Minority language communities lack access to educational technology that facilitates literacy skill building. The approach currently taken by most educational game app developers privileges widely spoken languages and often requires intensive resource investment. In response, a new game app was designed to provide easily localized, pedagogically…

Language revitalization efforts have been critiqued for creating and reproducing linguistic, epistemological, and pedagogical hierarchies that might run counter to a community's needs and interests. Drawing on a seven-year ethnographic and collaborative research with the Maya cultural promoters of the Caste War Museum in Tihosuco, Mexico, we…

In this paper, I examine the development, implementation, and results of utilizing three types of storybooks in a language revitalization classroom for students ages 5-12 learning Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. Although each method used for creating books in Zapotec generated a positive reaction from…

Native Spanish speakers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, who are also English language learners, are a growing population of students in the K-12 classrooms throughout the United States. This particular group of students is oftentimes placed in Spanish-as-a-foreign-language classes that fail to meet their linguistic development…

This paper examines the connection between heritage language and culture and the construction and maintenance of social and personal identities of the Cora, an indigenous people of the Mexican Sierra del Nayar, in Northwestern Mexico. Using the frameworks of the socially and linguistically mediated mind (Dennet, 1991; Harre & Gillet, 1994;…

This document describes literacy models for urban and rural populations in Mexico. It contains four sections. The first two sections (generalizations about the population and considerations about the teaching of adults) discuss the environment that creates illiterate adults and also describe some of the conditions under which learning takes place…

Spanish, English, and American Indian languages in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico and bilingualism and language contact in the region are addressed in a collection of articles. Approaches to research in the languages of this region are discussed in articles by Valdes, Lope Blanch, and Brandt. Cultural and sociolinguistic…