Despite the increasing number of U.S. born Latinos, placing heritage and native speakers in the Spanish curriculum is still a challenge (MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2020). The present article: (1) addresses the unique needs of heritage speakers in the Spanish curriculum; (2) problematizes traditional grammar-based placement exams; and (3)…

While previous sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that children faithfully acquire probabilistic input constrained by sociolinguistic and linguistic factors (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status), research suggests children regularize inconsistent input-probabilistic input that is not sociolinguistically constrained (e.g., Hudson Kam &…

Through the presentation of two bilingual reader profiles, this article will illustrate how miscue analysis can act as a culturally relevant assessment tool as it allows for the study of reading across different spoken and written languages. The research presented in this article integrates a socio-psycholinguistic perspective to reading and a…

Sociolinguists have been fighting dialect prejudice since the 1960s, but deficit views of non-standard English are regaining currency in educational discourse. In this paper I argue that the traditional sociolinguistic response--stressing dialect systematicity and tolerance of "difference"--may no longer be effective by questioning a key…

Learning to speak another language requires students to adopt new ways of thinking. Some teachers believe that students can assimilate idiomatic expressions and cultural turns of phrase simply through the teacher's use and the students' practice. Others work to explicitly show the difference between the target language and native language, as if…

For children whose everyday speech differs greatly from the School English (SE) they encounter in academic materials and settings, it was hypothesized that greater familiarity with SE would be associated with more successful early reading acquisition. Sentence imitation and reading skills of 217 urban African American students in kindergarten…