The evidence of a general achievement gap, and more specifically, a reading gap between African American students and White students is a well documented and alarming phenomenon (Chatterji, 2006; Darling-Hammond, 2004, 2007; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin & Heilig, 2005; Fishback & Baskin, 1991; Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Haycock, 2001;…

The reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased dramatically since the 1980s. In response, researchers, educators, and policy makers have sought to develop effective technologies for assessment and intervention. A focus on evidenced-based practices is logical, given significant deficits in language, social interaction,…

The purpose of this study was to examine suburban high school teachers' beliefs about non-European ancestry immigrant students; more specifically, suburban teachers' beliefs regarding the impact of students' cultural backgrounds on academic performance were examined. Non-European ancestry immigrant students are those students whose ancestral…

Presently in the United States there are 4.4 million English language learners (ELLs) in public schools, with California public schools being home to more than 40% of these students (Rumberger & Gandara, 2004). Research indicates that it takes an individual up to seven years to fully develop a second language (Collier, 1987; Krashen, 1994).…

Writing, and the vocabulary building that goes with it, is a more complex process than merely putting words on a page. In the process of acquiring vocabulary, for example, students need to understand not just what individual words mean but also which combinations of these words in sentences or paragraphs convey a meaningful message to the reader…

For many purposes, it is useful to collect a corpus of texts all produced to the same stimulus, whether to measure performance (as on a test) or to test hypotheses about population differences. This paper examines several methods for measuring similarities in phrasing and content and demonstrates that these methods can be used to identify…

This article extends and expands the existing literature on critical thinking (CT) by both establishing the need for more student-centered research on the topic and reporting on the findings of a CT research project with two central, related goals: 1) To record and analyze undergraduate students' definition of CT and 2) To create an easy-to-use…

Research on minority languages is ordinarily not well known by speakers of "big" languages but it has focused on several areas of Applied Linguistics and it is relevant to many areas. This current volume of "AILA Review" features five articles. Each of the articles emphasizes some aspects of research, depending on the recent…

The number of Hispanic students in the nation's public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. Strong growth in Hispanic enrollment is expected to continue for decades, according to population projection by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using data from the 2006…

In Belgium and Brussels, macrocontextual features such as language policy and language legislation have a profound impact on people's language use and on the way languages are learned. In order to explain this impact, the political and economic developments that have determined the current context of learners in Brussels are discussed. Secondly, a…

This paper provides a case study of the use of language objectives within a newly developed English language teacher education programme in Hong Kong. The programme development team decided to adopt a content-based language teaching approach to support students' second language development through content learning. The teacher education programme…

The objective of the study was to identify and evaluate factors that are associated with differences in substance abuse between non-acculturated and acculturated Hispanic youth. We employed t-test and logistic regression to analyze self-reported survey data from 8,200 self-described Hispanic students. The outcome variable was past 30-day use of…

Contemporary best practices in the profession encourage teaching as much as possible in the target language, but when university faculty were observed teaching Spanish, the majority spoke English during instruction and many engaged in frequent code switching (alternations) between English and Spanish. Findings indicate that instructors used…

In general, the vitality and social functions of a language are assessed in connection with such indices as the language's intergenerational transmission, the absolute number of speakers and proportion of speakers in the population, its present domains of use, its development within diverse domains of use, and the availability of its educational…

This article reports on a qualitative case study involving pedagogical innovations grounded in culturally and linguistically inclusive approaches to curriculum. In this project, kindergarten children were supported in collaboratively authoring Dual Language Identity Texts. Our findings suggest that as family and teacher conceptions of literacy…