http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/crede_ncrcdsllresearch/rss Recent eScholarship items from NCRCDSLL Research Reports Fri, 15 May 2026 09:47:29 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9802j9tg <p>In much of the research literature, academic language is described in discrete linguistic terms, focusing in particular on lexis and syntax. The purpose of this report is to explore academic language on a broader discourse-level of analysis. Examining three linguistic exchanges from a bilingual elementary school, the authors show how academic tasks influence academic language discourse styles (registers) in fifth grade class lessons. The authors also compare the research literature and their own classroom research with the results of a survey on academic language that they distributed to ESL educators.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9802j9tg Fri, 25 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Solomon, Jeff Rhodes, Nancy C. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5np8688p <p>On the basis of research on the Samoan American community of urban Los Angeles, the authors argue against two common misconceptions of multiculturalism:</p><p>(1) that language is a precise indicator of cultural orientation; and (2) that members of multicultural communities are in one culture at a time.</p><p>The notion of syncretic literacy is introduced to account for the ways in which the same language (in this case, Samoan or English) can be used for distinct cultural practices and the ways in which different cultural practices can be merged within the same literacy activity.</p><p>This report examines an exchange in which a six-year-old Samoan American boy involves members of his extended family in completing his homework. We see that English is sometimes used in ways that are consistent with the socialization practices typical of traditional learning environments in the home country and that different family members adopt distinct cultural strategies in their interaction... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5np8688p Fri, 25 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Duranti, Alessandro Ochs, Elinor https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cq7475x <p>Recognizing the inequities caused by compensatory education, tracking, and ability grouping, educators are exploring alternative practices. In San Diego, one effort to break down the barriers erected by school sorting practices is to "untrack" students.</p><p>Untracking places previously low-achieving students (who are primarily from low-income and ethnic or language minority backgrounds) in the same college-preparatory academic program as high- achieving students (who are primarily from middle- or upper-middle-income and "Anglo" backgrounds). The "Achievement Via Individual Determination" (AVID) untracking program shifts education policy for underachieving students away from a simplified or reduced curriculum toward a rigorous curriculum with increased support for low-achieving students.</p><p>The San Diego untracking program has been successful in preparing its students for college: 48% of the 248 students who completed three years of AVID enrolled in four-year colleges,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cq7475x Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Mehan, Hugh Hubbard, Lea Lintz, Angela Villanueva, Irene https://escholarship.org/uc/item/78p4t7hk <p>Recent research has emphasized the economic, social, and cognitive advantages available to bilinguals. Yet for many immigrant groups, bilingualism is a temporary phenomenon. Most immigrant children arrive in the United States as monolingual speakers of their native language, develop bilingualism as they acquire English, establish English-speaking households, and raise their children as English-speaking monolinguals. According to survey data, even Spanish, a language thought to be particularly enduring in the United States, seldom lasts beyond the second or third generation. Despite evidence that shift toward English is occurring for many immigrant groups, most researchers have neglected to focus on the different levels at which shift occurs, the factors that influence its development, and the course it takes during individuals' lifetimes. In an effort to address these concerns, this paper reports on research that investigates native language maintenance and shift to English... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/78p4t7hk Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Pease-Alvarez, Lucinda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/633345b4 <p>The Amigos two-way bilingual education program began as a collaborative effort between the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Public Schools' departments of desegregation and transitional bilingual education. Parents, teachers, administrators, and members of the community formed a committee to explore the possibility of developing a program that would combine the best features of transitional bilingual education (for limited-English-proficient students) and language immersion education (for native English speakers). The committee sought a way to end the isolation of language minority students from the rest of the school and to provide language majority students with the opportunity to acquire proficiency in a second language.</p><p>The Amigos program commenced in September 1986 and currently serves close to 250 public school students, half of whom are from Spanish speaking homes, the other half of whom are from English-speaking homes. Half of their instruction is provided in Spanish,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/633345b4 Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Cazabon, Mary Lambert, Wallace E. Hall, Geoff https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22g2s871 <p>The plight of students learning language simultaneously with content material, particularly math, spurred this study of the power of socioculturally based pedagogy, such as Instructional Conversation (IC), to increase Spanish-speaking minority students 'acquisition of English math lexicon and concepts. This article describes a series of four ICs taught by a novice teacher. The ICs were designed to promote interaction about math concepts in small groups of seventh-grade students who were ordinarily excluded from classroom participation by their regular teacher. In keeping with sociocultural theory, the IC teacher assisted students' conversation on math topics using visual stimuli, joint productive activity, and teaching that regularly urged students toward language expression on math topics. After describing the features of IC pedagogy, this paper analyzes the transcripts of the ICs using quantitative and discourse analysis. Measures of teacher and student percentages of talk,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22g2s871 Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Dalton, Stephanie Sison, June https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p87r8cz <p>This report examines the readiness of Latino high school students for college-level academic work based on their reading comprehension and verbal reasoning skills. We first review pertinent college admissions test data and educational survey data. Next, we go on to discuss findings from a variety of research fields that sharpen our understanding of factors that can promote or inhibit the development of verbal comprehension and reasoning skills among Latino students. Our analysis of research covers contextual factors, discourse processing, and word recognition factors related to reading comprehension and verbal reasoning performance. We conclude with a discussion of some important questions that need to be pursued in devising effective instruction and interventions based on what research has revealed.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p87r8cz Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Duran, Richard Revlin, Russell Havill, Dale https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13k5q2f9 <p>This paper reports the effects of thematically integrated mathematics instruction on achievement, attitudes, and motivation in mathematics among middle school students of Mexican descent. A school-university collaborative effort led to the development and testing of a thematic approach undertaken as a means of contextualizing instruction for students considered to be at risk for school failure. Instruction relied heavily on small collaborative learning groups and on hands-on activities designed to help students make real-world sense of mathematical concepts. As hypothesized, experimental and control students made equivalent gains in computational skills, but experimental students (who received thematic instruction) surpassed controls in achievement on mathematical concepts and applications. The two programs did not have a differential effect on students' attitudes toward mathematics or self-perceptions of motivation in mathematics, but motivational variables did predict achievement... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13k5q2f9 Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Henderson, Ronald W. Landesman, Edward M. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09v8k3sc <p>Because of the psychometric bias in much of the work on assessment, much attention has been focused on the technical aspects of assessment to the exclusion of other aspects of the overall literacy context. In particular, little attention has been paid to test users, especially in classroom settings. To date, little is known about teachers' beliefs and everyday practices regarding assessment. There is even less known about how various factors such as professional background might influence these beliefs and practices. This information is important, especially in light of the changing paradigms impacting educational practice and the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in many classrooms.</p><p>Given this knowledge gap, the present study investigated teachers' belief systems or mental models and everyday practices regarding the nature, function, and uses of assessment with a special focus on reading with Latino language minority students. These mental models can be seen... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09v8k3sc Mon, 21 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Rueda, Robert Garcia, Erminda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9286r4x9 <p>This paper reports a study of the effects of a collaborative inquiry approach to science on language minority students' (middle and high school) learning. This approach emphasizes involiving the students, most of whom have never studied science before and some of whom have had very little schooling of any kind, in "doing science" in ways that practicing scientist do. This study addresses the question: To what extent do students appropriate scientific ways of knowing and reasoning as a result of their participation in collaborative scientific inquiry? We focus our analysis on changes in students, conceptual knowledge and use of hypotheses, experiments, and explanations to organize their reasoning in the context of two think-aloud problems. The findings indicate that at the beginning of the school year the students' reasoning was non-analytic and bound to personal experience. By contrast, at the end of the school year they reasoned in terms of larger explanatory system, used... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9286r4x9 Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Rosebery, Ann S. Warren, Beth Conant, Faith R. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c03f01q <p>The number of students from linguistic and ethnic minority backgrounds in the United States is expected to increase just as the number of jobs that require higher education is expected to increase. However, students from these minority backgrounds are neither performing in high school well enough nor enrolling in college in sufficient numbers to qualify for the increasing number of jobs that will require baccalaureate degrees.</p><p>"Compensatory education" has been the prevailing strategy used in U.S. public schools to deal with the problem of low-achieving students. San Diego’s Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) "untracking" program was developed as an alternative to compensatory education and remedial/racking for underachieving high school students, especially/hose from ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds. Untracking is the practice of placing low- and high-achieving students together in a rigorous academic program. AVID places low-achieving students... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c03f01q Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Mehan, Hugh Datnow, Amanda Bratton, Elizabeth Tellez, Claudia Friedlaender, Diane Ngo, Thuy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5th0939d <p>For more than a centruy, American schooling has ben conducted in much the same way: The teacher assigns a text for the students to master and then assesses their learning. Known as the "recitation script," this repeated cycle of assign-assess is far from the natural kind of teaching by which societies have been instructing their young since the dawn of time. Contemporary eductional reform is now emphasizing the fundamental, natural method of teaching, which is the assisting of learners through the instructional conversation.</p><p>Newly understood through the principles of socio-higorical theory, real teaching is understood as assisting the learner to perform just beyond his or her current capacity. This assistance in the "zone of proximal development" awakens and rouses into life the mental capacities of learners of all ages. This assistance is best provided through the instructional conversastion, a dialogue between teacher and learners in which the teacher listens carefully... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5th0939d Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Tharp, Roland G. Gallimore, Ronald https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2p20x9z4 <p>In this report, we explore the practices of one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in the United States: Korean Americans. We report on a two-part study of the Korean and English literacy patterns found in two different communities: an ethnic enclave called Midbrae and an etthnically integrated area called Hill Heights. The first part was a year long ethnographic study of the two cities; the second was a telephone interview study involving a sample of Korean-American adults from each community. We conclude that literacy practices vary in the two cities. In Hill Heights, adult Korean Americans use English in order to participate in the society around them. In contrast, in Midbrae, adult Korean Americans have fewer opportunities to use English outside of their homes and many opportunities to use Korean. When they do use English, they often use it with non-native speakers. These Korean Americans may maintain their Korean literacy practices, buty they are at risk of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2p20x9z4 Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 Scarcella, Robin Chin, Kusup