This article examines a study on how preservice teachers enhance their understanding of theory and research in second language learning through an action research project that took place in a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) education course. The study focuses on how interaction with English language learners (ELLs)…

Central to educating young children well is assessing them well--diagnosing, each child's unique talents, skills, and knowledge. Early childhood educators do this in an effort to individualize children's programs, creating tailor-made lesson plans and experiences that fit each child's needs. To do a good job of assessing young children whose home…

While a great deal of information exists to help physical education teachers respond to the increasing cultural diversity in United States schools, these teachers have received little help regarding how to cope with linguistic diversity. It is the responsibility of all teachers not only to ensure that students who are English-language learners…

If it is time to put the "world" into a world-class education, the author argues, then it is time to make foreign languages a greater priority in the U.S. education system. About 6% of the world's population speaks English as its primary language. English is widely spoken as a second language in countries where it has official status along with…

In this article, we draw from research on cognitive development, sociocultural learning, and organizational development to examine the key factors in teachers' professional learning. Our review of this literature suggests that looking at teachers' prior knowledge, the nature of their interactions, the representations they produce and use, and the…

Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) of oral reading has been used to aid in identifying students who are at risk for failing the reading portion of their spring state standards tests. The purpose of this study is to determine whether adding a maze reading measure would aid in predicting the performance of students who are English learners (ELs).…

This article reports a study of parental motivation, attitudes, support, and commitment for the second year of the two-way immersion (TWI) program at an elementary school in San Bernardino, California. Findings include the unique aspects of border communities; similarities and differences between Spanish-language and English-language participants;…

A group of new studies is providing fresh evidence of what many researchers have been saying all along: English immersion has more political appeal than educational merit. Dr. Amy Merickel, co-author of "Effects of the Implementation of Proposition 227 on the Education of English Learners K-12," says it is not possible given the data…

Actual empirical research that explores East Asian female international students' identity development is lacking. Therefore, a qualitative study was conducted to investigate how five East Asian female international students' identities are developed in a second-language environment, the United States. Challenging the conceptual approach that…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of supplemental reading instruction on the reading performance of four (two boys, two girls) second graders who were English learners (ELs) and poor readers through the use of a multiple probe across-participants design. All students received instruction from a commercial reading program,…

Although the United States is clearly a melting pot, the country has generally held monolingualism in English as the gold standard of U.S. citizenship for immigrants. Fewer than one in 10 students at U.S. colleges major in foreign languages, and only 9 percent learn the most widely spoken languages in the world, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian,…

Language learners' own intelligence, ability to concentrate, perseverance, cultural identity, high expectations, and organizational skills all play an important role in determining the ease with which students learn English while continuing to develop their first language. To accomplish the amazing task of acquiring a new language and culture,…

Assessing use of language learning strategies has become commonplace around the world. One strategy assessment tool is the questionnaire, which usually asks students to report on their typical, general use of language learning strategies. Because of this general focus, most questionnaires do not require respondents to complete an actual language…

This paper provides an Optimality Theoretic account of how Hungarian learners of English acquire /[epsilon]/ and /[ash]/. It is hypothesized that as the learners' pronunciation becomes more nativelike, L1 transfer substitutions will diminish; non-transfer substitutions will be especially prevalent in the intermediate stages, and that all learners…

This article examines the relationship between group and individual patterns of variation in one area of the grammar: verbal morphology. The results of studies of the acquisition of English and Hungarian verbal morphology by Chinese learners show that individual patterns of variation closely match group patterns on several dimensions. Multivariate…