The Peace Accords of 1996 sought to bring significant changes for Indigenous people of Guatemala by promoting new educational opportunities centering on the recognition that culture and language are critical components of education. Bilingual intercultural programs have been created and attention to the detrimental effects of language loss and…

The increasing diversity in classrooms throughout the U.S. calls for teachers who are culturally competent and have quality professional development in working with dual language learners (DLLs) in order to ensure children from diverse groups are receiving equitable and high-quality education. This study focuses on teacher characteristics that…

School and work climate studies of LGBTQ-identified students and educators often reflect challenging environments for those with non-normative sexual and gender identities. Thus, this study sought to understand the experiences of LGBTQ-identified world language (WL) educators in the classroom as well as the intersections of their gender and sexual…

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of increasing the intellectual viability of lower-level foreign language (FL) study while facilitating connections between academic practice, learners' lives, and global communities. This article reports on a content-based role-immersion simulation (RIS) designed to incite a critical orientation…

A primary objective of development is to build a knowledge base. To accumulate knowledge over time and experiences, learners must engage in productive processes, going beyond what is explicitly given to generate new knowledge. Though important to accumulating knowledge, these processes are also easily disrupted. Individuals often depend on surface…

This dissertation presents the results of a tripartite exploration of English use by Latinxs in post-Katrina New Orleans, defined here as an ethnolinguistic repertoire that I call New Orleans Latinx English (NOLAE). The project considers how contemporary English use differs from that found in a pre-Katrina sample, how social network geometry…

Many scholars have argued that an intercultural approach to foreign language instruction best reflects the inherent interconnectedness of language and culture. However, abundant evidence of the effectiveness of such an approach is lacking, particularly at the secondary level. This two-year curricular experiment, which took place in two public high…

We take a multidimensional perspective on the development of second language (L2) speaking ability and examine how changes in the underlying cognitive variables of linguistic knowledge and processing speed interact with complexity, fluency, and accuracy over the course of a 3-month Spanish study abroad session. Study abroad provides a unique…

Though moral intuitions and choices seem fundamental to our core being, there is surprising new evidence that people resolve moral dilemmas differently when they consider them in a foreign language (Cipolletti et al., 2016; Costa et al., 2014a; Geipel et al., 2015): People are more willing to sacrifice 1 person to save 5 when they use a foreign…

This article explores the relationship between the writing proficiency of heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Spanish and their context of acquisition, educational experiences, and language practices. Biographical data and proficiency ratings obtained with the ACTFL Writing Proficiency Test were collected for 187 adult heritage…

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…

Emotional expressions have been proposed to be important for regulating social interaction as they can serve as cues for behavioral intentions. The issue has been mainly addressed analyzing the effects of facial emotional expressions in cooperation behavior, but there are contradictory results regarding the impact of emotional expressions on that…

Forty percent of Portuguese and Spanish speaking students in Toronto do not complete high school (Brown, 2006). This daunting statistic motivated Pueblito Canada, a Toronto-based Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) committed to Latino-Hispanic children, to initiate collaboration with the local Hispanic Development Council, a community activist…

This study examined the effects of participation in a community service-learning experience on Spanish heritage language learners' attitudes toward their heritage language and culture. Quantitative and qualitative data from heritage language learners demonstrated that engagement in community service-learning activities as part of the Spanish…

On college campuses throughout the United States, classes for decades have been offered to help Spanish speakers learn Portuguese, augmented recently by similar courses in Italian, French, and Catalan. Though there exist numerous commonalities between these innovative course offerings, the pivotal role of Spanish stands out. This essay therefore…