Chinese immersion programs have been increasingly popular in US schools. However, we have insufficient data on young English-speaking children's acquisition of Chinese as a second language in these programs, and specifically on social contextual variables systematically promoting or hindering Chinese language use. Taking a variationist…

This is a time of great change, vulnerability and possibility for the Irish language and for Irish-medium education. Research shows the language in serious decline in the Gaeltacht; areas of Ireland designated as being predominantly Irish speaking. There are also inconsistent approaches at the policy level in addition to an ambiguous attitude to…

The amount of language input bilingual children receive influences their language acquisition. This three-year quasi-longitudinal study determined the extent home language input influences measures of expressive and receptive English vocabulary among Spanish-English school-age bilingual children. The study also determined whether a relationship…

This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students' language acquisition. The book…

Scholars have consistently theorised that language ideologies can influence the ways in which bilingual speakers in minority language settings identify and engage with the linguistic varieties available to them. Research conducted by the author examined the interplay of language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of adults who started in…

This mixed-methods study investigates the ideologies, attitudes, and understandings of language, bilingualism, and second language acquisition among students, teachers, and parents in a Bay Area dual immersion (DI) program. The work shows that despite rhetoric and awareness of language variation, students' and teachers' approaches to language…

This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there…

Currently, public schools in the U.S. are experiencing dramatic increases in the number of English learner (EL) students they serve. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2006), between 1979 and 2004, the overall number of school children in U.S. public schools increased 18 percent. While the nation has a long history…

This publication reviews research findings on selected aspects of home and school language usage in the Pacific region, which is a multilingual context with English as the common language. Patterns of indigenous and English language vary considerably across geographical areas. Traditional cultures and languages are changing rapidly. The wide…

This study describes certain communication strategies used by Anglophone children learning French as a second language as well as by children whose mother tongue is French. Three groups of children in the third and fifth grades participated in the study: French native speakers, Anglophone children learning French in an immersion setting, and…

The Development of Bilingual Proficiency is a large-scale, five-year research project begun in 1981. The final report contains three volumes, each concentrating on specific issues investigated in the research: (1) the nature of language proficiency, including second language lexical proficiency and the development and growth of metaphor…