In this contribution I present an overview of Italian in Malta, the third language of Malta, focusing on the role of this language within educational institutions and other domains of society. Italian was one of Malta's official languages till 1936 and, historically, it was used mainly within administrative and cultural spheres of society.…

Children from minority-language backgrounds have multiple sites of learning: home, community, mainstream school, and in some cases complementary school where they study their mother tongue after school or at weekends. However, due to the institutional constraints of an education system based on monolingual principles, mainstream teachers are often…

Objective: To examine the association between food insecurity, dietary intake, and body mass index among Somali refugee women living in the United States. Methods: Cross-sectional study utilizing the snowball sampling method. Results: Most (67%) participants experienced some level of food insecurity, which was common among recent arrivals and…

Northern Mao is an endangered Afroasiatic-Omotic language of western Ethiopia with fewer than 5,000 speakers. This study is a comprehensive grammar of the language, written from a functional/typological perspective which embraces historical change as an explanation for synchronic structure. The grammar introduces the Northern Mao people, aspects…

The Somali Bantu, arriving in the United States after many years in Kenyan refugee camps, face significant barriers to successful integration into American society. Those responsible for managing initial resettlement at the local level were not prepared to provide appropriate assistance to this group. The arrival of the Somali Bantu highlighted…

This dissertation focuses on changes in the organizational development of community-based organizations (CBOs) within the context of new patterns of immigration, in the United States. Organizational development is considered within the context of dialects of growth, change and transformation of communities in transition. The primary goal of this…

Since the ascent of King Mohammed VI in 1999, Morocco has made strides to recognize the rights of its Amazigh (Berber) population. But the pace of progress is far too slow. One significant problem is the government's unwillingness to recognize the Amazigh as an indigenous people, which in turn undermines the Amazigh's ability to participate in…

In a challenging economic and political context, complementary schools in East London are mentoring each other and forming networks across communities to gain recognition and status for community languages in education and the wider community. As issues of power and status impact in different ways on differently situated communities, complementary…

Across many languages from unrelated families, spoken-word recognition is subject to a constraint whereby potential word candidates must contain a vowel. This constraint minimizes competition from embedded words (e.g., in English, disfavoring "win" in "twin" because "t" cannot be a word). However, the constraint would be counter-productive in…

This study examines language planning as displayed in street names, advertising posters, billboards, and supermarket product displays in three Moroccan cities: Casablanca, Fes, and Rabat. The study reveals somewhat confusing language planning stemming from on-going political, economic, and social transformation in Morocco. More than 50 years after…

Background/Context: In 2010, I was invited to give the annual lecture that honors Lawrence Cremin, the historian of American education who became the seventh president of Teachers College, Columbia University. To pay tribute to the way in which Cremin used an academic discipline to bring rigor and depth to educational research, I described my own…

This article provides an overview of research conducted with Somali Bantu refugee students in two contexts: Michigan and South Texas. We provide recommendations for outreach to refugee families and their families, for instruction in the classroom, for advising and support for these children, and for implementing school and district policy as it…

Teachers in complementary schools are often assumed to be using outmoded teaching strategies and an authoritarian approach to discipline. However, it is rare for mainstream teachers to have visited these community-run after-school or weekend classes, which remain on the margins of educational provision. This paper argues that complementary…

Millions of children participate in both Qur'anic schooling and public schooling. For the majority, this double schooling entails learning (in) two different non-native languages. Seeking to understand the double-schooling experiences of Muslim children for whom the language of literacy in both of their schools is not their native language, Moore…

In 2003, the Amazigh (Berber) language and the Tifinagh script were, for the first time in history, introduced as a subject for all students in public primary schools in Morocco. This study first investigates the language planning policy behind the introduction of the new Amazigh curriculum: selection, codification, standardization, curriculum…