Upon hearing someone's speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker's age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure…

Past research has highlighted some differences in how sarcasm is interpreted by different groups of individuals as well as biases in individuals' expectations regarding who is more likely to use it (e.g., occupation, gender). However, examinations of patterns of sarcasm production have been much less frequent. The current research extends past…

The purpose of this study was to research perceptions that content-area teachers and administrators have of strategies used in teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) and the viability, feasibility, and adaptability in the general education classroom. This study investigated teachers' perception of the effectiveness of ESL/EFL…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

This article reports on a cross-institutional, mixed-methods research study designed to gather data on first year writers' language backgrounds at three North American universities. Researchers administered a language survey to 1,870 first year writing students and led follow-up focus groups with 32 participants. Researchers utilized three methods…

The following article summarizes a research study which involved an investigation of the educational experiences of Afro-Caribbean student immigrants who were academically successful in the United States (U.S.). Although immigrants of African descent experience barriers such as immigrant status and racial minority status which leads to a double…

The purpose of this study was to examine the implicit attitudes of college-level instructors toward Latino-accented English and the effects of gender, teaching experience, home language, race/ethnicity, and rank on those attitudes. The auditory Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure the implicit accent preferences. Participants (N =…

Reading comprehension, defined as the active extraction and construction of meaning from all kinds of text, requires children to fluently decode and understand what they are reading. Basic processes underlying reading comprehension are complex and call on the oral language system and a conscious understanding of this system, i.e., metalinguistic…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the way in which items on the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey Revised (WMLS-R) Spanish and English versions function for bilingual children from different ethnic subgroups who speak different dialects of Spanish. Using data from a sample of 324 bilingual Hispanic families and their children living on the…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study examines the effects of reading interventions for bi-lingual and bi-dialectal Broward County School District middle school children using research-based strategies combined with metacognitive and meta-comprehension frameworks. The experimental study reports findings on the effects of an 8-week…

Interns at The University of Tampa investigate how perceptions of dialect and regionalism may impact the learning environment and more precisely, the learner. Regionalism is defined as a belief that one's region of origin is a primary determinant of the quality of one's standards of living, social forms, customary beliefs, levels of…

This study compared the intelligibility of native and foreign-accented English speech presented in quiet and mixed with three different levels of background noise. Two native American English speakers and four native Mandarin Chinese speakers for whom English is a second language each read a list of 50 phonetically balanced sentences (Egan, 1948).…

This resource guide contains an annotated bibliography of available materials for developing curriculum related to black studies. References for materials and human resources are offered in the areas of Home Economics, Language Arts, Dimensions of Language and Sociolinguistics, and Science. Material resources listed in the bibliography are…

Language acquisition in bilingual communities is noted to be fundamentally distinct from other types of second language learning. Discussion centers about the multi-dialectal, bilingual speech community of Miami with respect to educational opportunities afforded the city's ethnic groups. The function and achievement of the Spanish Curricula Center…

Papers for the fifth Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) Conference include the following papers: "The State and the Global Marketplace in the Provision of Minority Media Services" (George Jones); "Local Language Media: What Does It Take?" (Paul Lewis); "Power of the Media for the Good of Small Languages: An Indian…