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…

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…

Teachers of nonstandard dialect-speaking students need to become ethnographers of local communication. For minority education and bidialectal programs to work, there must be an informed awareness of community language functions and of the structural equality of all world dialects. (41 references) (CJH)

An examination of measures currently used to assess degree of bilingualism in individuals looks at the problems inherent in them, ideal measures, and how to use available measures. It is suggested that definition of bilinguality is a central cause for measurement problems, since a bilingual is assumed to be the sum of two monolinguals, without…

Hypothesizes that the relationship between L1 and L2 writing is not one of interference, but rather application of L1 to L2 writing. Includes writing samples of first-, second-, and third-grade students enrolled in a bilingual program. (EKN)

Identifies four misconceptions about language proficiency which are currently impeding the implementation of effective bilingual education programs. Misconceptions involve: (1) surface structure deviations and academic achievement; (2) surface fluency and "English Proficiency"; (3) bilingual language proficiency and instruction; and (4)…

Mathematics teaching and subject matter acquisition were studied with 66 linguistic minority children and 104 dominant language speaking students in a monolingual second-language class and a traditional bilingual education model in Oslo (Norway). Results indicate that linguistic minority students benefit from bilingual mathematics teaching. (SLD)

A questionnaire and interview survey shows that Gaelic is no longer the language of the home for a majority of parents of preschool children, who are nevertheless very positive that their children should be bilingual by the end of primary school. About half seemed prepared to enroll their children in Gaelic-medium units if provided. (22…

Examined language differentiation in bilingual toddlers prior to the emergence of functional categories. The children were observed with each parent separately and both together. Results indicate that while these children did code mix, they were able to differentiate between their two languages. There was some evidence that language dominance…

In this study, Spanish language samples were collected for a young bilingual Puerto Rican Spanish-English speaking child during a 2-year period (ages 4-6). Results suggest a progressive reduction of morphological and syntactical complexity in Spanish. The observed errors tended to affect mainly Spanish inflectional morphology. Implications for…

This study investigated how Finnish-Swedish bilingual 10-year-olds (n=26) produce self-repairs in a narrative discourse, in comparison with monolingual agemates (n=10), in three respects: (1) types of repair; (2) number of repairs; and (3) the structural organization of repair. Altogether, 36 Finnish and 36 Swedish narratives were examined. The…

The correlation between a bilingual's usage of grammatical morphemes from one of his/her languages and his/her language dominance is examined. The subject is a three-year-old Danish/English bilingual who code-switches at the morpheme level even though she has never been exposed to a code-switching bilingual community. Co-occurrence restrictions…

Lexical interference in the recall of adult Finnish/Swedish bilinguals with Finnish dominant is studied. The error patterns of short-term recall of words presented by category in either Swedish or Finnish were examined for translations, lexical substitutions, and intrusions or false recalls of non-occurring words. Individual differences in…

The publication brings together the latest thinking in five areas important to bilingual education. Part one, legal aspects, deals with limitations and capabilities of the judicial process, interpretations of major court decisions, and implications of these decisions in terms of community members, educators, and school boards. Philosophies,…

This paper is an attempt to take stock of the politics of language as it has been playing out in Latin America, ever since the countries in this region were colonized by European powers, mainly Spain and Portugal. Linguistic imperialism is by no means a new phenomenon in this part of the world. In more recent times, the relentless advance of…