The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New…

The term translanguaging has received a great deal of attention in recent years in applied linguistics. Originally coined to describe a bilingual pedagogical approach Ofelia García extended the definition to encompass the multiple discursive practices of bilingual communities. This broader definition has been taken up in many different ways by…

This ethnographic study aims to foreground the voices of 34 first through twelfth graders who belong to first-generation immigrant families from Mexico and Central America and attend Nueva Vida Church (fictitious name) in a Midwestern US city. They insightfully reflect upon their language, culture and citizenship during Sunday school class focus…

This interpretive study explores the writing and writing experiences of 2 bilingual, Mexican, immigrant undergraduates at a US university. Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester's (2003) continua model of biliteracy situates writing interactions to understand how students explore and draw on their bilingual and bicultural resources as they develop…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

Throughout the United States, deficit perspectives contribute to Latino students' failure in terms of school success. This happens because many educators still regard bilingualism as a deficit. We examined the discourse of one family to better understand how deficit, assimilationist discourse affected them and their two children. We came to…

Nearly all Hispanic adults born in the United States of immigrant parents report they are fluent in English. By contrast, only a small minority of their parents describe themselves as skilled English speakers. This finding of a dramatic increase in English-language ability from one generation of Hispanics to the next emerges from a new analysis of…

Explores the code mixing behaviors of Puerto Rican return immigrants in interaction among themselves in order to observe how their dual ethnic experience is reflected in the theory of code-mixing behaviors. Subjects were 13 Puerto Rican immigrants who were born in New York City and had been in Puerto Rico for a least 3 years. (Author/VWL)

This document describes the planning and implementation of a comprehensive program to facilitate the adjustment of newly arrived Puerto Rican pupils and parents to the school and the surrounding East New York community. The program encompassed the following areas: improvement of school atmosphere, training of teachers and para-professionals, more…

The daughter of a Puerto Rican immigrant mother and an American father describes her mother's early experiences with English language use and ethnic bias, her family's language use patterns, family sensitivity to language attitudes, school experiences with language use and language learning, and her feelings of low self-esteem and frustration as a…