This article reports the outcomes of a multiyear study comparing the English and Spanish language and reading performance of Spanish-dominant children randomly assigned, beginning in kindergarten, to transitional bilingual education (TBE) or structured English immersion (SEI) for periods of up to 5 years. On the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and…

Identifying a community problem or need and helping to solve it via student-led initiatives is at the heart of service learning. Elson Nash, associate director for program management at Learn and Serve America, a grant program of the Corporation for National and Community Service and USA Freedom Corps, calls service learning "the glue that…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

Summarizing the findings of his study in southwestern Nova Scotia coastal fishing villages, Mike Corbett (2009), in his article "Rural Schooling in Mobile Modernity: Returning to the Places I've Been" lays out several arguments, including the following: First, that formal education "has been and continues to be...a key institution…

A number of recent studies have argued that bilingual children's language comprehension and production may be affected by cross-linguistic influence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to judge the grammaticality of a construction in one language is affected by knowledge of the corresponding construction in the…

This study evaluates 39 different phonetic inventories of 16 Spanish-speaking children (ages 0;11 to 5;1) in terms of hierarchical complexity. Phonetic featural differences are considered in order to evaluate the proposed implicational hierarchy of Dinnsen et al.'s phonetic inventory typology for English. The children's phonetic inventories are…

Research and development of a new type of scoring rubric for the integrated speaking tasks of "TOEFL iBT"® are described. These "analytic rating guides" could be helpful if tasks modeled after those in TOEFL iBT were used for formative assessment, a purpose which is different from TOEFL iBT's primary use for admission…

This study focuses on how a Chicana/Latina professor contributed to the development of social consciousness with Spanish bilingual credential candidates in a Teacher Education Multiple Subject Credential Program, in California, USA. As a teacher educator, my goals were to look deeply at my teaching approach and to evaluate what the students and I…

One effect of the Bologna Declaration is that teaching staff and students are becoming more mobile, increasing linguistic diversity in the European Higher Education Area. This multilingual internationalisation is especially noticeable in bilingual universities such as the University of the Basque Country in Spain, where English-medium instruction…

Current assessment practices in the United States are not able to accurately capture the total linguistic, cognitive, and achievement abilities of bilingual learners. There are psychometric complexities involved when assessing and interpreting test results of bilingual students, which impact the validity of this practice. Further, the compromise…

Parent-teacher communication and partnerships are important in children's early years. This study compared goal setting, conducted in English, during Head Start parent-teacher conferences with native Spanish speaking, Latino bilingual, and native English speaking parents and their children's teachers. To understand conference goal-setting…

The authors report on an exploratory pilot project implemented in a large city on the U.S.-Mexico border. The project focuses on a curricular design in a secondary school where beginning-level English as a second language students are taught English language arts in Spanish. The researchers sought to determine whether these students made greater…

This study examines the educational and societal experiences that lead students to maintain or lose their heritage language to see how these experiences affect the language choices that young Latino/a adults are making after high school. Examining the experiences that lead language learners to lose or maintain their native language is important…

Technology-informed approaches to L2 research and teaching have prompted great interest by both researchers and practitioners alike. This book highlights the relationship between digitally-mediated technologies and second language pragmatics by presenting exemplary applications of technology for both research and pedagogy. Part I presents…

Teaching foreign language writing often lacks adjustments to the requirements of today's students of the "Internet Generation" (iGen): traditionally teachers set a--not very inspiring--topic, a deadline and then return a discouraging, manually underlined and/or annotated text without systematic labeling. The annotated document is then…