Bibliography: Bilingual Education (page 393 of 829)

This annotated bibliography is reformatted and customized by the Center for Positive Practices.  Some of the authors featured on this page include Thomas M. Bohman, L. Quentin Dixon, Anita Mendez-Perez, Kate Menken, Maria Teresa de la Piedra, Ping Li, Liesbeth Maria van Beijsterveldt, Elin Thordardottir, Jon Russell Herring, and Tatyana Kleyn.

Grosjean, Francois (2010). Bilingualism, Biculturalism, and Deafness, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. This paper contains three parts. In the first part, what it means to be bilingual in sign language and the spoken (majority) language is explained, and similarities as well as differences with hearing bilinguals are discussed. The second part examines the biculturalism of deaf people. Like hearing biculturals, they take part, to varying degrees, in the life of two worlds (the deaf world and the hearing world), they adapt their attitudes, behaviors, and languages to both worlds, and they combine and blend aspects of the two. The decisional process they go through in choosing a cultural identity is discussed and the difficulties met by some groups are examined. The third part begins with a discussion of why early bilingualism is crucial for the development of deaf children. The reasons that bilingualism and biculturalism have not normally had the favor of those involved in nurturing and educating deaf children are then discussed. They are of two kinds: misunderstandings concerning bilingualism and sign language; and the lack of acceptance of certain realities by many professionals in deafness, most notably members of the medical world. The article ends with a discussion of the role of the two languages in the development of deaf children.   [More]  Descriptors: Sign Language, Deafness, Biculturalism, Bilingualism

Bohman, Thomas M.; Bedore, Lisa M.; Pena, Elizabeth D.; Mendez-Perez, Anita; Gillam, Ronald B. (2010). What You Hear and What You Say: Language Performance in Spanish-English Bilinguals, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Purpose: This study assesses the factors that contribute to Spanish and English language development in bilingual children. Method: Seven hundred and fifty-seven Hispanic prekindergarten and kindergarten-age children completed screening tests of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English. Parents provided information about their occupation and education as well as their children's English and Spanish exposure. Data were analyzed using zero-inflated regression models (comprising a logistic regression component and a negative binomial or Poisson component) to explore factors that contributed to children initiating L1 and L2 performance and factors that contributed to building children's knowledge. Results: Factors that were positively associated with initiating L1 and L2 performance were language input/output, free and reduced lunch, and age. Factors associated with building knowledge included age, parent education, input/output, free and reduced lunch, and school district. Conclusion: Amount of language input is important as children begin to use a language, and amount of language output is important for adding knowledge to their language. Semantic development seemed to be driven more by input while morphosyntax development relied on both input and output. Clinicians who assess bilingual children should examine children's language output in their second language to better understand their levels of performance.   [More]  Descriptors: Semantics, Screening Tests, Parent Education, Linguistic Input

Menken, Kate; Kleyn, Tatyana (2010). The Long-Term Impact of Subtractive Schooling in the Educational Experiences of Secondary English Language Learners, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. This study examines a lesser-known population of students, called "long-term English language learners" (LTELLs) in the USA, who now comprise one-third of all English language learners in New York City secondary schools. A major finding from our research, which explores the characteristics and educational needs of this student population, is that the students' prior schooling has been subtractive, posing significant challenges for their academic literacy acquisition. Having attended school in the USA for seven years or more, LTELLs have experienced programming that has not provided sufficient opportunities to fully develop their native language literacy skills, in spite of research which states that such opportunities are correlated with school success. LTELLs thus arrive in high school with limited academic literacy in English or their native languages, in spite of their oral bilingualism, posing difficulties for them in all subject areas. As part of a three-year research project, we conducted qualitative research in three New York City high schools. This article draws upon interview data and document analyses to describe the interconnection between the students' schooling experiences, language usage, and current academic challenges. We provide suggestions for how programming can be designed to address the needs of this often overlooked student population.   [More]  Descriptors: High School Students, Second Language Learning, English (Second Language), Educational Experience

Koutsoubou, M. (2010). The Use of Narrative Analysis as a Research and Evaluation Method of Atypical Language: The Case of Deaf Writing, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The present paper argues the use of "narratives" as the most appropriate evaluation method in cases of atypical language production. Narrative as a genre has an ecological validity that other genres used in language research and evaluation do not have. Narratives develop naturally from very early, they are independent of education and academic skills, and they are meaningful because of their direct contact to experience. As a result the paper argues that "narrative analysis" is the most appropriate evaluation and research method for atypical language, one instance of which is deaf writing. The paper will present an example of narrative analysis application on a story written by a deaf writer. Via the illustrative example it will be shown that narrative analysis captures deeper levels of the language production by exploring the "content of information", and the "structure of text".   [More]  Descriptors: Language Research, Evaluation Methods, Deafness, Personal Narratives

Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C.; Thomas, Enlli Mon; Jones, Leah; Guasch, Nestor Vinas; Young, Nia; Hughes, Emma K. (2010). Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism: Digging Deeper for the Contributions of Language Dominance, Linguistic Knowledge, Socio-Economic Status and Cognitive Abilities, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh-English bilingual and English monolingual primary school age and teenage children were tested on two executive function tasks, a tapping task and a Stroop task. Bilingual children came from homes in which only Welsh, Welsh and English, or only English was spoken. Results differed by task. On the tapping task, bilingual children from only Welsh homes showed overall superior performance, monolinguals inferior, with the other two bilingual groups between them. Performance correlated with general cognitive abilities with number and pattern discrimination, as well as, at the older age, with balanced use of the two languages. On the Stroop task, language tested mattered; there were no differences across groups in Welsh, but complex patterns in English. The only strictly bilingual advantage on the Stroop was at the younger age for children from Welsh and English homes when tested in English, and performance was also influenced by SES level, cognitive abilities, vocabulary levels and use of the two languages.   [More]  Descriptors: Language Dominance, Socioeconomic Status, Linguistics, Monolingualism

de la Piedra, Maria Teresa (2010). Religious and Self-Generated Quechua Literacy Practices in the Peruvian Andes, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. This article discusses Quechua speakers' religious literacy practices in the native language in a rural community located in the department of Cuzco (Peru). I argue that in a situation where the school did not play the role of developing or maintaining the written vernacular, a group of community members found specific situations where they felt comfortable writing in their mother tongue. This study contributes to the discussion of native language literacy and Quechua language maintenance by examining adult and child Quechua literacy practices in the religious realm. Additionally, I present the case of Marcos, as an example of a self-generated literacy practice of authoring huaynos (songs in Quechua), as a result of the author's participation in a Protestant church. Findings show that literacy skills developed in the religious domain can be transferred across contexts. However, these literacy practices were endangered by macro forces of globalization.   [More]  Descriptors: Language Maintenance, Global Approach, Foreign Countries, Literacy

Herring, Jon Russell; Deuchar, Margaret; Couto, M. Carmen Parafita; Quintanilla, Monica Moro (2010). "I Saw the Madre": Evaluating Predictions about Codeswitched Determiner-Noun Sequences Using Spanish-English and Welsh-English Data, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Previous work on intrasentential codeswitching has noted that switches between determiners and their noun complements are frequent in both Spanish-English and Welsh-English data. Two major recent theories of codeswitching, the Matrix Language Frame model and a Minimalist Program approach, make potentially competing predictions regarding the source language of the determiner in these mixed nominal constructions. In this paper we evaluate the predictions of each theory with reference to comparable sets of Spanish-English and Welsh-English codeswitching data. Mixed nominal constructions are extracted to test the compatibility of these data with the predictions, taking into account coverage and accuracy. We find that the data are broadly consistent with each set of predictions but do not find statistically significant differences between the accuracy of the predictions of the two theories. We examine in detail the counterexamples to the predictions of each theory to see what further factors may influence codeswitching patterns between determiners and their nouns, and also discuss the differences in observed patterns in the data from each language pair.   [More]  Descriptors: Nouns, Prediction, Code Switching (Language), Spanish

Al-Azami, Salman; Kenner, Charmian; Ruby, Mahera; Gregory, Eve (2010). Transliteration as a Bridge to Learning for Bilingual Children, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. This paper examines how transliteration can be used as a bridge to learning for children who are studying more than one script. The focus is on second and third generation British Bangladeshi children aged 7-11, attending London primary schools and learning to write in Bengali at community-run after-school classes. An action research project explored how Bengali could be used as well as English to enhance learning at mainstream schools. Transliteration of Bengali into Roman script was found to aid this process in the following ways: as a communicative bridge between children, parents and teachers; as a conceptual bridge, promoting reflection on meanings and metalinguistic awareness; as a bridge to the Bengali script itself, mediating between oral and written representation; and as a bridge to new learner identities, enabling expression of ideas and building children's confidence as bilingual writers.   [More]  Descriptors: Metalinguistics, Action Research, English (Second Language), Indo European Languages

Lam, Kevin J. Y.; Dijkstra, Ton (2010). Word Repetition, Masked Orthographic Priming, and Language Switching: Bilingual Studies and BIA+ Simulations, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Daily conversations contain many repetitions of identical and similar word forms. For bilinguals, the words can even come from the same or different languages. How do such repetitions affect the human word recognition system? The Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model provides a theoretical and computational framework for understanding word recognition and word repetition in bilinguals. The model assumes that both phenomena involve a language non-selective process that is sensitive to the task context. By means of computer simulations, the model can specify both qualitatively and quantitatively how bilingual lexical processing in one language is affected by the other language. Our review discusses how BIA+ handles cross-linguistic repetition and masked orthographic priming data from two key empirical studies. We show that BIA+ can account for repetition priming effects within- and between-languages through the manipulation of resting-level activations of targets and neighbors (words sharing all but one letter with the target). The model also predicts cross-linguistic performance on within- and between-trial orthographic priming without appealing to conscious strategies or task schema competition as an explanation. At the end of the paper, we briefly evaluate the model and indicate future developments.   [More]  Descriptors: Code Switching (Language), Word Recognition, Bilingualism, Cues

Dixon, L. Quentin (2010). The Importance of Phonological Awareness for the Development of Early English Reading Skills among Bilingual Singaporean Kindergartners, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. To examine the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and English word-level reading among a multilingual sample, a random sample of 297 Singaporean kindergartners, stratified by ethnicity (169 Chinese, 65 Malay, and 63 Indian), were tested on their PA, receptive vocabulary, and word-level reading skills. Singaporean kindergartners are all bilingual or early second-language (L2) learners of English and learn English reading through logographic (look-say) instruction. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners scored lower than mostly monolingual US norming groups on English vocabulary and PA but higher than US norms on English reading, confirming findings in other contexts that L2 learners of English can be successful at word-level reading despite low levels of oral proficiency. However, these findings challenge the hypothesis based on Seymour's dual foundations model of reading that learning an alphabetic language logographically slows reading acquisition. Despite a curriculum which did not teach sound-symbol correspondences for reading English, PA had a larger, statistically significant influence than vocabulary (also statistically significant) on English reading with both variables in a multilevel regression model, controlling for demographic factors. These findings highlight the importance of PA to English reading, even in bilingual and L2 learning children who were taught to read English logographically.   [More]  Descriptors: Vocabulary, Multilingualism, Phonological Awareness, Monolingualism

Song, Juyoung (2010). Language Ideology and Identity in Transnational Space: Globalization, Migration, and Bilingualism among Korean Families in the USA, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. A growing transnational migration trend among (South) Korean families brings heterogeneity to the Korean-American communities in the US in terms of educational practices and identity. Based on interviews with Korean mothers, this study discusses how two groups of Koreans, Korean immigrants and early study abroad sojourners, enacted and adopted different language ideologies that resulted in divergent attitudes to and different strategies for their children's language education. The interviews with early study abroad families, in particular, revealed that their attitudes to language education were closely related to the language ideologies of global English in Korea. That is, these early study abroad families circulated "glocalized" English (localized global English) through transnational migration as an educational strategy. Particularly, two language ideologies of global English: (1) language as marketable commodity; and (2) language for cosmopolitan membership, become apparent and intensified in their discourse on language education. A pluralistic approach to an immigrant community highlights the intra-group variations in US immigrant populations, yielding an understanding of their diverse educational practices and identities. This study also contributes to a dynamic notion of bilingualism and language learning in transnational space by emphasizing the multiple and context-specific nature of language ideologies.   [More]  Descriptors: Educational Strategies, Language Role, Global Approach, Ideology

Zhao, Xiaowei; Li, Ping (2010). Bilingual Lexical Interactions in an Unsupervised Neural Network Model, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. In this paper we present an unsupervised neural network model of bilingual lexical development and interaction. We focus on how the representational structures of the bilingual lexicons can emerge, develop, and interact with each other as a function of the learning history. The results show that: (1) distinct representations for the two lexicons can develop in our network when the two languages are learned simultaneously; (2) the representational structure is highly dependent on the onset time of the second language (L2) learning if the two languages are learned sequentially; and (3) L2 representation becomes parasitic on the representation of the first language when the learning of L2 occurs late. The results suggest a dynamic developmental picture for bilingual lexical acquisition: the acquisition of two languages entails strong competition in a highly interactive context and involves limited plasticity as a function of the timing of L2 learning.   [More]  Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Bilingualism, Vocabulary Development, Age

Namazi, Mahchid; Thordardottir, Elin (2010). A Working Memory, Not Bilingual Advantage, in Controlled Attention, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. We explored the relationship between working memory (WM) and visually controlled attention (CA) in young bilingual and monolingual children. Previous research has shown that balanced bilingual children outperform monolinguals in CA. However, it is unclear whether this advantage is truly associated with bilingualism or whether potential WM and/or language differences led to the observed effects. Therefore, we examined whether bilingual and monolingual children differ on a visual measure of CA after potential differences in verbal and visual WM had been accounted for. We also looked at the relationship between visually CA and visual WM. Fifteen French monolingual children, 15 English monolingual children, and 15 early simultaneous bilingual children completed verbal short-term memory, verbal WM, visual WM, and visual CA tasks. Detailed information regarding language exposure was collected and abilities in each language were evaluated. A bilingual advantage was not found; that is, monolingual and bilingual children were equally successful in ignoring the irrelevant perceptual distraction on the Simon Task. However, children with better visual WM scores were also more faster and more accurate on the Simon Task. Furthermore, visual WM correlated significantly with the visual CA task.   [More]  Descriptors: Nonverbal Tests, Short Term Memory, Monolingualism, Bilingualism

Fuertes, Raquel Fernandez; Liceras, Juana M. (2010). Copula Omission in the English Developing Grammar of English/Spanish Bilingual Children, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The present study takes as a point of departure Becker's analysis of the copula "be" in English monolingual data and focuses on the distribution of copula "be" in the data from two English/Spanish bilingual children. Our data analysis shows that, as in Becker's study, the distribution of copula omission in the bilingual data is determined by the nature of the predicate. However, the omission patterns in our English bilingual data do not coincide with those described by Becker for the English monolingual data, since total omission is very low in our data and there are no significant differences between the stage-level (SL) and the individual-level (IL) predicates. We attribute this to crosslinguistic influence from Spanish, specifically, to the existence of two distinct copulas in Spanish, "ser" and "estar"; in particular, we propose that the lexical distinction between these two predicates may trigger the earlier projection of inflection and with it the use of an overt copula in both languages, but specifically in English, and for both SL and IL predicates.   [More]  Descriptors: Monolingualism, Data Analysis, Bilingualism, English (Second Language)

van Beijsterveldt, Liesbeth Maria; van Hell, Janet (2010). Lexical Noun Phrases in Texts Written by Deaf Children and Adults with Different Proficiency Levels in Sign Language, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in Dutch and SLN (presence of overt subject and object NPs, NP modifiers, and NP-internal agreement), or are absent in SLN (articles). We found that deaf participants experienced significant difficulty with lexical NPs. Further, deaf proficiently signing children (but not adults) more often omitted obligate articles than deaf low-proficiently signing children. Deaf proficiently signing children and adults did not differ from low-proficiently signing children and adults, however, in the use of NP modifiers, NP-agreement errors and omissions of obligatory NPs. We conclude that proficiency in sign language seems to affect particularly those aspects that differ substantially across sign language and oral language, in this case, articles. We argue that adopting a bimodal bilingual approach is important to understand the writing of deaf children.   [More]  Descriptors: Nouns, Written Language, Indo European Languages, Sign Language

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