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Full-Text Articles in Education

Opinions Of Students Enrolled In An Andalusian Bilingual Program On Bilingualism And The Program Itself, Francisco Ramos Dec 2016

Opinions Of Students Enrolled In An Andalusian Bilingual Program On Bilingualism And The Program Itself, Francisco Ramos

Franciso Ramos

The Regional Ministry of Education of the Autonomous Government of Andalusia, an autonomous community in the South of Spain, has established several bilingual programs to improve language proficiency of its student population. The programs, which undertake second languages as vehicular languages at the classroom, encourage student’s bilingualism, academic development and positive attitudes toward other groups. The following paper examines opinions given by a group of students enrolled in an Andalusian bilingual program about those matters. Students had different positive opinions on bilingualism as well as the program in general; however, they had some doubts over the intellectual and cognitive benefits …


“Why Do We Do This?” Reflections Of A Two-Way Immersion School Principal On The Roles Of Parents, Teachers, And Her Own, In The Program, Franciso Ramos Dec 2016

“Why Do We Do This?” Reflections Of A Two-Way Immersion School Principal On The Roles Of Parents, Teachers, And Her Own, In The Program, Franciso Ramos

Franciso Ramos

The present article offers the reflections of the principal of the longest-running two-way immersion school in Southern California on some of the key factors positively impacting the program, namely parental involvement, teacher commitment, and principal support. Additionally, it includes some of the critical challenges she must continuously face as part of her job, i.e., scarcity of qualified and minority language proficient teachers, lack of funding and adequate materials in the minority language, as well as the impact of federal and state education laws on the autonomy of the program. She also gave some recommendations, based on her professional experience, for …


Attempts At Reforming Haiti's Education System: The Challenges Of Mending The Tapestry, 1979-2004, Marc Prou Dec 2008

Attempts At Reforming Haiti's Education System: The Challenges Of Mending The Tapestry, 1979-2004, Marc Prou

Marc E. Prou

For well over a quarter of a century, Haiti's education system has been at a critical juncture. In 1982, Haiti embarked on a major educational reform, known as La Reforme Bernard. To date, there has been no comprehensive, longitudinal study of the nationwide impact of the Bernard Reform on the social, economic, and political institutions. Why was such a dramatic education reform proposed? What went wrong during the implementation of the reform? Was Bernard education Reform a success or a failure? These are some of the questions addressed in the article. the school system had become a perennial challenge for …


Cross-Language Synonyms In The Lexicons Of Bilingual Infants: One Language Or Two?, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Sylvia C. Fernandez, D.Kimbrough Oller Dec 1994

Cross-Language Synonyms In The Lexicons Of Bilingual Infants: One Language Or Two?, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Sylvia C. Fernandez, D.Kimbrough Oller

Barbara Zurer Pearson

This study tests the widely-cited claim from Volterra & Taeschner (1978), which is reinforced by Clark's Principle of Contrast (1987), that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. The rejection of translation equivalents is taken by Volterra & Taeschner as support for the idea that the bilingual child possesses a single-language system which includes elements from both languages. We examine first the accuracy of the empirical claim and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language. The vocabularies of 27 developing bilinguals were recorded …


Patterns Of Interaction In The Lexical Development In Two Languages Of Bilingual Infants, Barbara Pearson, Sylvia Fernandez Dec 1993

Patterns Of Interaction In The Lexical Development In Two Languages Of Bilingual Infants, Barbara Pearson, Sylvia Fernandez

Barbara Zurer Pearson

We investigated the extent to which bilingual children follow the same patterns and timetable of lexical development as monolinguals. For a group of 20 simultaneous bilingual (English-Spanish) infants, ages 10 to 30 months, we looked at the patterns of growth in one language in relation to growth in the other and also with respect to growth in both languages combined. The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), standardized parent report forms in Spanish and English, provided measures of lexical growth in two languages at varying intervals within the age range. We plotted the two single-language measures, as well as Total and …


Lexical Development In Bilingual Infants And Toddlers: Comparison To Monolingual Norms, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Sylvia C. Fernandez, D.Kimbrough Oller Dec 1992

Lexical Development In Bilingual Infants And Toddlers: Comparison To Monolingual Norms, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Sylvia C. Fernandez, D.Kimbrough Oller

Barbara Zurer Pearson

This study compares lexical development in a sample of 25 simultaneous bilingual and 35 monolingual children for whom semilongitudinal data were collected between the ages of 8 and 30 months. A standardized parent report form, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (1989), was used to assess the children's receptive and productive vocabulary in English and/or Spanish. A methodology was devised to assess the degree of overlap between the bilingual children's lexical knowledge in one language and their knowledge in the other. Using the measures presented here, there was no statistical basis for concluding that the bilingual children were slower to develop …