There is tremendous variation in the use of American English by major geographic regions, as well as within these regions or cities, and by cultural background. The variety of English spoken by many African American people in the United States is called African American English (AAE). AAE affects early literacy skills in ways that may require…

The study examined the relationship between children's explicit knowledge and awareness of diglossia (EKAD) and learning Arabic in school. Additionally, this study addresses the interrelationships between EKAD and oral comprehension, lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic awareness upon the transition to reading to learn. Thirty typicaly…

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners' school-relevant language resources…

The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set "for variability", has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral…

The present study concentrated on the writing vocabulary of Mexican American children (grades 1-8) in order to answer the following questions: (1) Are there regional differences in the writing vocabulary of Mexican American Children? (2) Is one justified in translating directly from English into Spanish? (3) Is there a need for the development of…

The question of teaching a standard dialect to Chicano students who are studying abroad has implications for teaching any standard versus nonstandard dialect. The University of Colorado has a program at the Universidad Veracruzana in Jalapa, Mexico, in which the policy is to teach standard Mexican Spanish (the cultivated norm of Mexico City) as an…

This monograph attempts to integrate experience and research findings in several related disciplines and bring them to bear on the problem of how to make language programs in schools simultaneously accommodate the needs of both the language curriculum and the general curriculum. It addresses four issues: (1) how specific languages, in all their…