While language education programs were created with an equity stance in mind--with the goals of increasing access and facilitating academic success for ethnically and linguistically marginalized students--the larger educational context has compromised access for multiply marginalized students. Recognizing a need for more complex understandings of…

This paper reports on a writing programme I started at Bronx Community College to improve academic success among recently immigrated Spanish-speaking students by linking ESL courses to Spanish academic literacy courses within the framework of a learning community. My reflection begins by articulating the pedagogical rationale for looking beyond…

In many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the release of each year's results for the end of high school examinations heralds an annual ritual of public commentary on the poor state of national education systems. However, the exoglossic/monolingual language regime for these examinations is infrequently acknowledged as contributing to the dismal…

Young people's perceptions may offer an insight into the complex associations between language, education and social class. However, little research has asked young people what they think of their own talking. Forty-two British adolescents aged between 14 and 15 years were interviewed: 21 attended a school in a working class area; 21 attended…

Latino students' educational success is central to America's prosperity--in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years…

Many minority students enter the university without the discursive ''codes of power" that they need both to find academic success and to self-identify as scholars. High schools and college preparatory programs too often ignore the role that academic language and literacy play in success at the college level. Even when academic…

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United…

Reports on a longitudinal study of nearly 1,000 English words to determine differences in usage in the United States in the 1930s and 1990s related to age, sex, race, education, region, and rurality. The results indicated that males, whites, older speakers, and speakers from rural areas use more older terms, whereas most educated speakers use…

Explores relationships between standard language and arithmetic-test performance and a range of language-related family characteristics in the Netherlands. The sample consists of 7730 pupils from nearly 700 primary schools. The main question is whether pupils who use standard Dutch perform better than pupils from another language variety, such as…

A study examined the roles of language and school in the lives of a group of five Indochinese friends, aged 10-12, in the same sixth-grade class. Two were born in the United States; three were born in Thai refugee camps. The ways in which the subjects defined themselves in relation to other students, particularly other Asian students, and to each…

A study was undertaken to confirm previous findings on the relation between teacher performance on the "Teacher Test of Black English" (TTBE), certain teaching behaviors (direct correction, establishing a set, and "directly relevant" teaching), and the achievement of Vernacular Black English speaking students. In addition, the study sought to…

Results of 11 investigations of various problems facing Mexican American and other linguistic minority children in the classroom are summarized. Conducted between 1972 and 1978, the studies are divided into studies dealing with teacher attitudes toward speech variation, elementary and secondary school pupil attitudes toward speech variation and…

This book incorporates a general discussion of bilingualism and its relation to sociolinguistic facts with a description of the Redwood City, California, bilingual education project, begun in 1969. Chapter 1 describes the phenomenon of bilingualism, while Chapter 2 deals with the concept of bilingual education. The relationship between…