In two Texas elementary schools with similar student demographics but different school and district environments, teacher expectations about bilingual education students were influenced by differing bilingual education goals, beliefs about the value of student native language, teacher beliefs and district expectations about curriculum, and the use…

The literature on language diversity, linguistic human rights, and language renewal is reviewed, and Web sites dedicated to Aboriginal languages are examined. The Internet provides a resource center where grammars, lexicons, fonts, and other resources can be developed; a means of learning languages; and a medium for communicating in Aboriginal…

Less than 200 years ago, nearly every Cherokee could read and write the Cherokee language because of the syllabary form of writing invented by Sequoyah. Language use declined due to government boarding school policies that forbade use of the Cherokee language. Isolated communities and medicine people kept the language alive. Current efforts to…

Criticisms against bilingual education policy are myopic and focus on nostalgic notions of Americanization and assimilation. Bilingual education supports heritage-language students' cultural identities and expands their contexts of choice, thus developing their self-determination and preparing them to participate in democracy. Federal policies…

Focus groups and interviews with 37 teachers and 4 principals examined their roles and experiences in Papahana Kaiapuni, a K-12 program taught entirely in Hawaiian. Teachers integrated Hawaiian culture into the curriculum and viewed the program as a model of school reform for Native Hawaiians. The program transformed many teachers' views of…

Attitudes toward bilingualism in Ireland were explored among 38 fifth-grade students attending Irish-medium or English-medium schools, their parents, and staff. English-medium school students indicated little need for Irish and valued bilingualism in other European languages but not Irish. Irish-medium students found Irish useful immediately and…

Nationally, foreign language faculty have been adjusting their curricula to ensure that today's college students know how to use technology to communicate effectively in languages other than their native tongue. Once upon a time, students were considered fluent if they could read, write, speak and aurally comprehend a foreign language. However…

This paper is based on an observational study concerning the effectiveness of elementary education. It was conducted in a rural area near Alotau, the provincial capital of the Milne Bay Province, with a special focus on the Maiwala Elementary School. In this paper, the author first briefly describes what elementary education is and how it has been…

This paper explores issues of teaching and learning Chinese as a heritage language in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo Saturday School, in Montreal, Quebec. With a student population of more than 1000, this school is the largest of the eight Chinese Heritage Language schools in Montreal. Students participating in this study were…

Many parents in the United States who speak and value a language other than English feel torn-between wanting their children to develop age-appropriate fluency and literacy in the language of their heritage, and wanting their children to acquire English as quickly and flawlessly as possible. When parents support communication in and acquisition of…

In this paper, the author aims to explore the connections between the right to basic education through the medium of the mother tongue and the right to education. She concentrates on child labor in India in general, and in Maharashtra, a state in Western India, in particular. She draws her data mainly from Pune (population 3,000,000), one of the…

This study examines the implications that state educational policies, such as high-stakes testing in English and Proposition 227, have on teaching and learning in primary language instruction for English learners in California. Utilizing cultural-historical activity theory of learning and development, this qualitative case study uncovers the…

The transcript (translated into English) of a roundtable discussion of literacy among francophone women in Canada begins with the personal narrative of one women who gained literacy skills as an adult. The panel of three specialists in francophone women's literacy in Canada then look at the literacy rate among Canadian women, and the demand for…

The design and development of GRACILE, a collaborative learning environment in the domain of Japanese language patterns and expressions, is described. The environment is designed to allow learning goals communication, learning activities negotiation, and collaboration between learners. From a group of student models, a potential development level…

The purpose of this study was to compare the Gilbertian mathetical sequence (MS) with the Skinnerian logical sequence (LS) methodologies in their effectiveness for language teaching. A series of 3 experiments were designed to investigate the effect of MS and LS on the teaching of Japanese Kanji characters to 24 Japanese fifth-graders. The students…