Perspective-Taking With Deictic Motion Verbs in Spanish: What We Learn About Semantics and the Lexicon From Heritage Child Speakers and Adults

In English, deictic verbs of motion, such as come can encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions for venir (“to come”), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions. We face this question head on by investigating narrative productions of young Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, in comparison to English monolingual and Spanish dominant adults and children. We find that the young heritage speakers produce venir in linguistic contexts where most Spanish adult speakers do not, but where English monolingual speakers do, and also resemble those of young monolingual Spanish speakers of at least one other Spanish dialect, leading us to generate two mutually-exclusive hypotheses: (a) the encoding of speaker perspective in the young heritage children is cross-linguistically influenced by the more flexible and dominant language (English), resulting in a wider range of productions by these malleable young speakers than the Spanish grammar actually allows, or (b) the young Spanish speakers are exhibiting productions that are in fact licensed in the grammar, but which are pruned away in the adult productions, being supplanted by other forms as the lexicon is enriched. Given independent evidence of the heritage speakers' robust Spanish linguistic competence, we turn to systematically-collected acceptability judgments of three dialectal varieties of monolingual adult Spanish speakers of the distribution of perspective-taking verbs, to assess their competence and adjudicate between (a) and (b). We find that adults accept venir in contexts in which they do not produce it, leading us to argue that (a) venir is not obligatorily speaker-oriented in Spanish, as has been claimed, (b) adults may not produce venir in these contexts because they instead select more specific motion verbs, and (c) for heritage bilingual children, the more dominant language (English) may support the grammatically licensed but lexically-constrained productions in Spanish.

My Journey as an Emergent Bilingual

This autoethnography was conducted at an elementary school not far from the South Texas border. I documented how my journey as a kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade student has impacted me to become a better educator. Through this qualitative study, I planned to determine if my childhood experiences as an emergent bilingual learner have made an impact in my teaching and the connections I have formed with my students. I analyzed observations of my current teaching practices and my elementary report cards and test scores. After observing my students’ interactions among their peers and my reaction towards their conversations, I found that emergent bilinguals can reach academic achievement, and their learning can be enhanced. Embracing more than one language can be a powerful resource that binds students to a variety of cultures.

An Honest Discussion About Learning as a Bilingual Student in American Schools

Bilingual students are a distinctive portion of the population of American schools. While encountering these students is not a rare occurrence, the type of instruction and assistance that is provided varies greatly from district to district. This professional memo highlights a series of open conversations with an adult bilingual learner. One is able to see the impact of school-related responses (or lack thereof) from his youth upon his later life.

The bilingual learner. What happens when the language of instruction is not the language of discourse

<span>Those of us who teach chemistry at the college or university level in the United States are faced with the problem of conveying our course content to an increasingly number of students for whom English is a second language; a problem that has been faced by our colleagues in Latin America for generations. We therefore conducted a study designed to probe the conceptual knowledge of bilingual students who studied chemistry from English language textbooks in a classroom environment in which the language of discourse was Spanish. Interviews were done with undergraduate science majors enrolled in general chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico and with graduate students in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. Analysis of the interview data led to the creation of five categories: (1) use of Spanish, (2) avoidance of communication, (3) confusion of terms; (4) use of examples and new words, and (5) use of terms without mastery.</span>

Language learning impairment in sequential bilingual children

We review and synthesize empirical evidence at the intersection of two populations: children with language learning impairment (LLI) and children from immigrant families who learn a single language from birth and a second language beginning in early childhood. LLI is a high incidence disorder that, in recent years, has been referred to by researchers and clinical educators as specific language impairment (SLI), primary language impairment (PLI), developmental language disorder or language disorder not otherwise specified. Over the past two decades, significant international attention has been directed at the LLI-sequential bilingual learner interface. Researchers have developed linguistic profiles of children with LLI who are learning different language pairs, investigated the diagnostic accuracy of various measures and, more recently, examined the relative efficacy of different treatment protocols. Participants in these studies range in age from 3 to 12 years. A main goal of this review is to relate available evidence to key theoretical and pedagogical issues. An additional aim is to indicate main areas of need for future research.