Denise Minor

• California State University, Chico

This study examines the impact that membership in a Spanish language theater and poetry troupe had upon a group of Mexican and Chicano university students in terms of the development of academic identities, feelings of belonging, connections with friends and family, and other factors that correlate with academic perseverance. Also examined was the...

This chapter discusses the National Standards Collaborative Board’s standards for language instruction, called the Five C’s: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. Communication, the most important of the five standards, has three categories: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. Culture involves incorporatin...

Heritage speakers are people raised in a home where one language is spoken, but who subsequently switch to another dominant language. The heritage language has surrounded such people since birth as the medium of adult conversations. But during childhood or adolescence, most of these people went through a process in which English took over as the do...

This chapter presents some suggestions on how language teachers can incorporate students with special needs into the classroom. It does so by using stories of students of years past. The first three stories focuses on students who had received a diagnosis and for whom the teacher received notification. The last two stories focus on students who did...

This chapter presents advice on how to negotiate the first two years of teaching at the secondary level or at a college or university. These recommendations are based on the author’s own experiences, but they come mostly from interviews with teachers, lecturers, and professors over the course of a year. These recommendations include finding a mento...

This chapter reviews research that has emerged since the 1960s, research that has led to the development of the most effective ways for teaching a second language. It focuses on the essential theories that hook together like the links of a chain: Universal Grammar, the mind’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD); Acquisition vs. Learning; Input +1; Wh...

This chapter provides language teachers with pointers for classroom management and outlines a six-step intervention process for problem behavior that is beyond what is taught in typical classroom management courses. The three most important principle of classroom management are to establish rules and procedures; to foster a classroom community; and...