Examined codeswitching to negotiate power or solidarity in adults' conversational exchanges and discusses ebonics as used by African Americans in urban adult basic education programs. Findings from 12 interviews and 20 videotapes show how adult learners use language to inform and interpret themselves in the world. (SLD)

Reviews 43 recently-published collections of poetry for children that were considered by the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Committee. Groups them in terms of: evoking an image or idea; visual poetry; word play; and the voice. (SR)

Conducted a study on the use of the mother tongue in English classes at the University of Puerto Rico. Recorded a 35-minute transcript from three classes at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester to see how often teachers used Spanish. Teachers filled out a questionnaire about their attitudes toward the use of Spanish and English in the…

Investigates the language situation in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Prefecture in China's Hunan province. By examining language use in certain domains of public life (public signs, radio and television broadcasting, publishing, and education) certain discrepancies between government policies for minority languages and realities of everyday use of the…

Investigated whether the content of infant speech productions is better characterized as preserving stressed and final syllables or as preserving a trochaic pattern; used a detailed longitudinal description of one child's syllable omission. Found that the trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. (Author/JPB)

Notes that the author/educator noticed that his efforts at teaching poetry were failing. Describes how he decided to make poets out of his students--to start by showing how they can be affected by language. Notes that students started with just a word, then wrote poems, and then began to demand forms, which the teacher then introduced to the…

This study surveyed 86 parents who enrolled their children in a Chinese-English bilingual preschool in San Francisco. The participants were asked their opinions on bilingual education, the reasons for sending their children to a Chinese-English bilingual school, their attitudes toward bilingual education, their use of Chinese and English, and…

This qualitative study explores how francophone mothers describe barriers to and supports for maintaining their mother tongue. It focuses on the experiences of women who have the primary responsibility for teaching French to their pre-school-aged children. The findings, based on data collected in semi-structured interviews with women residing in…

This article describes the pitfalls of using key words to support students when problem solving, and provides an alternative way (quantitative analysis) to support students' sense-making. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

An assumption that is fundamental to the scoring of student-constructed responses (e.g., essays) is the ability of raters to focus on the response characteristics of interest rather than on other features. A common example, and the focus of this study, is the ability of raters to score a response based on the content achievement it demonstrates…

The authors argue that in classrooms with students from linguistically diverse backgrounds, instruction should explicitly activate prior knowledge. Teachers have the opportunity to create environments that affirm the identities of English language learners, thereby increasing the confidence with which these students engage in language and literacy…

This article focuses on the particular challenges, choices, and celebrations relevant to teaching in an urban setting. The speech of African American students is described as rich and reflective of the African American oral tradition. The article also discusses the meaning, rules and the evolution of African American English.

This study compared clinic-anxious Hispanic/Latino and European American youths (ages 6 to 17 years old) along sociodemographic and clinical variables. Groups were relatively similar, although significant differences emerged as a function of ethnocultural and language choice (English, Spanish) used during the assessment. Within the English…

Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in…

The use of BE as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only HAVE, in Catalan and Romanian BE occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, BE is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since BE is still used as the…