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Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons

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Medicine and Health Sciences

Bilingual

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

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Full-Text Articles in Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education

Exploring Writing Of English Language Learners In Middle School: A Mixed Methods Study, Robin L. Danzak May 2009

Exploring Writing Of English Language Learners In Middle School: A Mixed Methods Study, Robin L. Danzak

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

The study's purpose was to assess, through mixed methods, written linguistic features of 20 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in middle school. Students came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Participants wrote two expository and two narrative formal texts, each in Spanish and English, for a total of eight writing samples each. Additionally, students developed 10 journal entries in their language of choice, and 6 randomly selected, focal participants were interviewed for the qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis involved scoring formal texts at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Scores were analyzed using Friedman's 2-way ANOVA by ranks, …


Does My Identity Speak English? A Pragmatic Approach To The Social World Of An English Language Learner With Language Impairment, Robin L. Danzak, Elaine R. Silliman Jan 2005

Does My Identity Speak English? A Pragmatic Approach To The Social World Of An English Language Learner With Language Impairment, Robin L. Danzak, Elaine R. Silliman

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

The case description provides a comprehensive picture of the complex social and linguistic factors that shape the social identity of an English language learner with the additional challenge of language impairment (LI). These issues were explored over 6 months with Fernando, an 8-year-old, Spanish-speaking male with LI in grade 3. A pragmatic, or practical, approach to problem solving was developed for two purposes: first, to obtain a multifaceted understanding of Fernando’s world at school, and second, to arrive at possible educational/clinical solutions that met a standard of cultural appropriateness and practicality. The patterns found that, contrary to teacher interpretations of …