Rapidly advancing technology continues to change the landscape of blended foreign language education. Pinpointing the differences between blended language (BL) learning environments and understanding how stakeholders experience such spaces is complex. However, learner experiences can provide a roadmap for the design and development of BL courses.…

The Educational Decree of 1863 was an effort by Spain to reform the Philippine colonial education system. The Decree established a complete system of education in the archipelago--it required two elementary schools in each municipality (one for girls and one for boys), standardized the curriculum, and established normal schools, thus making…

A study involving 75 Spanish-speaking fifth graders from a school in the Chicago area investigated whether a peer-led, open-format discussion approach, known as Collaborative Reasoning, would accelerate the students' English language development. Results showed that, after participating in eight discussions over a four-week period, the CR group…

The growth of the Mexican population in the U.S. Midwest has also been reflected in the public school population. Mexican students face many hardships in school such as language difficulties and cultural issues. Due to these hardships, their dropout rate from school is high and their attendance of postsecondary institutions is low. Using critical…

This study explored heterogeneity in literacy development among 2,300 Hispanic children receiving English as a Second Language (ESL) services at the start of kindergarten. Two research questions guided this work: (1) Do Spanish-speaking English language learners receiving ESL services in the fall of kindergarten demonstrate homogeneous early…

Researchers in second language socialization (SLS) often examine those interactions relating to a learner's integration within a target community. Kramsch and Whiteside (2008) noted the importance of "symbolic competence" in this integration. Symbolic competence, defined as the ability to access contextually relevant social and political…

This study examines the effects of processing instruction (PI) alone versus PI and output (O) on the acquisition of three conjunctional and infinitival phrases in Spanish. Seventy intermediate and advanced-intermediate high school participants received: 1) PI on three consecutive days (PI + PI + PI); 2) PI for two days and meaning-based output…

This study examined children's early literacy skills in both English and Spanish at entry to preschool to investigate the pattern of association among these skills and their families' home language and literacy practices. The participants were 392 primarily Latino immigrant (85%) families and their children. Mothers completed questionnaires about…

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability in reading and writing, which requires adequate early intervention to prevent future school failure. We describe the diagnostic assessment of a 7-year-old boy labelled "dyslexic", the evaluation of his family, social, medical, developmental, and academic status as a preliminary for the design…

Simple, lively, and easy-to-understand science books in Spanish for the very young are the new reality in the publishing world. In contrast to previous years where there has been a wider selection of books for beginning, middle, and advanced readers, today publishers in the United States (with a few exceptions) seem to be concentrating on books…

This paper builds on the emerging body of research aimed at exploring the educational potential of mobile technologies, specifically, how to leverage place-based, augmented reality mobile games for language learning. Mentira is the first place-based, augmented reality mobile game for learning Spanish in a local neighborhood in the Southwestern…

In this dissertation I discuss several aspects of the syntax, semantics and discourse properties of what I call Spanish verbless clauses -i.e. non-finite utterances with clausal properties: Spanish PredNP "muy listo este tio" "very intelligent this guy", Spanish PP complement clause "me sorprende lo caro del piso" "it amazes me how expensive this…

This research examines the processes which native Spanish-speaking learners of English and English-only students engage in when inferring meaning for unknown English words that have Spanish cognates. Conducted within the context of a large-scale vocabulary intervention that taught word inferencing strategies, including a cognate strategy, this…

The current study describes the development and psychometric testing of the Global Support From Mother Figure During Pregnancy Scale (GSMF-P). The measure is developed in both Spanish and English to assess social support provided to adolescents during their pregnancies. The current study examines the reliability, cross-language equivalence, and…

Past scholarly work has examined commercial greeting cards as an important cultural practice. The growing presence in the USA of bilingual greeting cards offers a site for understanding public uses of contact varieties of language. This paper analyses the reactions of 30 college educated US-raised bilingual Latinos to 17 intrasententially…