This study analyzes linguistic ideologies and attitudes of Spanish high school teachers in Western Massachusetts towards Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). An open-answer survey was conducted to examine the reactions of teachers towards utterances produced with well-documented Puerto Rican Spanish features. In the state of Massachusetts, Puerto Ricans…

Sense of school belonging has been shown to contribute to a range of academic and psychosocial outcomes, especially among adolescents, and may have particular salience for immigrant students of color, due to their ethnic-racial positionality and frequent marginalization in school. In this study, we examined the ways that immigrant and island-born…

Puerto Rican students are a growing population in U.S. mainland schools, yet few recent studies have focused on the school contextual and identity-based experiences of Puerto Rican youth. Using stage-environment fit and LatCrit theories, this qualitative study examined seven Puerto Rican adolescent students' perspectives on domains of school…

Scholars, activists, and communities strive for educational equity and justice for emergent bilinguals. The pursuit of advocacy, however, is often fraught with emotional tension, leading many teachers to question their identities as advocates. Relatively few studies have focused on language teachers of color, and on how they navigate their…

The present study examined the relationship between children's early literacy-related abilities and their reading achievement in late elementary school in the context of a Puerto Rican community in Massachusetts. The researcher examined four years of student achievement test data from the public elementary schools of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The…

This study explores Spanish language maintenance in Southbridge, Massachusetts, a suburban town with a vibrant Puerto Rican community. The investigation focuses on the extent to which Southbridge Puerto Ricans use Spanish and English at home, and their attitudes toward Spanish language maintenance. Survey data, especially the impact of factors…

A study was done to examine the reasons why Puerto Rican youth from the Holyoke (Massachusetts) Public School System drop out of high school and the effect of dropping out of school on the Latino community. The study was conducted using data provided by the Holyoke School Department and drawn from Students' cumulative folders and school district…

Examines the caregiving arrangements of 214 disabled, elderly Puerto Ricans living in Springfield, Massachusetts. Results indicate that although these elderly were severely disabled, they had limited sources of informal care and rarely used formal services. Discusses the need for a structural adaptation approach and for social services that are…

Communication between students and teachers is a basic requirement for learning to take place in a classroom. Like words and phrases, behaviors carry specific meanings which may vary across cultures. When teachers are not aware of cultural differences, when they assume that a behavior has a particular meaning while students assume it has another,…

The acquisition of Spanish as a first language was investigated in a study of eight Puerto Rican children ranging in age from 17-39 months. The speech of the four children studied in Puerto Rico was analyzed in detail and compared with that of the four children taped in Boston. The children's speech was taped in natural situations and analyzed in…

In this article, Sonia Nieto, professor of language, literacy, and culture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Patrick M. Jenlink, editor of "Teacher Education & Practice," engage in conversation focused on the meaning and importance of affirming diversity in schools. Dr. Nieto has taught students at all levels, from…

This paper focuses on the Bilingual Department of the Boston Public Schools and how with the financial and technical support of the Institute for Learning and Teaching, funded in part under Title VII of the 1965 Elementary Secondary Education Act, it devised effective inservice training programs for bilingual teachers. Two points are of particular…

This report concerns conditions in Boston and Springfield, the cities with the largest concentrations of Puerto Ricans in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The lack of adequate statistics on living conditions of Puerto Ricans remains one of the main barriers to determining a solution for any problem of the Puerto Rican community. This situation…

This study examined the effects of family size on a sample of some 5000 students in Bayamon, Puerto Rico and examined the effects of family size and spacing on some 537 families in four suburban towns near Boston. It was found that there were major effects of both socio-economic status and religion on family size, but that the direction of the…