The Power of Speaking More Than Two Languages

The Data that has been collected, read, and analysis was to determine Miguel’s strengths and challenges (weaknesses). According to Miguel’s Data his strengths are Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and Vocabulary. In the phonemic awareness: The student is scoring very well in phonemic awareness/oral language. He was able to get 10 out of 10 in sounding out words. He was also able to

To my surprise, the challenges that the minority students experience in the United States have never crosses my mind. However after going through this article, I bet to concur with all the arguments provided by the authors. It is true the high number of people migrating to the United States have significant impacts on the nation at large. This is because many people have known the things that are happening in the schools regarding the perception on minorities and little efforts have been done to deal with the situation. The message writtern in the article is reiablesince the United States as a nation is facing a problem when it comes to its ability to accommodate people who are moving into the country especially in terms of schooling (Commins & Miramontes, 2006). Additionally, there is also an issue about teaching language were the minorities are experiencing a problem in learning linguistics. The fact that the increasing number of immigrants to the United States has posed a challenge to the school system is also interesting. The discussion about the success of linguistic languages in schools is something that has been in mind for a long time.

Bilingual Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (BCIRC) is the intervention program designed to help Spanish-speaking English Language Learners(ELL) students successfully read in Spanish and make a successful transition to English reading. The target of the intervention was the Spanish-dominant ELL students who attended seven elementary schools which had the highest rates of poverty and the lowest levels of student achievement in El Paso, Texas. The 222 Spanish-speaking ELL students in the second (n = 120) and third (n = 102) grades initially participated in the study and were assigned to the mixed-ability (high, medium, and low achieving)

Immigrants and language minority students like English learners are among the fastest growing populations in U.S. public schools. The Urban Institute finds that the share of children enrolled

The students’ linguistic background is 100% Spanish speaking and most of them are considered linguistically proficient in their native language. Although most of them do not present any difficulty speaking conversational Spanish, some of them present some inconsistencies at the time to use academic language.

In this article, the researchers employed usage-based theories in their study in order to examine the language development of bilingual children. The purpose of their study was to investigate the various factors that affect vocabulary and story recall abilities of bilingual children in both of their languages. The researchers targeted the following factors: the children’s exposure to their two language (determined by the length of time that the children lived in the United States), the age at which the children were communicated with regularly in English, the language(s) currently used by mothers, fathers, and teachers

The reading is directly concerned with the reasons underlying bilingual children's poor performance on standardized tests. The research believes that we as a nation constantly misunderstand the nature of bilingualism itself. Therefore, the problems encountered by bilingual individuals on such tests will continue to be misconstrued. This relates to my research because an overwhelming number of Latino students that took my survey and may have influenced results by the language barrier.

After assessing Eduardo in his native language to determine his literacy proficiency in Spanish, strategies that can be used to develop Eduardo’s phonological awareness are rhyme, alliteration, segmentation and blending (Caldwell & Leslie, 2013, pg. 49). Assessment of Eduardo’s phonemic awareness should include sorting tasks, counting tasks, word building and using letters (Caldwell & Leslie, 2013, pg. 57-58). Eduardo’s teacher can use read-a-louds, small group activities, repetition, and ways of incorporating Eduard’s native language into classroom and

This study will involve 2 English/Spanish bilingual children, ages 10 to 15. The potential population of participants comes from a variety of Spanish speaking countries including Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The potential participants are children living with their parents who are students at Southern Illinois University.

Given the current achievement reading gap between White and Hispanic populations, research on Spanish-English EBs is always important, not just for educators and practitioners to transcribe it into classroom practices, but also for EBs and their families to provide the support the EBs need to overcome the literary gap between these two

Immigration has brought about significant changes in the U.S. student population. In particular, the number and percentage of immigrants in schools have increased dramatically since 1970. From 1970 to 1995, the number of immigrant children, ages 5 to 20, living in the United States more than doubled, from 3.5 to 8.6 million. As the number grew, immigrant children represented a larger percentage of students in U.S. schools, increasing from 6% in 1970 to 16% in 1995 and 19% in 1997 (Ruiz de Velasco & Fix, 2000). While their numbers have increased, English language learners (ELLs) lag significantly behind their fluent English-speaking peers in reading. For example, in California, ELLs participating in statemandated standardized testing performed worse

Imagine what Christopher Columbus first said when stepping on American soil. Perhaps he said: “This land holds great promise.” Whatever he said the more fascinating question to ponder centers around what language did he speak, for Christopher Columbus, a multi-linguist, knew Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. So what happened to the diversity of languages in this land of promise? Many foreigners contribute to the melting pot of America, bringing their culture and language, yet American schools continue to teach just one language in today’s society. The heated debate among parents, educators, and politicians over a multilingual education in the United States began in the late nineteenth century. Over the next sixty years many crucial

English and speak English at home than the overall U.S. foreign-born population (DHS, 2014). In 2013, about “69 percent of Mexican immigrants ages 5 and older reported limited English proficiency, compared to 50 percent of the total foreign-born population”(DHS, 2014). Approximately “4 percent of Mexican immigrants spoke only English at home, versus 16 percent of all immigrants”(DHS, 2014). Assimilation has its merits as it encourages immigrants to learn to speak English, the language that is required to succeed in life as well as experience ordinary life in the United States. Without assimilating enough to at least learn English, the predominant language of the United States, immigrants cannot communicate with Americans and will be confined to their ethnic group. Studies show that immigrants that learn and adopt English as their first language are more likely to self identify as being American (Renshon, 2009). Acquiring language skills is a means that helps immigrants become more attached to America’s institutions, to its way of life and its communities. Assimilation not only means learning English, but also developing an appreciation for civil rights, and abiding by laws. Consequently without assimilation, an immigrant will always be “diverse”, and this divisiveness will inevitably destroy America and its prosperity. Diversity in this sense is not strength, but rather a weakness. Unity, values and a shared identity is what defines a country (Huntington, 2004).

The bilingual participants were split into two groups based on their total proficiency scores, the more proficient bilinguals (N = 30) and the less proficient bilinguals (N = 37). This was determined through the language proficiency section of the childhood questionnaire. Individuals with a total proficiency score of 12 or lower were classified as the less proficient bilinguals, while individuals with a score of 13 to 16 were classified as the more

Concrete words can be defined as an object, as opposed to abstract words, which are an action or state (Walker & Hulme, 1999). Phonetic (or letter) fluency requires individuals to produce as many words as possible that start with a given letter, excluding numbers, proper names, places or words in different forms (Luo et al., 2010). This task puts less demand on the participants during the assessment. Therefore, it can be predicated that bilingual individuals will recall and produce more words during the phonetic fluency tasks, compared to semantic fluency task. Both tasks rely on vocabulary for word retrieval, which is accessing the mental lexicon (Luo et al., 2010). A study assessing verbal fluency differences between bilingual and monolingual college students found phonemic fluency tasks to be less challenging for both groups (Portocarrero et al., 2007). Both groups presented similar performances on phonetic fluency, however bilinguals performed significantly lower on a semantic fluency task (Portocarrero et al., 2007). Studies indicate that bilingual adults are more likely to perform better on verbal fluency when asked to generate as many words within a minute, during the phonemic fluency task (Salvatierra et al., 2007; Luo et al., 2010). This suggests the hypotheses of cross-language interference affecting semantic fluency, but not phonemic fluency because the participants showed significant differences in semantic fluency but not phonemic fluency. Taler et al. (2013) assessed the same task, however, they observed the subjects to repeat the words during the phonemic fluency task. The findings did not result in any differences of semantic and phonemic fluency performance in monolingual and bilingual groups. According to Lipski (2014) bilinguals are likely to mix the languages in attempt to speak monolingual in their second language. This may affect their use of compound