Lina, a Mexican American second grader, bilingual in Spanish and English, used a strategy for adding two two-digit numbers that the authors share as an example of the importance of listening to the mathematical ideas of children, especially when these ideas do not align with how mathematics is traditionally represented in the classroom. The…

A business Spanish curriculum that presents the full spectrum of general and specialized areas--including management, banking, finance, marketing and advertising--might seem ambitious for a single course. A course that aims to present the full picture would seem to impose an undue burden on memory and retention of the content. By emphasizing…

At the intersection of social studies and world language curricula are opportunities to explore students' prior learning with vocabulary-rich content designed to support language acquisition goals. "Funds of knowledge" is defined as socio-cultural, economic, and historical knowledge from home and community settings. The instructional…

In recent years numerous studies on language learning strategies have signaled the importance of developing students' metacognitive skills. This article communicates findings from a classroom research project that sought to stimulate metacognitive self-monitoring practices among college students in an intermediate-level Spanish language course.…

The author and her family spent a few weeks traveling through Central America last summer. A few years back, they had been to Guatemala, Belize and Costa Rica yet that was it, not much more exploration of their neighbors to the south. They decided on a short tour of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama and realized this would be a great opportunity…

Even though many post-secondary institutions offer a variety of Hispanic linguistics classes (Hualde 2006; Lipski 2006), research on the pedagogy of Hispanic linguistics is an underdeveloped or non-existent area of the discipline. Courses in Hispanic linguistics can present not only linguistic challenges for non-native speakers of Spanish, but…

This version of "Improving the Language and Learning of Students Who Are Deaf. PEPNet Tipsheet," written in Spanish, offers some suggestions on improving the language and learning of students who are deaf. The saying "Good teaching is good teaching" holds considerable truth when thinking about exemplary practices used in educating students who are…

Children working alone is a common instructional strategy in some early childhood classrooms. According to foundational work by Johnson and Johnson (1986), however, cooperative teams employ higher levels of thought and retain information longer than children who work individually. Children engage in discussion, take responsibility for their…

The greatest challenge inhibiting the ability of English-language learners (ELLs) to read at the appropriate grade level is perhaps a lack of sufficient vocabulary development. While extensive reading is beneficial, these students must acquire the necessary vocabulary in order to read extensively. Both vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth are…

Discusses the usefulness to second language learning of an activity in which students assume a pen name and write letters under that name in the language studied in order to motivate their interest in the language and accelerate their mastery of it. (CK)

Suggests four methods to help students make intelligent guesses and expand their Spanish vocabulary through induction of cognate patterns, including making students consciously aware of cognate patterns; emphasizing general patterns of English abstract words and their corresponding Spanish cognates; enhancing inductive learning strategies through…

Provides insight into how to more fully realize the potential of computer-assisted language learning, emphasizing the importance of sound methodology and the employment of appropriate technology to measure students' progress. (CB)

Reports on the results of a descriptive study of the noun phrase agreement behavior exhibited by three first-year Spanish language students during a series of oral interviews conducted over six months (two academic quarters).(13 references) (JL)

Illustrates how advance organizers can be used to aid the second-language decoding process. Devices considered include cognate recognition, syllable-morpheme information, contextualized meaning, chronological ordering, time-frame reference, cross-cultural differences, redefinitions, and direction of discourse. (CB)

Notes that one way to ensure that students understand the importance of developing communicative abilities is to utilize Spanish language resources in the United States, as in an excursion to a "tienda" (shop), where they negotiate with the Spanish-speaking owner. (seven references) (Author/CK)