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Drawing on social categorization, relational demography, and faultline theories, the purpose of this paper is to examine interpersonal relationships between Hispanic American, European-American, African-American, and Asian-American coworkers in relation to language use in the workplace (English or Spanish).

Employed adults (n=97) participated in one of four racioethnic-specific focus groups (Hispanic American, European-American, African-American, and Asian-American) at each of four worksites in order to assess their reactions to working in a linguistically diverse environment. Interviews with onsite management and human resource directors were also conducted.

Language issues created noticeable faultlines between English and Spanish speakers. In total, six themes representing issues for multilingual organizations emerged: inclusion vs exclusion, assimilation vs ingroup identification, essential communications, composition issues, utility of speaking English, and negative affective responses.

Results highlight the difficulties inherent in working in multilingual groups and the challenges they present for organizations. Results also suggest the importance of group composition in the development of language issues.

This paper is among the first to present insight into the experiences of workers in linguistically diverse workplaces, and the barriers presented by language differences. As the number of Hispanics in the US workforce continues to increase, maintaining effective relationships between Spanish and English speakers at work becomes especially important for organizational success. Suggestions for managing a multilingual workforce are included.

The Hispanic community is the fastest growing ethnic group in the USA and is currently the largest minority group with tremendous buying power. This trend has seen a significant growth with respect to the Spanish-language media in recent years. Along with the media ' s ability to entertain, comes the responsibility to educate and warn its audiences of eminent threats and disasters. The aim of this paper is to look at the Spanish-language media ' s efforts to warn and prepare its listeners for local and national emergencies.

Using descriptive and explanatory methods the author looks at the failures of the Spanish language media to communicate emergency warnings in both the Saragosa, Texas tornado and in the case of hurricane Katrina.

Research indicated that pressure from constituents, however, forced a change on the Spanish language industry.

The research was limited by not having first hand contact with the Spanish language media.

The practical implication of this research which has social overtones is that providing disaster warnings to the non-English speaking population in the USA is achievable. Emergency managers and first responders need to be aware of issues regarding non-English speakers.

The implications for this research is that all individuals will be notified of emergencies even non-English speakers.

The issues on non-English speakers in emergency situations have come up before. Nevertheless, this work identifies a practical solution by involving the Spanish language media in emergency alerts. It is essential that this tremendous resource be involved in emergency alerts.

“Dora! Dora!” squealed my 18-month-old son from his stroller on the crowded subway platform. I scanned the crowd but could not locate the source of his excitement. Then a young girl turned her back to us and I saw on her purple backpack the face of “Dora the Explorer,” whose name had made its way into my son's small vocabulary. This scene could have easily taken place in any city or town in the US; young children of all ethnicities are familiar with Dora's animated television program. Worldwide, parents have spent over $3 billion on Dora the Explorer merchandise since 2001, and most products feature English and Spanish phrases (Jiménez, 2005). And Dora is not alone: her show was just the first in a recent wave of animated educational children's programs featuring Latino main characters and dialogue in Spanish.

When bilingual teachers are first hired, many say they are pressured to teach material only in English (Menken, 2008). Removing instruction in a child’s native language is not likely to improve scores on English standardized tests (Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass, 2005), and long term, English-Only instruction reduces academic success and reduces graduation rates (Iddings, Combs, & Moll, 2012). This chapter looks at bilingual classrooms in a Texas school district, through classroom observations, interviews, and a large-scale survey seeking to answer the question, what do officially bilingual classrooms look like when they operate monolingually? Results showed that administrators exerted pressure, and teachers used methods they expected not to work. Some bilingual classrooms had teachers who either could not speak Spanish, or chose not to. Because classrooms operated without the legally required amount of first-language instruction, the district’s “bilingual” programs undermined accountability data while harming emergent bilinguals. Teacher educators have not prepared bilingual teachers for the reality of anti-bilingual schools. New teachers need to know how to not only implement research-based instruction but also defend their instructional choices. Wherever lawmakers, agencies, and administrators have allowed transitional bilingual programs to become de facto monolingual, there may be a role for colleges of education to play, monitoring, assisting, and, if necessary, publicizing lack of compliance. Study findings are limited to one specific district; even in districts with similar phenomena, the manner in which a bilingual program ceases to be bilingual will vary substantially.

Little is known about low-income immigrant parents’ health-related quality of life (HRQoL) associated with their parenting. The purpose of this paper is to examine low-income immigrant parents’ HRQoL, depression and stress.

In the spring of 2015, English speaking and Spanish speaking low-income uninsured immigrant parents utilizing a free clinic (N=182) completed a self-administered survey using standardized measures of parental HRQoL, stress and depression.

Immigrant parents’ HRQoL related to parenting was lower than general primary care patients. Higher levels of depression and stress were associated with lower levels of parental HRQoL and family functioning. Spanish speakers were significantly more likely to worry about their child’s health or future compared to English speakers.

While both English and Spanish speaking immigrant parents may need assistance addressing the health-related needs of their child, Spanish speakers may be a target audience for outreach programs. It is possible that by improving the health of their child, immigrant parents may see improvement in their own HRQoL and reductions in their levels of stress and depression. Future research should develop parenting classes for low-income immigrant parents targeting the potential health needs of their children, and assess the efficacy of the classes in improving child health and parental HRQoL.

This paper notes that the rapid rate of demographic change in the United States of America population means that librarians must integrate Spanish language materials into their collections now if they have not already done so. It attempts to compile a current collection of high quality resources that will assist librarians in their Spanish language collection building. The paper takes an inclusive perspective and no distinction is made between Chicano, Puerto Rican, Filipino, and other geographic or cultural sub‐groups of Spanish speakers.

While bilinguals frequently mix languages in everyday conversation, these hybrid language practices have often been viewed from a deficit perspective, particularly in classroom contexts. However, an emerging literature documents the complexity of hybrid language practices and their usefulness as an academic and social resource for bilingual students. This chapter examines hybrid language practices among English- and Spanish-speaking high school students in an astronomy/oceanography classroom in southern Arizona. Microethnography, or fine-grained analysis of video recordings from long-term ethnographic observation, is used to reveal what bilingual students accomplished with hybrid language practices in the classroom and to outline implications for teachers who want to engage their students’ hybrid repertoires. Specifically, the analyses reveal that careful attention to hybrid language practices can provide teachers with insights into students’ academic learning across linguistic codes, their use of language mixing for particular functions, and their beliefs about language and identity. The research is necessarily limited in scope because such in-depth analysis can only be done with a very small amount of data. Nevertheless, the findings affirm that hybrid language practices can enrich classroom discourse, academic learning, and social interaction for emergent bilinguals. The chapter highlights a teacher’s story in order to offer practical guidance to other teachers who seek to capitalize on the promise of hybrid language practices in their own classrooms.

In the context of American institutions of higher education, the practical implementation of strategies associated with the development of L3+ or multilingual education often remain difficult to implement. Furthermore, students who reach the university level with pre-acquired bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural skills may perceive their competencies as trivialized and undervalued due to the lack of linguistically relevant opportunities available to them.

By contrast, the recent implementation of a multilingual course titled “Intercomprehension of the Romance languages: a pathway to Multilingualism,” at California State University, Long Beach (2014–2018) and St. Lawrence University (2018) offers bi/multilingual students the tools to develop skills geared toward language learning in a continuous effort to appraise, nurture, and upraise the ever-growing linguistic diversity present among students and faculty members in universities across the United States. This course and its iterations specifically benefit students’ pre-existing bi/multilingual competencies while offering them opportunities to reinforce and expand their multilingual repertoire. Students learn how to read in 5+ Romance languages, reinforce their knowledge of English, as well as of their Romance language, all while strengthening their metalinguistic awareness by learning how to navigate a larger repertoire of either foreign or unknown related languages.

In addition to discussing the pedagogical and theoretical framework of the course, the authors propose to explore how this innovative approach favors the development of multilingualism among students in North-American universities by examining course demographic data collected from several of these courses and key results relating certain aspects of students’ initial contact with new languages through intercomprehension.

Analyses the influence of the use of Spanish and of regional languages in consumers and homes of five bilingual regions of Spain: Balearic Islands, Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Valencia. After eliminating the effects of social class and of habitat, a fair number of significant differences have been found between speakers of Castilian (i.e. Spanish), bilinguals and speakers of their own vernacular language, in very varied areas: food, drinks, home cleaning products, financial services, cosmetics and personal hygiene products, shopping stores, reading of newspapers, supplements and magazines, home equipping and makes of car. Language has revealed itself as a good criterion for segmentation in various sectors and regions in order to reach each linguistic group more efficiently.

Drawing on the survey of Spanish-speaking immigrant and migrant readers in Canada and the US, this study pursues three goals: (1) examine the image of the library held by these readers and trace the change of this image after the international migration; (2) use the study findings to revise and update the currently existing typologies of the image of the library; and (3) understand ethical and effective research practices in the studies of immigrant/migrant communities whereby researchers are external to communities in question.

The data about immigrant/migrant readers were collected through a self-administered survey questionnaire that was available both in print and electronically, both in Spanish and English. The data analysis was guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, as explicated in the article. Theoretical examination of the image of the library relied on the earlier typology developed by V. Stelmakh.

The study elucidates perceptions of libraries and librarians in both North America and countries of origin held by Spanish-speaking immigrant/migrant readers, and highlights changes that occur in the image of the library as readers move across geographic borders. Building on the empirical data, the article develops a new typology of the image of the library. It also offers insight into ethical and effective ways of engaging with immigrant communities that should be upheld by researchers from outside the communities in question.

It is the first known study that systematically traces the changes in the image of the library which occur alongside geographic and sociocultural migrations. It is also the first known study that focuses specifically on readers rather than library users in general. The new typology consists of four different elements – the cultural image; the functional image; the humanistic image; and the ideological image of the library – and is accompanied by detailed definitions of each.