Background: The Social Emotional Distress Scale-Secondary (SEDS-S) is a short measure designed for comprehensive school-based mental health screening, particularly for using very brief self-reported measures of well-being and distress. Whereas prior studies have shown validity and reliability evidence for the English version, there is a lack of…

COVID-19 continues to disproportionately impact the health of Hispanics/Latinos. While Hispanics/Latinos are considered one of the fastest-growing racial/ethnic groups, media news coverage in Spanish concerning COVID-19 is stunningly low. The Hispanic/Latino population comprises close to 25% of COVID-19 cases and 17% of COVID-19 deaths. Lack of…

A questionnaire was recently developed for the use with the Spanish-speaking, and evidence have been provided about the construct internal validity by means of structural equation modelling. In this paper, two research questions were considered: (i) What new evidence does application of the Rasch model provide regarding the validity of this…

Ahead of the recent wave of social justice movements (e.g., [All] Black Lives Matter (#BLM), #MeToo, #StopJewishHate, #StopAsianHate), in 2019 the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) declared a stance on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in language education. It affirmed that it "values diversity…

Gender-inclusive language serves to recognize women and people with non-binary gender identities as part of the primary group, and it has been seen in various languages, including Arabic (Berger 2019), English (Berger 2019; Mathews 1995), Hebrew (Berger 2019), Portuguese (Secretaria de Comunicação 2021), Spanish (Berger 2019; Guzmán Stein 2004),…

The current study examined self-reported first language (Spanish) language reading and writing ability and behavior and relationships with digit span and stroop task performance. A battery of assessments and questionnaires was administered to 81 sequential Spanish-English bilingual university students in the U.S., for whom the sole language of…

This dissertation project aims to investigate (1) how three different L2 Spanish instructors treat vocabulary in their beginner Spanish course (SPA 1) depending on their teaching experience, and (2) how an instructor treats vocabulary in a beginner Spanish course during the three academic quarters of his first year of teaching at the university…

This dissertation delves into second language acquisition, sociophonetic variation, and speech perception, investigating how prior linguistic experiences and exposure to regional variations in a second language influence the decoding of dialectal linguistic cues. It aims to enhance the understanding of words pronounced with different phones and…

This study was part of a larger three-year investigation of the effectiveness of a small-group, content-focused (science, social studies) preschool shared book reading vocabulary intervention implemented with Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals enrolled in a one-way dual-language bilingual program. A subset of bilingual preschool teachers (N =…

This qualitative study explores the language ideologies of three elementary Spanish/English Dual Language teacher candidates (DLTCs) within the contexts of an elementary Teacher Education (ELTEP) program and their field placements in Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) classrooms. Using language ideologies and Bourdieu's conceptualization of…

Drawing from a qualitative approach and through individual "pláticas" (processes of co-constructing knowledge through dialogue) as a linguistic and cultural framework, this work explored informal contextual factors valued by Spanish-speaking Latina mothers of children, three to five years of age and enrolled in a nonprofit California…

Evidence shows individual variation in lexical acquisition as a function of socioeconomic status and linguistic input. Research has primarily involved English-speaking populations and considered only mothers' child-directed speech. This study analyzes the effects of socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative properties of linguistic…

The Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory was designed to assess the extent to which a person experiences unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, and genuineness in a relationship. This study (N = 1,286) investigated measurement invariance between English, Chinese, and Spanish language versions of the inventory and partial scalar…

This longitudinal, multi-semester study investigates the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in university-level communicative Spanish classrooms to find out how instructor feedback affects student performance on IPA assessments, if at all, and in what ways do teachers and students use feedback from the IPAs in their teaching and learning, if…

States annually report the five languages other than English most commonly spoken by English learners (ELs) as well as the number of ELs who speak each of the "top five" languages. This fact sheet gives an overview of the most commonly spoken languages during the 2019-20 school year (SY). Fifty languages or language categories appear in…