This case study focuses on the diverse discourses Latinx bilingual students bring to class to make sense of power relations in the world. The study implements critical literacy practices such as read-alouds, discussions, writing, and drawing activities that help students critique and disrupt power discourses embedded in texts and visuals. With the…

The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e.,…

This study of 1,338 Spanish-speaking 1st graders examined contextual effects of bilingual programs on reading comprehension and the effect of language of instruction within these contexts. The study included 128 classrooms in 32 schools located in border Texas and in urban Texas and California. These classrooms used either English immersion or…

The purpose of the current study is to elaborate on the statistical nature of the linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1979). It is argued that reading skills across the languages of bilingual learners are differentially robust to interdependence, falling along a continuum mediated by the commonalities between Spanish and English.…

The purpose of this content analysis study was to examine how reading comprehension was addressed in professional literacy texts used with preservice teachers at five universities in Texas. The universities for the study were selected based on the number of teachers graduating with their initial EC-4 teaching certificate between September 1, 2007…

The purpose of this study was to determine if educators were capitalizing on bilingual learners. use of their biliterate abilities to acquire scientific meaning and discourse that would formulate a scientific biliterate identity. Mixed methods were used to explore teachers. use of biliteracy and Funds of Knowledge (Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D.,…

This report is an evaluation of "Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies," an instructional program for use in elementary school classrooms to improve student proficiency in reading and math. It was developed for use with students with diverse academic needs, including English language learners. Although other programs emphasize peer-to-peer…

The authors studied a longitudinal English intervention in a 70/30 (Spanish/ English) developmental bilingual education (DBE) program (n = 302) and compared this model with a typical-practice, 80/20, late-exit transitional bilingual education program (n = 187) in terms of students' language and literacy acquisition from kindergarten to second…

Reports on research into the interactive roles played in the verbal comprehension processes by the sequence of textual elements, text-specific prior knowledge, and levels of language proficiency. Four cloze tests were administered to undergraduate and graduate native speakers of English and to undergraduate non-native speakers of English at three…

Analysis of responses to two cloze tests administered to native and non-native speakers of English revealed that non-natives were far less capable of coping with the loss of redundant cohesive data than were natives. Nonnatives were more reliant on text in comprehension process than were native speakers. (Author/CB)