While families play a vital role in the early literacy skills of young English Learners, their educators often do not share the same backgrounds or cultures, and may not know how to connect with parents who are linguistically and culturally different. As part of a year-long grant funded professional development project, the authors led teams of…

This study, framed within sociocultural theory, examines the interaction of adult ESL test-takers in two tests of oral proficiency: one in which they interacted with an examiner (the individual format) and one in which they interacted with another student (the paired format). The data for the eight pairs in this study were drawn from a larger…

The evaluation reviews the implementation of the "Crossroads Cafe" English language instruction program in Florida, focusing on the program's management, training, and overall effectiveness as measured by its impact on adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers and learners. "Crossroads Cafe" is a series of videotape…

The position taken in this paper is that the basic debate concerning the effectiveness of bilingual education has been totally "socially naive." A study investigated the concept that the ethnolinguistic vitality of a community determines the quality and quantity of linguistic contacts with one's own linguistic group and with other…