Latino families should be fully supported to accomplish their goals for the bilingual development and school success of their children. Unfortunately, they often encounter misinformation and negative messages regarding early bilingual development, specifically the belief that young children are "confused" if they grow up with two…

Purpose: This exploratory study developed a process for reinterpreting previously published research studies in the bilingual literature. Three previously published studies on bilingual phonological acquisition were revisited due to the following characteristics: (a) they applied a theoretical framework for bilingual speech production developed by…

In a bilingual teacher preparation milieu fraught with high stakes and little time to develop biliteracies in humanizing ways, the researchers engaged in a comparative case study of two types of bilingual pre-service teachers, a heritage bilingual and an initially Spanish-dominant bilingual, to explore how they grew in their biliteracies after the…

This report examines the critical role of home visitors in supporting dual language development among Latino children, who represent a growing share of the U.S. population. Through surveys and interviews with home visitors, UnidosUS identified gaps in training and resources needed to effectively serve culturally and linguistically diverse…

In the "Bilingual Literacy Development Model: A holistic way to support Spanish-speaking children" research study, I studied bilingual families over a 5-month period in their home environments through home visits. Drawing from data obtained through home visits, including interviews with mothers and observations of family literacy…

The language practices of Heritage Learners (HLs) of Spanish are frequently regulated and stigmatized in academic and community settings when their Spanish is perceived as deficient. By ignoring institutional structures that accelerate Spanish loss, the "inadequacy" of Latinxs' Spanish is regularly perceived to be the fault of…

This case study examines the consequences of community language attitudes and ideologies on later-generation heritage speakers through qualitative sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of 22 interviews with first- and second-generation Latinos of diverse backgrounds in a major US metropolitan area. The findings show that imposed deficit…

Language learning and the development of language proficiency are central concerns in the study of immigrant adaptation. This paper analyzes the social construction of language proficiency among Indigenous Guatemalan Maya youth in the United States--specifically, undocumented young adults who migrated to Los Angeles, California as unaccompanied…

Studies assessing the grammatical knowledge of speakers of Spanish as a heritage language have largely focused on the Spanish subjunctive mood and have concluded, almost unanimously, that heritage speakers' knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive is non-native-like and subject to incomplete acquisition. However, there is also evidence that while…

In this paper, we investigate the effect that parents' language use (English, Spanish-English or Spanish) had on self-perceived proficiency, frequency of use, language anxiety, code-switching and cultural orientation of 206 Spanish-English bilinguals and multilinguals who were students in Texas where there is a strong presence of Spanish, the…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…

Scholars acknowledge that Indigenous Latinx immigrants' complex process of adapting to life in the United States, or incorporation, differs from that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. Understanding these differences is especially important as arrivals of Indigenous refugees and asylum seekers from Central America have increased steadily over…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US (US Census Bureau, 2011) and are learning American English (AE) as a second language (L2). Many may experience difficulty in understanding AE. Accurate perception of AE vowels is important because vowels carry a large part of the speech signal (Kewley-Port, Burkle, & Lee, 2007). The…

Purpose: Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students' schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of…