Purpose: To develop a reliable and valid questionnaire of bilingual language status with predictable relationships between self-reported and behavioral measures. Method: In Study 1, the internal validity of the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q) was established on the basis of self-reported data from 52 multilingual adult…

Joel Spring (2007/this issue) argues that in most nation states around the world today, English plays a central role primarily as a commodity of globalization. At the same time in the United States, English is being perpetuated in nationalistic terms as the only legitimate language. This is done through a variety of mechanisms such as language…

In this article, the author shares the strategy she adopted to even out the participation among her multicultural students during their classroom discussions. The author realized that her students had different concepts about the classroom and different philosophies about competition. For the Americans and Indians, the classroom was a site of…

The essays in this volume have been selected from papers presented at the 13th World Conference of the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction. The first WCCI Conference held in England in 1974, was followed by conferences in Turkey, the Philippines, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Egypt, India, Thailand, Spain, Australia, and again, the…

To compete in the work force today, the global and national economy demands our 21st century learners to write efficiently, effectively, and coherently. Due to minimal progress in writing scores over the past decade, spelling has increasingly become a subject of national debate as poor spelling can impede a writer's ability to formulate ideas and…

The verbal organizing abilities of the bilingual, multilingual, and monolingual, as measured by four subscales of the Goyer Organization of Ideas Test (GOIT), were investigated. A total of 163 subjects from 5 universities having high populations of multilingual students were administered the GOIT. Bilinguals were not as effective on the sequential…

The problems and advantages of being bilingual are discussed, along with the personality of bilinguals and the different forms of bilingualism. It is concluded that the optimum situation is passive bilingualism, i.e. reading and understanding various languages, accompanied by active monolingualism, i.e. speaking and writing only one language.…

Discusses communication between multilingual individuals by means of a language other than their native languages. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

This article studies the problem of social identity among six different racial groups in the British Honduras, focusing on what the groups call themselves and what others call them, and on the semantic field of these terms, i.e. the socio-cultural values they represent. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The Second Canadian Conference on Multiculturalism was held to clarify some of the issues upon which multiculturalism as a concept and as a policy depend. Cultural pluralism was investigated within the social, political, and historical framework of Canadian society. The opening session, called "The Bear Pit," invited questions and…

In rehabilitation, the team approach demands harmonious communication among practitioners of many professions and occupations at many different levels. Technical terminology needs to be concurrently understood or able to be explained easily. Although rehabilitation terminology is still somewhat in a state of flux, enough terms have been identified…

The educational history and practices of the Republic of Singapore, prefaced by a description of the inception of the republic, are described in this paper. The uniqueness of that history stems from the republic's multiracial society which requires equal education opportunities for all four official language groups--Malay, Chinese, Tamil (Indian),…

The multilingual EUDISED thesaurus is a documentary language specially conceived for the processing of information regarding education in Council of Europe member states. It is intended first for use by abstracting and indexing institutions, especially those which define the contents of documents for retrieval by computer. But it is also designed…

Adult educators, in non-formal, open university educational systems, must develop strategies for meeting the communication needs of a multilingual, educationally disadvantaged population, thus enabling language to be the vehicle for educational development. (LH)

A multilingual teacher discusses her approach to teaching non-English-speaking children. (JD)