The Preassessment Process for English Learners With Potential Language Impairment

This chapter presents the case of Tanveer, a first-grade boy from an Urdu-speaking immigrant family from Pakistan. He is in the public schools and has been struggling academically since kindergarten. This chapter discusses the preassessment process and interventions that took place before Tanveer underwent a full special education evaluation, including testing by a speech-language pathologist for the possible presence of an underlying language impairment. (Note: this author personally worked with this child, and this is a true story with some details changed for confidentiality.) This chapter shows how even before formal special education testing commenced, conducting an extensive preassessment process helped to greatly increase the accuracy of the formal evaluation, eventual diagnosis, and intervention provided for Tanveer.

Aging immigrant family caregivers health, social engagement, and health literacy

Family caregiving is evolving in multiple ways. There is an increasing recognition of the role of informal or unpaid family caregivers. Extensive body of research shows that family members who provide care to individuals with chronic or disabling conditions are themselves at risk. However, most evidence on family caregiving gear towards Caucasian middle-class populations. There is limited research that exists about aging immigrant family caregivers who are ill-prepared for their role and provide care with little or no support. The specific aim of this study was to assess and determine the association of health status, social engagement, and health literacy among aging immigrant family caregivers. This study utilized a non-experimental, cross-sectional, correlational design. Most of the participants are female married Asian women, who are retired, living with their spouses, and taking care of their family members more than 4 hours a day with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cardiovascular disorder. Most participants have existing medical condition such as hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, and heart disease. Most participants experienced problem with sleep and difficulty falling asleep. While some participants experienced fatigue and having trouble doing regular leisure activities with others. There is an association between sleep disturbance and ability to participate in social roles and activities among aging immigrant family caregivers. Inclusion of people from different ethnicities, backgrounds, and socioeconomic position in caregiver research is vitally important. There is a need for a greater understanding of the contextual factors of family caregiving and recognizing the prevalence and characteristics of aging immigrant family caregivers.

Home-Visit Intervention to Reduce Stress of Underserved Family Caregivers for Persons With Dementia

Immigrant family caregivers for persons living with dementia (PWD) have constant stress due to the 24/7 responsibility. These family caregivers of PWD often have high morbidity and mortality. We provided a cultural and language specific home-visit intervention for these vulnerable family caregivers. There is a lack of an objective measure of stress for caregivers. We assessed caregivers’ stress by measuring heart rate variability (HRV), a physiological measure of stress, using a smartwatch for a one-month intervention. Weekly home visits for a month were provided to dementia family caregivers by trained community health workers with stress reduction techniques: mindful breathing and compassionate listening. Linear mixed-effect models were used to analyze the trends for the daily stress levels as measured by HRV from the smartwatch. We had 22 participants who completed the 4-week intervention (8 Latinos, 8 Koreans, 6 Vietnamese). The models showed a significant decrease in the stress level of all participants for 3 weeks (all Ps<0.01). At 28 days (4 weeks) all three groups showed a decrease in stress: Korean group (Beta= -0.405, P<0.001), Vietnamese group (Beta = -0.150, P=0.028), Latino group (Beta= -0.154, P=0.073) and all caregivers (Beta = -0.235, P< 0.001). The findings demonstrated a reduction of immigrant family caregiver stress with a home-visit weekly intervention for one month using mindful breathing and compassionate listening by culturally/linguistically appropriate community health workers. Large-scale studies to determine long-term outcomes of family dementia caregivers are necessary and should be carried out.

School-Immigrant Family-Community Collaboration Practices: Similarities and Differences

We compared school-immigrant family-community collaboration practices based on the six dimensions of Epstein’s influence model (2001). These three groups of stakeholders (N = 54) participated in this study by answering a questionnaire on their collaboration practices. Kruskall-Wallis analyses revealed a notable difference between the three groups with regard to decision-making practices and at-home learning. A positive correlation was found between the number of years of teaching experience in the school and communication, volunteering, parenting, and decision making, as well as between the child’s grade level and parenting. Results show that although the collaboration practices followed Epstein’s involvement theory, they remained weak, with no significant difference between the three groups in terms of their use. Our findings are discussed in light of recent literature and their practical implications and avenues for future research are proposed to better understand and improve the conditions favoring school-immigrant family-community collaboration.

“If You Don’t Speak English, I Can’t Understand You!”: Exposure to Various Foreign Languages as a Threat

The number of non-English speaking and bilingual immigrants continues to grow in the U.S. Previous research suggests that about one third of White Americans feel threatened upon hearing a language other than English. The current research examines how exposure to a foreign language affects White Americans’ perceptions of immigrants and group-based threats. In Study 1, White Americans were randomly assigned to read one of four fictional transcripts of a conversation of an immigrant family at a restaurant, where the type of language being spoken was manipulated to be either Korean, Spanish, German, or English. In Study 2, White Americans read the same fictional transcript—minus the Spanish; however, there was an addition of two subtitles conditions in which the subtitles were provided next to the Korean and German texts. The two studies suggest that exposure to a foreign language—regardless of whether they are consistent with Anglocentric constructions of American identity—lead White Americans to form less positive impressions of the immigrant targets and their conversation, experience an uptick in group-based threats, and display greater anti-immigrant attitudes. Moreover, there is evidence that the (in)ability to understand the conversation (i.e., epistemic threat) influences participants’ perceptions of immigrants and group-based threats.

Packing up the Past: Vicki Baum’s Quest for Heimat

The best-selling Austrian novelist Vicki Baum took ship alone for America in 1932 but emigration soon became exile for the Jewish author. The feeling of ‘Heimatlosigkeit’, or rootlessness, which oppressed Baum at that time was emotional and spiritual rather than physical. Child of a Jewish immigrant family in the anti Semitic society of nineteenth-century Vienna, Vicki Baum had long questioned the loci and the politics of Heimat, a German term whose significance far exceeds the simple definition of home or homeland. Cut loose from Heimat, she began her travels to far-away destinations, seeking to identify a common humanity and the universal moralities which could guide Europe to a better future. She wrote her travel experiences into novels which allowed her to narrate the landscapes and customs but also the inner lives of the peoples she encountered. A long-standing belief in the inauthenticity of verbal communication encouraged her to transcend linguistic barriers with confidence but it was her gender, she believed, which enabled her to share and interpret other cultures. Commonality rather than difference is the focus of her travel-letters and their fictional transpositions. Focusing on Baum’s experiences on Bali seen in a postcolonial perspective, the article argues that the island was for the novelist a space of transcendence, where the inhabitants held on to values already lost in Western societies.