Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Supervisors: Douglas Foley and Pauline Turner Strong. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-54).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-54). Also available in print.

Doctor of Education / Department of Educational Leadership / Kakali Bhattacharya / Bilingual education has a long history in the United States, although the support for bilingual education through, which students preserve their culture and heritage language, has not been consistent throughout the years. While there is clear evidence that aligns students’ academic, emotional, and economic successes are aligned when they learn English through their native language, there is a paucity of research regarding bilingual principals as leaders of dual-language programs. This study explores issues of challenges and essential support structures within dual-language programs. The results may be used to improve leadership in bilingual programs. The purpose of this ethnographic case study was to explore the lived experiences of two Latinas who taught in Spanish within dual-language programs that were run by monolingual principals. This qualitative study was informed by two different sampling procedures, purposeful and criterion-based. The participants selected needed to be Latina (self-identified), Spanish dual-language teachers who worked with a monolingual principal as their leader within Midwestern U.S. schools, during the 2012-2013 school year. Narrative inquiry grounded the study in order to elicit stories that would represent the experiences of the teachers as they negotiated their path when their leader was monolingual and they taught in Spanish. Findings indicate that teachers who taught in Spanish within an Anglo-majority educational context, experienced palpable manifestations of inequity and discriminations. The participants had strong self-worth, self-confidence, and self-awareness, which led them to persevere through the instances of judgment and imbalance. The finding also demonstrate that the participants developed coping mechanisms to empower themselves, and established newly-found and increased resourcefulness as an attempt to provide the students with the education they deserved. The participants relied on alternative resources, long hours of research and re-planning, creativity, and resolve to function in an environment that was set out to demean them. The study raised implications about the amount of support teachers in bilingual programs who teach in Spanish receive while led by monolingual principals. Another implication is that there is marginalization of certain languages that are not English. Lastly, this study raised implications regarding ways in which bilingual programs can become more just and egalitarian.

Previous studies show that bilingual infants are slower in developing phonology and tend to experience some difficulties in acquiring some grammatical rules. Furthermore, as compared to their monolingual peers, bilingual infants tend to have less vocabulary. This thesis set out to explore how bilingual infants organise the lexical information in their two languages. Specifically, we examined the lexical-semantic relationships between words within and across languages using a word-to-word priming paradigm. The thesis sought also to uncover any relationship between semantic priming effects and the size of vocabulary. Vocabulary measures such as the BPVS II, the SETK, and the Oxford CDI were used in the experiments, along with an experimental design close to that used in Styles and Plunkett (2009) and Arias-Trejo and Plunkett’s (2009) studies, based on the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) paradigm. The basic design was that the infants were presented with a prime word (e.g. ‘dog’) followed by a target word which was related either semantically to the prime (e.g. ‘cat’) or not (e.g. ‘bus’). Immediately thereafter, we presented two images, depicting the target and a distracter, and monitored the looking times towards the images. In Experiment 1, we tested whether upon hearing related prime and target words, as compared to unrelated pairs, 30 month old monolingual infants preferred to look at the target more than the distracter image. This constituted a benchmark priming effect. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the presence of the target word was necessary for a priming effect to occur. The results demonstrated an effect of semantic priming in the word-word condition (Exp.1) but no semantic priming effect was found in the word-image condition (Exp.2). Experiment 3 investigated, in each of their languages, the semantic priming effect in bilingual 30-month-olds (Arabic-English). The overall result revealed a significant semantic priming effect along with a different pattern in Arabic and English. Experiment 4 was designed to investigate, in a cross-linguistic design, semantic priming in bilingual 18-month-old infants and to address the symmetry between forward (L1-L2) and backward (L2-L1) priming. The overall results showed no semantic priming effect; however, infants showed a non-significant tendency for forward (L1-L2) over backward (L2-L1) priming. As controls for the previous experiments, in Experiments 5 and 6 we examined monolingual and bilingual 18-month-olds to explore whether a priming effect could be obtained only in English. The results showed no semantic priming effect and no strong evidence of a naming effect. All the findings suggested that hearing words activated automatically some other words which, in both monolingual and bilingual infants, were related semantically around 30 months of age, but were not found at 18 months in either population. Despite what is reported often about a delay of language in bilingual children, these findings suggest that, although they show a smaller size of vocabulary in each of their languages when compared to monolingual infants, bilingual infants may build the semantic relationship between words at the same time as their monolingual peers, and with similar word-to-word relations.

Purpose: The current study examined if bilingual children (English-Spanish) with language impairment(LI) and children in the low typical(LT) range display a cognate advantage as their typically developing(TD) peers do. Given the literature we posed two hypotheses; on one hand, learning cognates may be easier for bilingual children with language impairment over typically developing children, as their shared representations lend to overlap in input. Conversely, it is possible the children with SLI would exhibit a cognate disadvantage given that in early language development children reject lexical units with high competition. Method: We examined whether 117 Spanish-English bilingual children (5;0 to 9;11) displayed a cognate advantage in oral production relative to their typically developing peers. The cognate and noncognate items were derived from the English and Spanish versions of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Children’s average proportion of cognate and noncognate responses were compared across ability groups. Results: TD bilingual children exhibited a cognate advantage, while the bilingual children with LI exhibited a cognate disadvantage. TD bilingual children produced a significantly higher proportion of cognates across their two languages, while LI children produced most of their cognates in Spanish only. The LT children performed similarly to the LI group in terms of overall proportion correct of cognate pairs over noncognate pairs, but performed similar to the TD group in terms of the language of response (only English, only Spanish, or both languages) of the cognate pairs. Conclusion: Consistent with our second hypothesis, children with LI show a cognate disadvantage, while TD bilingual children show an advantage for cognate production. As expected, LT children’s performance fell between the LI and TD groups. We discuss the theoretical and clinical implications of these findings. / text

The goal of this report was to explore ways to differentiate the performance of early school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children in U.S. public schools, who appear “at-risk” for language impairment versus those who have true risk. We compared the patterns of performance reported for children with typical development and language impairment reported in the literature to those for children with risk described by Bedore et al., (2013) and Perez et al., (in preparation). Children with risk seem quite different than their peers with true language problems on formal measures such as the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA). However these children presented fewer errors or weaknesses in spontaneous speech than did their peers with true language impairment. Language variability and errors are expected in the language of young bilingual children, so it is of utmost importance that language professionals closely assess each of the child’s languages with formal and functional measures prior to making a diagnosis of language impairment. / text

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.