Volume 28, Number 3 Fall 2004 ABSTRACTS |
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Educating Parents in the Spanish-Speaking Community: A Look
at Translated Educational Materials
Federal legislation (White House Executive
Order 13166, 2000) mandates that language services be provided to
limited English proficient populations by health care providers
receiving federal funding. In order to do this, some basic resources
have been developed to administer medical services. Nevertheless,
the translation aspects of these guidelines often lack many components
that would be necessary to assure the functional adequacy of the
translated text (e.g., cultural, pragmatic, and textual appropriateness).
Furthermore, outside the medical field, guidelines and legislation
are often nonexistent. In the absence of specific requirements for
translation and/or translator qualifications, research suggests
that translators, in particular novice, unexperienced translators,
tend to adopt a literal, linguistic, micro-approach to the translation
task, failing to consider global or pragmatic factors (Colina, 1997,
1999; Jääskeläinen, 1989, 1990, 1993; Königs,
1987; Krings, 1987; Kussmaul, 1995; Lörscher, 1991, 1992a,
1992b, 1997; Tirkkonen-Condit & Jääskeläinen,
1991). Given the scarcity of educational programs in translation
and the frequent use of untrained bilinguals to produce translated
materials in Arizona, we hypothesized that documents translated
in educational settings would not be functionally adequate. Using
a sample corpus of educational materials for the Spanish-speaking
population, we show that this is indeed the case. We demonstrate
that a structural, literal approach is inadequate for educational
purposes and often negatively affects educational outcomes. The
effectiveness of the translated materials with regard to global
considerations and purpose is vital, especially in regard to parental
involvement as a key factor in a student’s success. More adequate
guidelines need to be developed regarding requirements for translations
and translator training. Additional implications for education and
policy creation for language-minority populations are discussed.
This article describes the usage of
linguistic units and instructional strategies that facilitate word
recognition for Latino kindergarten students who are beginning to
read in Spanish. This case study was based on coding videotaped
reading and language arts instruction of two bilingual kindergarten
teachers at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year using
the Elements of Word Identification Instruction (Denton, Mathes,
& Anthony, 2002), in addition to classroom field notes, narrative
descriptions of instructional methods, and an end-of-the-year semistructured
interview with the teachers. Results show that although Spanish
has consistent letter–sound mappings, beginning reading instruction
may focus on instruction at the word level, with phonemes playing
a role in error correction, writing and spelling, phonemic awareness,
and remediation for struggling readers who cannot read words fluently.
This article concludes with implications for further research and
discusses the significance of scaffolding word-recognition instruction
at the phoneme level.
This study examined the effectiveness
of a transitional Spanish–English bilingual program, Academic
Language Acquisition (ALA), in enhancing K–5 students’
English-language proficiency, as well as their English performance
in academic subject areas, in comparison with the Structured English
Immersion (SEI) process.1 An existing reading program, Success for
All (SFA), served as a confounding influence because it had similar
goals for reading development and included English- and Spanish-language
curricula. Given 4 years of enrollment in their respective programs,
ALA and SEI students, regardless of participation in SFA, were scoring
on par with one another as a group. This phenomenon occurred with
content-based tests (reading, mathematics, and language arts) and
in the reading and listening and speaking portions of the California
English Language Development Test, an English-language proficiency
measure. The only statistically significant difference among student
groups was that students in both ALA and SFA appeared to be scoring
at a lower level on the California English Language Development
Test writing portion than matched peers in the other three groups
of interest (participants in ALA but not SFA, participants in both
SEI and SFA, and participants in SEI but not SFA). Additional findings,
theoretical and methodological issues, and implications for future
research are featured.
With the advent of George W. Bush’s
education policy, emphasizing the frequent large-scale assessment
of children in American public schools, it has become even more
important than ever before to examine the fairness of the testing
process and instruments being used to make decisions about children
and their schools. When the children being assessed have limited
English proficiency, one of the most common means of assessing them
is the use of parallel assessments: standardized achievement tests,
developed in the native language of the English language learners,
that emulate the content of their English-language counterparts.
This article focuses on some of the faulty assumptions that are
made in the development of such tests for Spanish-speaking English
language learners and argues that new measures need to be taken
to assure that these tests reflect the best interests of the populations
to whom they are administered.
Jill P. Koyama
In this ethnographic study,
I investigate the ways in which students of Mexican descent who
are designated as limited English proficient are “acquired”
by particular social positions in a northern California high school.
Focusing on two interrelated and reflexive phenomena in the high
school—standardized testing for assessing English proficiency
and instruction in English Language Development classes—I
demonstrate how, through these institutional rituals and their associated
discourses, positions for English language learners are constructed,
maintained, and challenged. I examine the interactions of the teachers,
staff, administrators, and students across various school settings
to illuminate the practical implications of, for instance, being
designated limited or fluently proficient in English. I suggest
that second-language acquisition policy is appropriated with great
variability across federal, state, district, and school levels,
and I argue that through these courses of action, particular social
fields and the positions for English language learners are defined
locally as ones of “success” and more often “failure.”
Hmong Language and Cultural Maintenance in Merced, California Andrea C. Withers
The purpose of this research
was to ascertain whether the Hmong language and culture were shifting
or were being maintained within a generational cross-section of
12 Hmong participants in Merced, California. Data was collected
in the form of interviews, questionnaires, Internet research, and
library research. The results of the study showed that though there
were Hmong language and cultural resources available in Merced,
the participants nonetheless seemed to be undergoing a generational
shift in their heritage language in terms of both ability and use,
as well as their attitudes about and participation in their heritage
culture.
Research
in Practice This paper describes an ambitious
educational program uniting the efforts of Swiss, German, and French
business associations, corporations, government agencies, and regional
school boards in the Upper Rhine Valley, where economy and culture
transcend national borders. The objectives of the program are to
promote bilingualism, to teach the young people what factors unite
and what factors differentiate their communities, and to optimize
conditions for prosperous economic development based on knowledge
of geographic, historical, sociocultural, and socioeconomic data.
The focus of this paper is the program’s textbook, Leben am
Oberrhein/Vivre dans le Rhin Supérieur [Living in the Upper
Rhine Valley],1 created especially for the communities of the Upper
Rhine Valley and the center of the program. The program is multifaceted
and innovative. This paper concentrates on Europe (where the program
originated) as well as the United States of America (home to the
author and the majority of Bilingual Research Journal readers) and
its neighboring countries (essentially Canada and Mexico). Yet the
program can serve as an inspiring model throughout the world for
community leaders and educators wishing to promote bilingualism
within communities formed by native speakers of a dominant language
and groups of various heritage language speakers and cultures, or
in neighboring communities with different backgrounds and mother
tongues.
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