This article explores challenges and opportunities for language minority students and their monolingual English-speaking classmates during oral presentations in mainstream 7th grade social studies classrooms. The classrooms were designed to provide access to rigorous content and opportunities to develop English for use in academic settings.…

Where do the two languages of the bilingual child interact? The literature has debated whether bilingual children have delays in the acquisition of direct objects. The variety of methods and languages involved have prevented clear conclusions. In a transitivity-based approach, null objects are a default structural possibility, present in all…

Educational interventions designed to serve the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in U.S. public schools are developed within a fractured social context. Recent language and immigration policy debates in the U.S. have focused on the importance of English in attaining socio-economic success. On the other hand, research in applied…

Having orally proficient Spanish speaking heritage learners in a class alongside monolingual English speakers who are learning Spanish as a second language is quite the challenge: the heritage learners' ability to converse can be intimidating to the non heritage learner, but at the same time, the non heritage learner's ability to grasp the grammar…

In response to a critical need in teacher preparation, study abroad programs aimed at developing multicultural competencies in pre-service teachers have proliferated across the United States. Multicultural competencies constitute the ability to challenge misconceptions that lead to discrimination based on cultural difference, reflect on one's…

English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that…

Over the centuries, first Latin and then French, German, and Russian have receded in perceived importance as languages of science. Other powerful languages with extensive internal scientific discourse, such as Japanese and Chinese, have always been largely excluded. The dominance of English has elevated the reputation of English-language…

The current study was designed to investigate the timing and nature of interaction between the two languages of bilinguals. For this purpose, we compared discrimination of Canadian French and Canadian English coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual, monolingual and advanced early L2 learners of French and English. French /d/ is phonetically…

In Experiment 1, monolingual native Spanish speakers (NSSs) had better kernel recall and longer end-of-clause (EOC) pauses than native English speakers (NESs) when reading texts that varied in syntactic complexity as a function of the number of nonessential clauses added to the kernel text. NSS familiarity with embedded clauses in Spanish seem to…

The "weaker links" hypothesis proposes that bilinguals are disadvantaged relative to monolinguals on speaking tasks because they divide frequency-of-use between two languages. To test this proposal, we contrasted the effects of increased word use associated with monolingualism, language dominance, and increased age on picture naming times. In two…

Type and token frequency have been thought to be important in the acquisition of past tense morphology, particularly in differentiating regular and irregular forms. In this study we tested the role of frequency in two ways: (1) in bilingual children, who typically use and hear either language less often than monolingual children and (2)…

The Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago, but the traces left in occupied countries by this monstrous system still affect the lives of millions of people. Under the glittering surface of newsworthy events that regularly appear in the mass media, there are many other wounds hard to heal. The system of education is one of the social…

This book provides a unique and accessible account of current research on reading and dyslexia in different orthographies. While most research has been conducted in English, this text presents cross-language comparisons to provide insights into universal aspects of reading development and developmental dyslexia in alphabetic and non-alphabetic…

While the overall school-age population grew by only 2.6 percent between 1995 and 2005, the number of English Language Learners (ELLs) grew by 56 percent--a number that can only be expected to grow considerably in the near future. Mainstream literacy professionals across the country, typically monolingual European American women, struggle to…

A substantial amount of literature regarding first language (L1) acquisition has shown that reading for meaning significantly contributes to vocabulary expansion and strongly relates to overall academic success. Research in the English as a Second Language (ESL) context, however, has presented mixed results, in particular for recent immigrant…