Transnational Children in Mexico: Context of Migration and Adaptation

Transnational migration increasingly impacts economically disadvantaged and culturally marginalized students. Over the last decade, an unprecedented number of Mexican nationals living in the United States have returned to Mexico. Their children may face cultural and linguistic barriers in their ancestral country. This group of students is particularly important to American educators since they may eventually return to the United States. This article reports on the results of a qualitative study of experiences of 12 U.S.-born children of Mexican nationals who are currently living in Mexico. Through a series of semistructured interviews and activities, we learned about the children’s varied experiences. Included are recommendations for greater collaboration between U.S. and Mexican educators.     

Curriculum‐Based Measurement of Oral Reading fluency (CBM‐R): An objective orientated evaluation study

The knowledge and practices associated with improved outcomes for readers have yielded converging evidence about practices associated with improved reading outcomes for primary students. This considerable intervention knowledge can be beneficial for English teachers working with struggling secondary readers. Fluency is one critical element that becomes increasingly important for many older students with reading difficulties as they strive to read large quantities of text written at challenging levels, with sufficient speed, accuracy and understanding to keep up with class content and demands. This objective‐orientated evaluation study examined the effects of Curriculum‐Based Measurement of Oral Reading (CBM‐R), a prevention‐orientated approach designed to identify readers at risk of not achieving adequate outcomes, on 94 second‐grade students from a primary school in New South Wales, Australia. Results indicate that teachers found CBM‐R to be a reliable and easily implemented prevention‐orientated system, which has the capacity to raise awareness of fluency abilities to guide differentiated practice and reduce the risk of failure in English.     

Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface‐to‐Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28‐month‐olds' interpretation of right‐dislocated sentences (noun_i‐verb, noun_i) where the presence of clear, language‐specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right‐dislocated sentences containing well‐known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface‐to‐meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions.