This article details a pilot program of mother tongue instruction in five primary schools for classes one through three, in Kajokeji County, Central Equatoria State, South Sudan. The program was launched by teachers and volunteers with the support of the Jesuit Refugee Service, an international non-governmental organization. The research examines…

The growing population of young English language learners (ELLs) in American schools creates an urgency for educators to understand, value, and support the wide array of students' native language practices as a way to support both the ELLs' first language and their native cultures and communities. Considerable research shows the importance of…

Grounded in discourse analytic and language socialization paradigms, this dissertation examines issues of language and social identity construction in children attending a Russian Heritage Language Orthodox Christian Saturday School in California. By conducting micro-analysis of naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction combined with longitudinal…

This study explores the potential of native language literacy instruction for adult immigrant English language learners who have limited formal schooling or have had interruptions in their formal education. By examining 3 programs that provide native language literacy in combination with English as a second language (ESL) instruction, this study…

This article contributes to the literature on the use of the present tense to refer to past events in oral narratives, otherwise known as the Conversational Historical Present (CHP) (Wolfson 1978). Previous research has found that the CHP switches with the past (Wolfson 1979) frequently with verbs of saying and achievement verbs (Dunn 1998; Van…

Despite an increasing need for culturally relevant curricula, what is considered culturally responsive and how it is assessed is under-researched. The present study examined the perceived cultural responsiveness and effectiveness of an early intervention program designed to teach early language skills and expose students to Indigenous culture, the…

Regional dossiers aim at providing a concise description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

Some heritage language learners (HLLs) are comfortable identifying themselves as such, while others are decidedly reluctant to adopt this term (Pino & Pino, 2000). HLLs in this paper are defined as those students having a parent or grandparent who speaks German or those who have spent a significant part of their childhood in a German-speaking…

Drawing on evidence from indigenous language immersion programs in the United States, this article makes the case that these immersion programs are vital to healing the negative effects of colonialism and assimilationist schooling that have disrupted many indigenous homes and communities. It describes how these programs are furthering efforts to…

Papua New Guinea (PNG), an independent state in the southwest Pacific, is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. Its roughly six million people speak over 800 distinct languages. In spite of this diversity, in 1995 the Papua New Guinean government established a mother tongue-based bilingual education programme in which community…

This article reports the results of an investigation into current Spanish heritage language (SHL) course offerings and their content in 4-year public and private universities in the American Southwest. Prior research has indicated that the number of language departments in the United States offering SHL courses remains small (18 and 17.8%,…

This study examines the role of transfer from English in the acquisition of double-que questions in Spanish among 17 heritage speakers in the US. Results from an elicited production task, an acceptability judgment task and a preference task revealed significant difficulties in the production and acceptability of double-"que" questions. In contrast…

This survey study, which involved 134 language learners enrolled in first-year Chinese as a foreign language classrooms in the US universities, intended to address the research question, "Do learners' strategy use differ based on the following learner differences: (1) gender; (2) home language/culture; and (3) number of other foreign languages…

This study investigates the effects of weekly heritage language (HL) classes on first language (L1) proficiency in speakers who arrived in the second language (L2)-dominant setting before the onset of puberty. Two groups of L1 Spanish--L2 Swedish bilingual high school students living in Sweden participated in the study. One group currently…

Traditional bilingual education programmes in regional linguistic minority contexts face major challenges within the recent paradigm of linguistic diversity against a background of increasing migration, mobility and trans-locality. Based on three case studies, the authors of this paper focus on how particular dual-medium models are applied in…