In response to the underachievement of its Latino children, one district implemented Parent Partnership for Achieving Literacy (PAL), a program to build cultural bridges between home and school. Professional development (PD) that helped mainstream teachers develop cultural competence to work effectively with Latino children and their families was…

Monographs on pragmatics and language learning include: "Do We All Apologize the Same?--An Empirical Study on the Act of Apologizing by Spanish Speakers Learning English" (Montserrat Mir); "Conversational Openings in Kiswahili: The Pragmatic Performance of Native and Non-Native Speakers" (Alwiya S. Omar); "Experimental and…

This overview of bilingual education concerns definitions, rationale, program and student characteristics, background in the United States, data on bilingual programs, the sociocultural context, the politics of bilingual education, the development of specific bilingual programs, and studies and implications for the foreign language profession.…

The series "Self-instructional Notes on Social Participation" is a six-volume series intended as teaching aids for adult educators. The theoretical, methodological, informative and practical elements of this series will assist professionals in their work and help them achieve greater success. The specific purpose of each notebook is…

Language attrition research usually attempts to elicit all types of usage from speakers of all fluency levels in a dying language in order to abstract changing linguistic patterns from situational variation. Informants adept at hiding their vernacular and improvising in an obsolescing variety are reluctant to admit to such scrutiny. In a…

From 1980 to 1990, the number of native Spanish speakers in the service region of Virginia's Germanna Community College (GCC) increased significantly. In response, GCC implemented a Spanish language occupational/technical curricula for law enforcement personnel and health professionals. Classes focused on the development of highly effective…

A program designed to improve higher-order thinking skills in secondary school students of Spanish as a second language is reported. Deficiency in higher order thinking was documented through teacher-constructed tests, students' oral presentations in Spanish, teacher observation journals, and student reflection logs. Analysis showed the students…

This report provides an overview of bilingual education in the Basque area of Spain over the last 10 years. Since 1982, a government decree established that public education was to be conducted following 1 of 3 models of bilingual education: 1) instruction is basically in Spanish, with Basque taught as a separate course; 2) content instruction is…

This book, part of a Mexican series of instructional materials, is directed toward people over the age of 15 who are interested in beginning, continuing or finishing their basic education. It explains the pedagogical model developed for adult education in Mexico based on the following features: (1) the content of the textbooks must be useful for…

Two studies investigated whether two conventions in the use of adversative conjunctions in English are acquired by native Spanish-speakers who are highly proficient in English. The two conventions are: (1) selection of "but" to introduce foreground information and (2) use of "although" to introduce background information. Subjects in the first…

In light of growing numbers of Mexican immigrants and other Spanish speakers in the United States, public schools must deal with shortages of certified bilingual teachers. This chapter describes efforts to address such shortages by the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA) and other agencies of the U.S. Department of…

This collection of papers by the graduate students and faculty in linguistics at the University of Kansas offers summaries of works in progress dealing with general linguistics and studies in Native American languages. General linguistics papers include: "Resetting Bounding Nodes in Acquiring Spanish" (Ramiro Cebreiros); "Syntax of…

The pragmatic expressions of Argentine Spanish (e.g., "bueno, viste, no? mira") are defined as deictic signals. They are deictic because they indicate elements of the communicative situation: transitions between text segments, conversational roles, or the social relationship between participants. They also signal contextual suppositions…

This study explored the teaching and learning of school-related knowledge and skills in the home of a Spanish-dominant Puerto Rican kindergartner. The teachers, in this case, were the child's older siblings. The study was part of a larger exploration of language use in the classroom versus the home during activities defined by adults as lessons.…

This report highlights 11 family support programs that are serving one of the fastest growing groups in the United States--the Latino population. The programs described in this report differ from each other in terms of their structures and the types of families and communities served. They represent a range of geographic areas and vary in terms of…