This study investigated the effects of advance organizers on the English reading comprehension of six bilingual learning disabled students. Little research has examined instructional strategies for teaching bilingual learning disabled students, a growing population in our schools. Based on research dealing with the use of advance organizers as an instructional strategy and on research in bilingual education, this study compared the effectiveness of using advance organizers on the English reading comprehension of six learning disabled students whose primary language was Spanish. An alternating treatment design was maintained. Following each treatment, the students read an expository text written in English and answered eight comprehension questions based on five levels of reading taxonomy. The number of correctly answered comprehension questions was recorded on graphs and statistically analyzed to compare the treatment conditions. In addition, the average proportion of correct responses for different levels of questions was computed and analyzed. Analyses of the data suggest that advance organizers were effective particularly when presented in the dominant language of the student. The five students who demonstrated equal or greater language proficiency in English scored higher when the English advance organizer was compared to the Spanish advance organizer. The student who demonstrated greater language proficiency in Spanish scored higher on the Spanish advance organizer. All students scored higher when the English advance organizer was used in comparison to no advance organizer. Three of the students scored higher on reading comprehension when the advance organizer was presented in Spanish as compared to no advance organizer. Students performed highest on questions at the appreciation and evaluation levels of the reading taxonomy. This study supports the body of research which suggests advance organizers are an effective instructional strategy and suggests their effectiveness with bilingual learning disabled students. This study also highlights the importance of considering students' dominant language, particularly their cognitive/academic/language proficiency, when determining the language for presentation of the advance organizer. Further research needs to systematically investigate the interrelationship between advance organizers and students' dominant language when attempting to facilitate English reading comprehension.

The major focus of this study was to examine the consistency between the perception of teachers and parents toward the value of bilingual education for facilitating the academic growth of school-age children. Relationships of perceptions to the academic achievement of children was also evaluated. Three specific areas of the bilingual program were investigated: philosophy, functional value, and implementation. In order to obtain measures of perception of teachers and parents toward bilingualism and bilingual education, an instrument was developed. This instrument, named as the Attitudes Toward Bilingualism (ATB), contained 49 Likert-type items. The items of the ATB were divided into three categories: philosophy, functional values, and implementations. Items in each section were rated on a five-point scale ranging from a low to a high agreement scale. Teacher and parent volunteers filled out the ATB. The faculty of five targeted bilingual schools volunteered to participate in this study. Teachers included in the sample were drawn from all first, second, and third grade bilingual classrooms of the target schools. Thirty bilingual teachers and 107 parents participated in the study. The overall directions of the findings clearly suggested a great deal of similarity in the perceptions of parents and teachers toward various issues surrounding bilingual education practices. The specific issues examined in this study can be viewed in a broad sense of parent-school partnership issues, which need to be studied at greater depth. Issue concerning implications of the study and the general utility of obtained results were discussed.

This study explores the policies and requirements governing French immersion teacher certification at the secondary level as prescribed by the Ministry of Education and the universities in each of Canada's ten provinces. Four components are examined: (1) certification procedures, (2) professional training, (3) course credit and competency requirements, and (4) provisions for certified teachers. An analysis of responses to a mailed questionnaire revealed that: (1) Quebec and Ontario are the only two provinces that have specific requirements for FSL certification, (2) there is little agreement among respondents regarding existing reciprocity agreements, (3) there is little consistency in the FSL components of teacher-training programs across Canada, (4) the approved program approach is the most common procedure used for certification, (5) all proposed changes address the need to separate French Immersion training programs from the generic FSL education, (6) none of the provinces currently offer a bonafide Bilingual Education training program, (7) no additional teacher-training is presently required to certify an Anglophone for FSL teaching, and (8) the responsibility of defining the criteria for the selection of FSL teachers is at times assumed by a school board, a denominational education committee, a university, a Ministry of Education, or by supply and demand. Three recommendations were made to the Council of Ministers of Canada: (1) that national assessment centers be established to determine competencies of FSL teacher candidates; (2) that three specific bases of information be established: (a) a national pool of competency-based and criterion referenced performance items, (b) a clearinghouse to assist in evaluating assessment procedures, (c) four regional information exchanges; (3) that research be conducted to determine the feasibility and effective methods of utilizing French native speakers in FSL teaching.

Codeswitching between languages is a uniquely bilingual mode of communication. The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance the current body of knowledge dealing with the phenomenon by analysing samples of speech produced by twenty-six Spanish/English bilingual children ranging in age from eight to twelve. Methods of analysis include theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and educational linguistics. A discussion of relevant codeswitching research covering the past thirty years is presented. The data were collected during a reading study focusing on miscue analysis. The children read stories in English and retold them in both Spanish and English. The analysis considers the data from the four previously mentioned points of view. The linguistic analysis looks at the locations of switched constituents within the sentence and the frequency with which those constituents are switched. The data of this study are compared with that of other researchers, and a consideration of a formal grammar of codeswitching is presented. The sociolinguistic analysis addresses the effect of social and stylistic variables on codeswitching. The psycholinguistic analysis of codeswitching covers lexical storage, editing phenomena, and developmental aspects. Finally, some aspects of the education of bilinguals are considered by analysing the effect of the printed word on language switching and dialect shifting . The application of the results of the analysis to both theoretical issues and practical concerns is explored along with suggested areas for future research. The analyses show that young children's codeswitching initially favors less complex structures and is influenced by few social variables. As they grow older, they become more comfortable with switching grammatically complex structures, and they become aware of a greater variety of social factors. A separate grammar is not necessary for a complete description of codeswitching; a modified interdependance model of the two grammars can account for the codeswitching mode. Lastly, the written language becomes part of the speech situation in the classroom and affects the choice of language or dialect spoken.

The research is clear; given the opportunity to do so, children begin transacting with print at very young ages (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982). Deaf children with full access to language from birth frequently experience higher success rates in literacy acquisition (Kuntze, 1998). However, there remains a paucity of studies on how young Deaf children whose success with literacy development can be reasonably predicted, begin their journeys toward literacy. With the understanding that early literacy experiences significantly impact all children's literacy development (Bus, Van Ijzendoorn, & Pelligrini, 1995), it is important to have a clearer understanding of how Deaf children develop emergent literacy skills.This dissertation presents a year-long case study on four young Deaf children from native-ASL families who were immersed in literacy-rich environments and how they developed literacy skills in school and at home. In order to provide the fullest possible picture, parents, teachers and children were interviewed and observed. As literacy development does not happen in isolation; this dissertation provides information about the children's sociocultural context that included the literacy experiences and beliefs of the adult participants and the children's own experiences at home and in school. Artifacts including writing samples and data from an early literacy checklist were also collected to provide information about each child's individual written language development.The data were organized and analyzed based on salient themes and framed by socio-psycholinguistic studies on hearing children by researchers such as Dyson (1993), Ferreiro & Teberosky (1982), and Goodman (1996). Results show that with full access to language and opportunities to develop reading and writing abilities, Deaf children's emergent literacy development is highly similar to that of monolingual and bilingual hearing children with some characteristics unique to Deaf ASL-English bilinguals. The results of this dissertation study adds to the general body of knowledge of how children develop literacy abilities even when they do not have face-to-face communication in their literate language. The results also inform current practices in Deaf education and provide researchers, educators, and parents with a framework for understanding the critical role that language and communication play on Deaf children's literacy development.

This qualitative case study investigates key reason(s) for Korean language loss among Korean-American children raised in mixed-race military families where the mother is a Korean immigrant of middle school or lower educational background and the father is an American Serviceman. A secondary purpose is to discover some effects of Korean language loss on the participant's identity (cultural and social) and effects on relationships between children and mothers. This study focuses on four Korean-Americans---three biracial participants, and one monoracial, adopted participant (ages 21 to 28). I record the phenomena of language loss, using the participants' voices. The three data sources include: interviews, follow-up discussions, and field notes. Major findings show: (1) that the decision to drop Korean language maintenance was made deliberately by one or both parents based on what the father considered best for the welfare of the child in U.S. schools. (2) The participants most traumatized by Korean language loss found it hard to identify with any group socially. (3) Those participants not consciously traumatized by Korean language loss claimed a Korean social identity. (4) All participants' mothers preferred to isolate themselves in the family or among Korean friends who spoke little English. (5) All participants noted frustrations in the mother-child relationship. (6) The children recognized it was easier to communicate with their absent military fathers even if they did not necessarily "get along" well with Dad once he returned home.

The present investigation is a mixed method study combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the use of "como" as a discourse marker in the Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona, based on a corpus of twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews of young male and female Spanish-English bilinguals. In a data set of 1148 occurrences of "como," 21.3% fulfill a focus discourse function, 2.2% fulfill a quotative discourse function, and 76.5% fulfill a lexical function. The analysis of young Spanish-English bilinguals using "como" in Spanish to fulfill discourse functions of "like" in English sheds light on how bilinguals structure discourse by drawing from both languages. The results of this study on the diffusion of the focus and quotative "como" to another Spanish-English bilingual community add to our knowledge of how discourse markers can travel both within and between communities and across languages.

Education is and always has been an important component of American Indian life. Contrary to popular understanding, American Indians have always had a system of education which imparted understanding and cultural genetics to the rising generation. With European contact, this viable system of education was discredited; consequently, American Indians were viewed as "uncivilized" and in need of a Euro-American education. As the egregious five hundredth anniversary of European discovery of the new World approaches, educational policy makers still view the indigenous Americans as void of a culture worth perpetuating and therefore in need of a prescribed education. While Native Americans today are not adverse to Western education, they view it in a perfunctory manner because it is still designed to acculturate rather than educate. This constitutes miseducation and therefore is a foe against whom many American Indians battle for survival, both as a people and as individuals.

A survey needs assessment was conducted with casts of an International Educational Program. The purpose was to identify common problems the members faced and to determine their need for counseling services. The data collected included general demographics, symptoms of culture shock, personal and career problems, and counseling needs. Four hundred subjects from 25 different countries participated in this study. It was found that about 50% experienced symptoms of culture shock, personal problems rotated around difficulties at home, and career problems related to applying what they learned while in the program. It was also found that all groups indicated a need for counseling services. However, one particular group indicated a stronger need. Additional information provided by participants was analyzed and reported. From three open-ended questions, the students identified other common problems not mentioned in the body of the questionnaire.

The purpose of this research was to examine aspects of Indian higher education with a focus on Indian and native studies programs in the United States and Canada. The academic dimension of the study centered on the intellectual discussion, credibility, and stature of the field, as well as, perceptions prevalent in mainstream academia. This thesis compared and contrasted Indian higher education in the United States and Canada, and provided analysis of mainstream and tribal college Indian and native studies programs. Institutions studied were Sinte Gleska University, Trent University, University of Arizona and Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. A theoretical framework was created with essential criteria for Indian and native studies program development including: (1) Administrative Structure; (2) Program Purpose and Goals; (3) Mission Statement; (4) Governance; (5) Relationship to Tribal Community; (6) Curricula; (7) Staffing/Faculty; (8) Student Services; and (9) Community Outreach.