Interpreting Solidarity

In metro Charlotte, North Carolina, dynamic newcomer Latinx communities have changed the demographics of K-8 education as the region has emerged as a new gateway for an influx of immigrants and migrants. Today, in what has come to be known as “the New Latino South,” K-12 teachers are eager to expand their knowledge base for working with this relatively new population. To that end, bilingual (Spanish/English) educators are increasingly tapped to serve as impromptu interpreters as monolingual administrators and teachers interact more frequently with Spanish dominant communities. Drawing from an in-depth interview sequence, the chapter narrates a Dominican-American's lived experience with simultaneous K-12-based interpreting as a K-12 student teacher, and a licensed early-grades educator. This chapter theorizes the layered emotional and professional advocacy of heritage-language bilingual school-based professionals and their agency in advancing access and equity to public resources with recommendations for policy and practice.

The Snakes and Ladder on Speaking Ability in Children 5-6 Years

Early childhood is also called the golden age because children's physical and motor skills develop and grow rapidly, both in terms of emotional, intellectual, and moral development. The development of cognitive abilities is the development of basic skills to improve children's abilities, one of which is the ability to speak, especially the ability to speak English which is a development to become a bilingual school. Snakes and ladders is a game that is used as a game medium to improve cognitive development (speaking) in children where this game contains pictures of snakes and ladders as well as instructions in English that must be done which are divided into small boxes to connect one box to another. This study aimed to analyze the effect of Snakes and Ladders Game on English Speaking Ability in Children 5-6 Years at TK Negeri Pembina, Banjar District. This study used a pre-experimental design with a one-group pre-post test design, the sample size in this study was 38 respondents who were taken by using purposive sampling technique. This study used the Paired-t-test, the p value (0.00) < (0.05), it means that H0 was rejected and Ha was accepted. It concluded that there is an effect of Snakes and Ladders Game on English Speaking Ability in Children 5-6 Years at TK Negeri Pembina, Banjar District.

Relationship Solving Mathematical Problems Focused on the First Grade Equations either Spanish or English in Bilingual Students

The main idea of this article is to show the relation between students of a bilingual school who solved exercises in English and Spanish, indeed these exercises are focused on the first grade equation, and so it can determine if the mother’s tongue is involved by the resolution of a mathematical problem.

Gender Assignment Strategies Among Simultaneous Spanish/English Bilingual Children from Miami, Florida

We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals (n = 1774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions (n = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (second graders vs. fifth graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), were collected by Pearson, Barbara Z. 2002. Narrative competence among monolingual and bilingual school children in Miami. In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children, 135–174. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Results revealed that in Spanish nominal constructions, children across both instructional programs and grade levels evinced native-like acquisition of grammatical gender. In mixed nominals, children overwhelmingly assigned the masculine gender to English nouns. Notably, irrespective of schooling background, simultaneous Spanish/English bilingual children used the masculine default gender strategy when assigning gender to English nouns with feminine translation equivalents. This suggests that from age seven, simultaneous Spanish/English child bilingual acquisition of grammatical gender is characterized by a predisposition towards the employment of the masculine default gender strategy in bilingual speech.

Recruitment and retention of bilingual graduate students in school psychology: Efforts and challenges in increasing professional diversity

The main goal of this paper is to illustrate recruitment efforts, strategies, and challenges in the process of training bilingual school psychologists to serve diverse schools. First, we address the acute and chronic shortage of bilingual school psychologists in the United States, particularly in urban schools where student populations are increasingly diverse. Then we provide a review of strategies and efforts to recruit and retain bilingual graduate-level learners in one school psychology program in an urban university. Quantitative data regarding recruitment and retention efforts are discussed. We identify challenges and future directions to increase diversity in the field of school psychology.

Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Development of an Early Literacy App in Dhuwaya

Phonological awareness is a skill which is crucial in learning to read. In this paper, we report on the challenges encountered while developing a digital application (app) for teaching phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Dhuwaya. Dhuwaya is a Yolŋu language variety spoken in Yirrkala and surrounding areas in East Arnhem Land. Dhuwaya is the first language of the children who attend a bilingual school in which Dhuwaya and English are the languages of instruction. Dhuwaya and English have different phonemic inventories and different alphabets. The Dhuwaya alphabet is based on Roman alphabet symbols and has 31 graphemes (compared to 26 in English). The app was designed to teach children how to segment and blend syllables and phonemes and to identify common words as well as suffixes used in the language. However, the development was not straightforward, and the impact of the linguistic, cultural and educational challenges could not have been predicted. Amongst these was the inherent variation in the language, including glottal stops, the pronunciation of stops, the focus on syllables as a decoding strategy for literacy development and challenges of finding one-syllable words such as those initially used with English-speaking children. Another challenge was identifying culturally appropriate images which the children could relate to and which were not copyrighted. In this paper, we discuss these plus a range of other issues that emerged, identifying how these problems were addressed and resolved by the interdisciplinary and intercultural team.

Efforts to Improve English Speaking Ability of Five to Six-Years-Old Bilingual School Students Through Hand Puppet Media

This classroom action research was motivated by the five to six-year-old students’ low English speaking ability in bilingual schools, especially in pronouncing, adding vocabulary, and forming sentences. This research aims to improve the English language skills of five to six-year-old students using hand puppets. This research was conducted from April 9 to May 4, 2018, at the TK IT Al Ikhlas Islamic Bilingual School by employing Kemmis's and Mc Taggart’s model in two cycles with three meetings each. The subjects of this research consisted of twelve students (seven males and five females). Based on the research results, there was an increase in English language skills through hand puppet media. In conclusion, the factors affecting students’ English speaking skills are familiar vocabulary, clear and easy to imitate teacher's pronunciation, exciting and varied media, and opportunities for them to use hand puppets while imitating the teacher. The researchers concluded that the hand puppet media could improve the five to six-year-old students' language skills.

Education: An Excellent Opportunity to Respect, Maintain and Promote Indigenous Children’s Cultural and Linguistic Richness

Education can provide the opportunity to affirm indigenous children’s cultural and linguistic identity by using their funds of knowledge as an essential tool in the teaching and learning process. This paper emphasizes the importance of using indigenous children’s voices, knowledge, and wisdom to continue to develop their talents and capacities to share, learn, inquire, analyze, and create. To do so, indigenous children should be given the opportunity to participate in meaningful activities that allow them to utilize their native language and culture which can be done through bilingual discussions, debates, artistic works, creation of poems, singing of songs, games and group activities related to their own indigenous culture while using both their native and second languages. Also, critical thinking skills can be developed through the use of this type of activities that can be artistic and also promote collaborative work since bringing the community together is fundamental in the indigenous cosmovision. In addition, the techniques that are suggested in this piece can help create a peaceful/harmonious environment in the classroom where students’ affective filters are open to welcome and practice the target language since enriching interactions that embrace diversity in all its dimensions are promoted. Thus, the purpose of this manuscript is to share some ideas to make the teaching and learning process more meaningful, respectful, harmonious, and enjoyable through artistic activities that promote indigenous children’s own language, culture and cosmovision. The ideas that will be discussed in this piece are based on a qualitative research study conducted at a Spanish-Indigenous Tsotsil bilingual school in Chiapas, Mexico.