The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States draws from quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to inform educational policy and practice. It is based on cutting-edge research and policy analyses from a number of well-known experts on immigrant language minority education in the USA. The collection includes contributions on the acquisition of English, language shift, the maintenance of heritage languages, prospects for long-term educational achievement, how family background, economic status, and gender and identity influence academic adjustment and achievement, challenges for appropriate language testing and placement, and examples of advocacy action research. It concludes with a thoughtful commentary aimed at broadening our understanding of the need to provide quality immigrant language minority education within the context of globalization. This collection will be of value to students and researchers interested in promoting educational equity and achievement for immigrant language minority students.

This paper analyzes the determinants of English language fluency among adult foreign-born men and women in the United States. It shows that fluency rates are higher among those for whom the benefits of English language fluency are greater and the costs are lower. The data are from the PUMS file of the 1990 Census of Population and a set of variables added to the Census file. The latter variables include a minority language concentration measure, an index of linguistic distance between English and the origin language, the geographic distance from the origin to the U.S., the return migration rate from the U.S., and a measure of the extent of foreign language media (i.e., the number of radio stations in Spanish). The language model is based on the integrating of migration theory and human capital theory. The conceptual variables (exposure, efficiency and economic variables) are converted into empirically measurable variables. It is shown that the model is very robust. In particular, fluency rates are higher for those with more schooling, who immigrated at a younger age, who lived in the U.S. a longer period of time, who live in areas with fewer origin language speakers, and, among women, who have fewer and younger children. Fluency rates are also higher for those with less access to origin language media, with a lower probability of returning to the origin, whose country of origin is geographically further from the U.S., and whose origin language is linguistically closer to English.

Written by two internationally renowned experts in the field, this book explores the determinants of dominant language proficiency among immigrants and other linguistic minorities and the consequences of this proficiency for the labour market.Using empirical material from a range of countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia and Bolivia, the a

One child in five in America is the child of immigrants, and their numbers increase each year. Based on an extraordinary interdisciplinary study that followed 400 newly arrived children from the Caribbean, China, Central America, and Mexico for five years, this book provides a compelling account of the lives, dreams, academic journeys, and frustrations of these youngest immigrants.

In the present-day context of cross-linguistic perspectives on language acquisition, The Acquisition of Dutch offers a much needed overview of the wealth of Dutch child language research that was hitherto lacking. Its comprehensive coverage in terms of topics, its many new theoretical contributions and its focus on providing a solid basis for cross-linguistic comparisons will be of interest to linguists and psycholinguists studying child language everywhere.The volume consists of four thematic chapters preceded by an introductory overview. The thematic chapters cover early speech development in the first year of life, the acquisition of phonology, the lexicon and syntax. The consolidated list of references cover most of the work on Dutch child language in the last few decades.

Do the languages people speak influence their economic decisions and social behavior in multilingual societies? This Handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine the links and tensions between economics and language to find the delicate balance between monetary benefits and psychological costs of linguistic dynamics.