Psycholinguistics.

Drawing on the principles of critical multicultural teacher education, Teaching
English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and bilingual education, this study
examined how pre-service teachers were prepared to educate Emerging Bilinguals (EBs)
in ESOL-infused teacher education programs in Florida universities. The textual analysis
of a purposeful sample of five elementary-level English Language Arts (ELA) methods
textbooks, utilizing a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, revealed that
authors overwhelmingly referred to EBs as English learners or English language learners,
rather than bilinguals or dual language learners, and devoted less than 5% of the total
content of four textbooks to topics about teaching methods, curriculum, and assessment
for EBs. Evidence of five forms of curriculum bias was found, including invisibility,
linguistic bias, fragmentation and isolation, stereotyping, and imbalance and selectivity. The findings suggest that textbook authors value knowledge about teaching EBs
less than knowledge about teaching native English-speakers. EBs were stereotyped as a
homogenous group of struggling readers and essentialized in terms of their limited
English proficiency. One author conflated students’ language differences with physical
limitations and learning disabilities, a troubling mischaracterization in the context of the
overrepresentation of EBs in special education. Meanwhile, a preference shown for ESL
methods over bilingual methods, based upon misconceptions about how EBs learn,
suggests that textbook authors undervalue the cultures and linguistic skills that students
bring from home.
The hidden curriculum in ELA methods textbooks may influence a majority of
pre-service teachers, who are typically monolingual and raised in the English-dominant
mainstream culture, to develop a deficit view of EBs and utilize a one-size-fits-all
approach towards ELA instruction. In order to prepare pre-service teachers to educate
EBs for academic success, the teacher education curriculum must include material that
explains linguistically responsive instruction and describes effective bilingual education
models, within a critical pedagogical framework. Without this knowledge, pre-service
teachers may continue instructional practices that contribute to a persistent “achievement
gap” experienced by EBs. A transformation of the ELA methods curriculum is required
so that pre-service teachers are prepared to implement a humanizing pedagogy that
facilitates positive identity formation as it develops bilingual and biliterate students.

The current study examined the role of complexity and initial variability of
exemplars during learning in verb generalization. Children and adults learned two novel
verbs in the context of two novel creatures across two sessions. After a second training
session, participants completed a generalization task during which they were required to
identify the verbs when presented with seven novel creatures of varying levels of
complexity. Performance was compared across age group and condition. Participants who
initially learned the verbs in the context of a single, simple exemplar demonstrated a
higher proportion of correct responses than participants who initially learned the verbs
with both a simple & complex exemplar. These results provide evidence that fewer
exemplars during initial training of novel verbs may increase learning in young children,
as well as some evidence that complex exemplars may increase the difficulty of learning
and generalizing verbs.

Previous studies have found that bilingual children’s vocabulary development
benefits more from child-directed speech from native speakers than child-directed speech
from nonnative speakers. The current study compared the native English child-directed
speech of 20 English monolingual mothers, the nonnative English child-directed speech
of 20 Spanish-English bilingual mothers, and the native Spanish child-directed speech of
the same bilingual mothers in terms of three aspects of input previously associated with
children’s language development: data-providing properties, topic contingency, and
speech function. There were significant differences between native English and nonnative
English child-directed speech, and between nonnative English and native Spanish. The
results suggest two sources of influence shaping child-directed speech: quality
differences related to native speaker status and cultural factors primed by the language
being spoken.