student performance on reading and writing…

In this article, we will highlight an overview of a project that we facilitated with colleagues that encouraged immigrant youth and members of their families to share photographs that they took and stories that they wrote with fellow students in their school, their teachers, with members of their own student and cultural communities, and with…

Although generalized anxiety has increased among college students, it is unclear what effect this has on language anxiety. While language anxiety has been shown to negatively affect second language achievement, its impact at the level of specific linguistic subdomains has not been evaluated. In what follows, we explore what relationship, if any,…

Individual differences in infants' native phonological development have been linked to the quantity and quality of infant-directed speech (IDS). The effects of parental and infant bilingualism on this relation in 131 five- and nine-month-old monolingual and bilingual Spanish and Basque infants (72 male; 59 female; from white middle-class…

Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop a child self-report questionnaire measuring bilingual experience and self-perceptions of Spanish and English proficiency and establish preliminary evidence of validity and reliability for the questionnaire. Method: Participants included 113 Spanish-English bilingual children with and without…

It is common to see mirror errors in letters in early stages of reading due to the mirror-generalization process that allows a visual stimulus to be identified independently of its orientation. To avoid such errors, this process must be inhibited. A special case would be children with dyslexia since their difficulties with the alphabetic code may…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) classroom instruction that incorporates a principled approach into the use of the first language (L1) by students and instructors has an effect on beginning learners' development of L2 speaking and writing proficiency, compared to L2-only instruction, over the course of one semester.…

The consumption of videos on the Internet by young children is increasing, and therefore, when they start school, a great part of their knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes will be influenced by the contents they have consumed in social networks such as YouTube, which is considered a third educational agent in childhood, together with families and…

The Scale of Physical and Verbal Aggressiveness has been an instrument widely used in the scientific literature to measure physical and verbal aggressiveness, both in children and adolescents as well as in parents. The original scale has shown adequate psychometric properties. However, the scale has not been previously validated in Spanish, and no…

The current longitudinal, mixed-methods dissertation explored how various Family Language Policy (FLP) factors (including parent and child language ideologies, practices, and management) influence "Español"-English (hereafter, "Españ"Eng) bilingual students' home language maintenance/loss and their bilingual development.…

In the United States nearly one third of children under five live in homes where a non-English language is spoken. However, many of these language-minority (LM) children shift towards English monolingualism after beginning school in early childhood. While language input and usage are central to acquisition and maintenance in each language, less is…

This paper explores the complex relationship between higher education and the concept of public goods in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, with a particular focus on Chile. Through an extensive literature review, the study examines the evolving meanings of public, public/common/global goods in Spanish culture in the context of higher…

It is often assumed that heritage language learners (HLLs) speak better than they write--by themselves and by educators alike. This article draws on data from writing and oral proficiency ratings plus self-evaluations of 35 Spanish HLLs to investigate: (i) whether Spanish HLLs actually tend to receive higher ratings in speaking than in writing;…

Participants learned the meaning of novel objects by listening to two complementary definitions while watching videos of the new object, in a single-language context (all in Spanish) or a mixed-language context (one definition in Basque, one in Spanish). Then, participants were asked to assess the degree of functional relatedness between novel and…