Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy

The 2016 presidential election is in full force. There are many topics of concern for each candidate, ideology notwithstanding. However, one topic that continues to surface across the two major parties is immigration, with a particular emphasis on Latino immigrant youth. Depending on the candidate, the message can vary. Some observers argue that the candidates, regardless of their affiliation, lack an adequate understanding of Latino immigrant youth, their backgrounds, their needs, their concerns, and their hopes and dreams. In Latino Immigrant Youth and Interrupted Schooling: Dropouts, Dreamers and Alternative Pathways to College, Marguerite Lukes not only discusses a timely issue, but also builds on the foundation of what we need to know about this important group of individuals—a group that she argues is frequently overlooked, undervalued, and allowed to fail. In order to capture and examine the lives and experiences of Latino immigrant youth, Lukes draws on her twenty years of involvement in thinking about, reading about, teaching, and personally connecting to this subject. The book rests on a mixed method approach that highlights both the statistics and the stories of Latino immigrant youth. Specifically, it follows the paths of Latino immigrant young adults who left high school in their home country, entered the United States, and then proceeded to attend school again, but this time in alternative educational settings. One central objective of her work is to challenge the ways in which Latino immigrant youth are essentialized in narratives ranging from literature to public policy. She argues that Latinos are a highly diverse group and that, while Latinos have a long history with racial and ethnic categories and diverse educational experiences, it is critical that we see the diversity within this group. Lukes rightly emphasizes the point that Latinos represent broad spectrums in areas such as language, social class, and educational attainment. The volume is divided into six chapters. Each chapter contributes to the previous one and helps paint a picture of both what Latino immigrant youth will need in order to continue on their pathway to college and what the realization of their educational success will require from policy makers and educational professionals. Lukes explores traditional and conventional understandings of the term " dropout, " using research, census data, and school enrollment figures to challenge how we think about and categorize students who leave school. Of particular concern to the author is how we understand both the complexities characterizing Latino immigrant youth who leave school and the importance of reframing our perceptions of some students' conscious decision to leave school. The author also explores the nuanced pre‐migration educational experiences of Latino immigrant youth. Using a historical and sociopolitical backdrop, the author emphasizes just how critical the past circumstances of immigrant youth are to these individuals' current situations and the role that " choice " plays in their experiences. Lukes addresses questions such as: What do we know about these individuals' pre‐immigration experiences? What led some of them to abandon school in their home country? What were their school experiences in their home country? And, why did they migrate north? In Chapter Four, the author digs deeper into the personal stories of Latino immigrant youth in order to capture the goals and aspirations that many of these immigrants have as they enter the United States. Lukes gives the reader insights into the views that immigrant youth have of the United States and its education system, including education's role in their own lives. This chapter also discusses the idealized hopes and the practical aspirations of immigrant youth. In contrast to much of the literature, Lukes found that there was little difference between what her participants hoped to achieve and what they actually believed they could achieve. This chapter ends by examining the career goals and educational attitudes of Latino immigrant young adults.

The claim that 'The earlier, the better', for purposes of language learning, currently stands as an unquestionable nugget of wisdom. Sound wisdom, however, arises from questions confronting what we think we know with factual knowledge. This is precisely what this book does, by providing readers with timely evidence to enable critical assessment of this claim. The cogent insights that this book affords about the what, the how and the why of early language learning (ELL) show that the evidence is both sobering and heartening.

Australia is a country of high linguistic diversity, with more than 300 languages spoken. Today 19 percent of the population aged over five years speak a language other than English at home. Against this background, we examine government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 30 years to address the challenge of offering 'Literacy for all', in particular focusing on minority language speaking children. Across the examined policies and initiatives, a distinct negative correlation can be observed: the more multilingual Australia has become, the more assimilationist the policies, and the more monolingual the orientation of the society that governments have sought to establish through policy. We argue that to enhance literacy outcomes more generally, this orientation needs to be reversed. We explain why policy understanding and approach need to instead promote the maintenance of home languages and support literacy acquisition in these languages.

Last in the three-part series Understanding Bilingual Education. With the information and charts from the first two papers, the role of languages in any school system can be analyzed in terms of types of bilingual education. This paper takes a pedagogical approach in providing lesson plans that have been used in Content-Based English as a Foreign Language university classes on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Ten realistic cases of school systems in Japan and the world are presented for analysis, and a checklist of ten items provides further criteria. Referring to the chart of ten aims in the first paper, and the ten types of bilingual education detailed in the second article, various school situations around the world can be analyzed in terms of established criteria in the field of bilingualism.

My aim in this article is to explore 3 perspectives on bilingual mathematics learners and to consider how a situated and sociocultural perspective can inform work in this area. The 1st perspective focuses on acquisition of vocabulary, the 2nd focuses on the construction of multiple meanings across registers, and the 3rd focuses on participation in mathematical practices. The 3rd perspective is based on sociocultural and situated views of both language and mathematics learning. In 2 mathematical discussions, I illustrate how a situated and sociocultural perspective can complicate our understanding of bilingual mathematics learners and expand our view of what counts as competence in mathematical communication.

The eleven articles in this collection on the relationship of languages and their speakers in different international settings, the existing power and dominance relationships affecting educational programs, and the role language planning has played in the past and is playing today in areas of the world such as Australia, Europe, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and others.

This paper presents the results of a survey on the attitudes of young British people (age range 18-25) towards the learning of the UK’s regional languages. A combined quantitative and qualitative questionnaire was administered to 71 respondents, who were all born and spent the majority of their youth in Britain. It was found that overall attitudes to regional languages are largely positive and that a great proportion of the target group reported they were potentially willing to learn one of the regional languages. Cultural identity and a desire to integrate with the community were identified as major contributors to willingness to learn. A major factor for unwillingness to learn was “lack of real need” (i.e. the ability to get by with English). The paper also looks at the distribution of these attitudes against gender, age and education, all of which were significantly related. Further, respondents already speaking a regional language were found to have more favourable attitudes overall.

The vast majority of bilingual studies involve two spoken languages. Such “unimodal” bilingualism automatically entails a severe production constraint because one cannot physically produce two spoken words or phrases at the same time. For unimodal (speech-speech) bilinguals, there is a single output channel, the vocal tract, for both languages. In contrast, for bimodal (speechsign) bilinguals, there are two output channels: the vocal tract and the hands. In addition, for unimodal bilinguals both languages are perceived by the same sensory system (audition), whereas for bimodal bilinguals one language is perceived auditorily and the other is perceived visually. In this article, we present a preliminary investigation of bimodal bilingual communication among hearing people who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and who are also native English speakers. First, it is important to emphasize that American Sign Language has a grammar that is independent of and quite distinct f...

potential of relationality to capture the ambivalence of entities (e.g., the demonic dead in Chapter 6) and social relations (for example, children in Chapter 4) under different cultural purviews. For the Korowai, the demonic dead are both deceased dear kinspeople and visually terrifying killers. The multiple valences of social and semiotic entities themselves can become the basis for analyses of social bonds and semiotic units that avoid reductionism by highlighting potentially unstable collections of valences that sit squarely but uncomfortably-more or less-between an "us" and a "them." Though the Korowai may try to stabilize these ambivalences, Stasch is arguing that analysts of society must come to embrace them. And indeed, for scholars of contextualized events of interaction, Stasch's work will most certainly help integrate analyses of the gradient relationality emergent in discourse and events of semiosis to the ethno-theories of social life that guide action and inform experience, now with their gradience firmly at the fore.

Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large
extent the two fields overlap. Field workers utilize research models of the ethnographic type
as well as approaches that are experimental, methods that are qualitative as well as
quantitative, for example. The study of language contact and bilingualism, topic of this paper,
presents a good opportunity for drawing on contributions from the two overlapping fields.
The focus of the following review of current research will be mainly from the cognitive
science point of view, divided into four areas of recent work: (1) bilingual development, first
and second language learning and language loss, (2) creolization and convergence, (3)
codeswitching and borrowing, and (4) problems related to the distinction between language
and dialect.

Many children in North America and around the world grow up exposed to two languages from an early age. Parents of bilingual infants and toddlers have important questions about the costs and benefits of early bilingualism, and how to best support language acquisition in their children. Here, we separate common myths from scientific findings to answer six of parents’ most common questions about early bilingual development.

English: A socio-ecological system offers a framework in which to situate research on language learning in a community.
This article discusses the ecological turn of linguistics and psychology of the 1970s and argues for these as a basis for
environmentally appropriate research on Russian/English biliteracy in the 21st century. This ecological foundation is
enhanced through applied linguistics methods including ethnography, positive discourse analysis, and systemic function
linguistics. This framework is robust enough to explore bilingual and biliterate development in learners in various contexts.
The paper concludes with possible questions for investigation of bilingual and academic development.
Russian:
Социально-экологическая система предлагает основу для проведения исследований процессов овладения языками в обществе. Данная статья рассматривает экологические стили в лингвистике и психологии 70-х годов XX века и предлагает их применение в качестве основы для соответствующего исследования двуязычного об-разования (на русском и английском языках) в XXI веке. Данная экологическая система далее обогащена по-средством прикладных лингвистических методов, таких как этнография, анализ развития речи и функциональ-ная лингвистика. Эта система вполне основательна для того, чтобы провести изучение развития билингвизма и грамотности речи среди различных групп населения. В заключение данной работы выявлены вопросы, возни-кающие при проведении исследований академического развития и билингвизма. Овладение языками в обществе, прикладная лингвистика, системная функциональная лингвистика, этно-графия, экологические системы, социально-экологическая система, развитие билингвизма.

The contributors to this volume provide a critical examination of the notion of bilingualism as it has developed in linguistics and of its use in discourses of social regulation in state and civil society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They attempt to move the field away from a "common sense," but in fact highly ideologized, view of bilingualism as the co-existence of two linguistic systems, and to develop a critical perspective which approaches "bilingualism" as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.

During the classes were presented basic elements of speech therapy workshop, which can be used by glottodidactists in teaching correct pronunciation of bilingual children. The degree of mastery of the phonetic system of a new language has a significant impact on the success of the glottodidactic process. Speech defects significantly delay the acquisition of a second language and also reduce communication skills. During the workshop were indicated phonetic skills that should be achieved at particular age ranges, as well as exercises that allow to overcome the difficulties associated with incorrect pronunciation.

How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence.

The history, culture and practices of Central America are inadequately addressed in teacher preparation  and  professional development across the United States, and especially in California based on my analysis of teacher preparation (http://www.ctc.ca.gov/html.,
2001).  Information about the histories, cultures and practices add to the linguistic and pedagogic knowledge-base of bilingual and non-bilingual teachers  of  Central  American  immigrant students. To this end, this article documents the experiences of Central American immigrant families residing in the Los Angeles area and includes analyses from focus group data, participant observations and interviews collected at the Central American Resource Center, CARECEN, and with Central American families living in this area of Los Angeles.  Selected folklore and writing by Central American youth in the Los Angeles area are interspersed within this  article.  Implications  for  practice  conclude this study.

Introduction

The International Conference on Bilingualism: Language and Heritage is an inaugural conference that officially launches the newly established University of Cambridge - Chinese University of Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism (JLB). We aim to provide an international forum to promote and disseminate research in bilingualism across the lifespan from infancy to early childhood and adulthood with a focus on the acquisition of Chinese across linguistically diverse bilingual and multilingual contexts. The theme of the conference features bilingualism through the lens of the intricate relationship of language and heritage, in particular, the acquisition of language as a way to preserve and maintain a speaker and community's heritage and the challenges posed to language learners, researchers and educators.

The conference also features two panels that will be of interest to a wide spectrum of audience from diverse disciplines as well as the general public. The panels bring together researchers and practitioners from different countries including Australia, UK, USA, Hong Kong and Singapore to give an international perspective on issues in nurturing bilingualism in early childhood and heritage bilingualism across diverse contexts.


Panel I: Bilingualism in early childhood education: research and practice

This panel focuses on issues in early childhood bilingualism and education, with the guiding assumption that research and practice can mutually inform each other. Panelists will highlight the importance of infant and child bilingualism research using methods from psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience and explore implications for developing programs and for practitioners in the classroom. The panel will be of interest to educators and language professionals concerned with bilingualism research and best practices in the local and international communities.
Panel II: Heritage bilingualism, education and society

This panel focuses on Chinese as a heritage language in overseas communities where English is the language of the community. As the learning and teaching of heritage Chinese has grown rapidly in recent years across many countries, the speakers will address issues in developing education programs for school age children and adult learners in diverse learning contexts. A key issue to be discussed is how knowledge of Chinese as a heritage language can be nurtured in English-dominant environments and how heritage bilingualism is vital to preserving the heritage and identity of the speaker.
Call for Abstracts (Poster Presentations)

We are inviting abstract submissions for poster presentations at the Conference. Submissions are invited on any of the following topics:

childhood bilingualism and multilingualism
second language acquisition
third language acquisition
heritage bilingualism
language contact and bilingualism
language shift and maintenance
bilingual education
bilingual language policy


Submission guidelines:

All abstracts must be submitted in pdf format via the online abstract submission portal.
Abstracts are limited to 300-400 words, including references and 3 keywords, not exceeding one A4 page.
Font size is 12 point Times New Roman font, single-lined, margins set to 2.54cm (1 inch) all around.



Important dates:

Submission deadline: 16 October, 2017
Notification of acceptance: 30 October, 2017



Keynote Speakers

Boping Yuan
University of Cambridge

Margaret Deuchar
University of Cambridge

Esuna Dugarova
United Nations

Audrey Li
University of Southern California

Yongcan Liu
University of Cambridge

Gigi Luk
Harvard University

Maria Polinsky
University of Maryland

Virginia Yip
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Yang Zhao
Peking University







Invited Speakers

Angel Chan
Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Xiangjun Deng
Shenzhen University

Ting Ding
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Mary Erbaugh
University of Oregon

Yanyu Guo
University of Cambridge

Xuhui Hu
Peking University

Yinglin Ji
Shenzhen University

Elaine Lau
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Diana Lee
University of Hong Kong

Connie Lum
NTUC First Campus, Singapore

Ziyin Mai
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Peggy Mok
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ruying Qi
Western Sydney University

Pei Pei Setoh
Nanyang Technological University

Rebecca Starr
National University of Singapore

Ai Ling Thian
NTUC First Campus, Singapore

Lucy Zhao
University of Sheffield







Invited Moderator

Stephen Matthews
University of Hong Kong







Registration

Early bird (till November 15)

Regular registration: HK$ 600
Student registration: HK$ 300
Regular registration (after November 15)

Regular registration: HK$ 800
Student registration: HK$ 400
One-day Registration

Regular registration: HK$ 500
Student registration: HK$ 250
ONLINE REGISTRATION

Payment methods:

By credit card:
Please provide information of your credit card when completing the registration form.
Only Visa / MasterCard will be accepted.

By cash:
Cash payment is available during on-site registration in regular rates.

How to register?

Please register through our online system, and indicate the type of registration and payment method in the form.

Payment Policy: Please note that all fees are non-refundable.

Venues and Transportation

The conference will be held at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

18 December, 2017: 
Inauguration ceremony
Cho Yiu Conference Hall

Invited Talks
Lecture Theatre 5, Lee Shau Kee Building

19 December, 2017:
Panels
Lecture Theatre 5, Lee Shau Kee Building

Verfasserin Lisa-Maria Müller angestrebter akademischer Grad Magistra der Philosophie (Mag.phil.) Wien, 2013 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 190 344 362 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: UF Englisch UF Russisch Betreuerin: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Ute Smit Dla mojej Mamusi. Für meinen Papa. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | DANKSAGUNGEN | PODZIĘKOWANIA | REMERCIEMENTS First of all I would like to thank my supervisor Ute Smit for taking me on despite the rather unusual topic of my thesis and for supporting me magnificently despite the geographical distance between Austria and Finnland. Thank you for numerous nurturing discussions on the topic of bilingualism and the detailed and constructive feedback during my writing process. Następne podziękowania są skierowane do Ewy Haman oraz do Zofii Wodnieckiej za możliwość uczestniczenia w projekcie Bi-Sli-Pl, przy którym się nauczyłam nie tylko bardzo dużo o rozwoju poznawczym dzieci dwujęzycznych oraz dzieci ze specyficznym zaburzeniem językowym, ale także miałam możliwość zdobycia wielu praktycznych doświadczeń związanych z tak dużym projektem naukowym. Dziękuję również za udostępnienie danych niezbędnych do powstania niniejszej pracy. Further thanks are directed at Shula Chiat for her support throughout my stay in London and for many fruitful discussions in person and online as well as to Susi Reichl for her constant encouragement. Jestem bardzo wdzięczna Alexowi i Nathanowi za ich zgodę na badania i cierpliwość w trakcie przeprowadzania badań. Ta praca nie powstałaby bez nich! Thanks boys, you are wonderful. Dziękuję również rodzicom chłopców za wyrażenie zgody na udział w badaniach i za wiele ciekawych rozmów na temat rozwoju dzieci dwujęzycznych. Die nächste Danksagung gilt meinen fabelhaften Eltern, ohne die ich nicht wäre wer und wo ich heute bin. Dziękuję Mamusiu za cały ten czas, który mi poświęciłaś i nadal poświęcasz, za to że zawsze wiesz kiedy Cię potrzebuję najbardziej, za wszystkie Twoje bezcenne rady, za to że zawsze pozwalałaś mi marzyć i nauczyłaś mnie, że wszystko można osiągnąć jeśli tylko wloży się w to dużo ii wysiłku i serca. Dziękuję również za to, że nigdy mnie do niczego nie zmuszałaś i za to że dałaś mi korzenie i skrzydła. Jesteś moim wzorem. Danke Papa dafür, dass du mich in meinem Weg unterstützt, auch wenn wir nicht immer einer Meinung sind, dafür dass du mich zu einer kritischen Denkerin erzogen hast, dafür dass du immer ein offenes Ohr für meine Anliegen hast und akzeptierst dass diese oft mit sehr viel Nachdruck geteilt werden müssen, dass ich unendlich viel von dir gelernt habe und immer noch lerne und dass du gekämpft hast als es am wichtigsten war. Merci beaucoup à Adrien pour me soutenir dans toutes mes idées et mes rêves pour être le vent sous mes ailes et pour ajouter toujours une côté critique à mes réflexions qui me permet de les considérer dʼun autre point de vue. Merci pour partager les mêmes passions et dʼen avoir rajouté plein de nouveaux. Grazie mille per tutto la mia carissima Eva! Thanks for keeping me sane amidst the insanity. Thanks for having cursed and procrastinated with me and put a smile back on my face whenever I lost mine temporarily. Ohne dich würde ich noch immer im dichten Wald der universitären Bürokratie herumirren. Another big thank you goes out to my lovely host family in England. Thank you Bridget and Dave for treating me like your child no. 5. Thank you Alex, Ella, Cassie and Zac for being the brothers and sisters I never had. I love you guys! I would further like to thank Grandpa Supple for introducing me to linguistics and for sharing his expert opinion with me on numerous topics. Lastly, I would like to express my endless gratitude to my family and friends at home and across the globe. Your are essential.

The dichotomy between China’s claim to respect, protect and promote Tibetan culture in the education system and its actual practice of alienating Tibetans from their linguistic and cultural heritage and identity through a vigorous imposition of Chinese curricula under its Han-Chinese nationalist agenda has only resulted in a failure to achieve the kind of domination it seeks over the Tibetan people.

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

O objetivo deste trabalho é discutir, através dos dados, que a decodificação fonológica na
L2 ocorre de forma similar à da aquisição da L1, através da decodificação fonológica do som da letra,
e a associação ao grafema. O público-alvo são estudantes do 1º ano do Ensino Fundamental I de uma
Escola da Rede Particular Bilíngue. Bilinguismo consecutivo é aquele em que a aquisição da segunda
língua ocorre ainda na infância, porém após o aprendizado da L1, aproximadamente aos cinco ou seis
anos de idade. No método fônico, essa aquisição da segunda língua se dará a partir do som da letra,
o fonema, para a construção de palavras e, consequentemente, frases e pequenos textos. Para isso,
foi realizado um estudo de caso com objetivo de observar uma situação real e analisar as situações
observadas. Os dados apontam que a educação bilíngue consecutiva de infância possibilita que
os alunos consigam mobilizar os dois códigos linguísticos de forma alternada, como também
oportunizar uma conscientização linguística e intercultural.

The ecology of language has its foundation in the work of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists in the 1950s and early 1960s.  Since the late 20th century, the ecology of language, sometimes known as “ecolinguistics” or “language ecology,” has become an umbrella term for a wide range of perspectives that seek to make connections between language and environment: using concepts related to ecology to understand social environments for multilingualism, analyzing discourses of environment and environmentalism, and describing relationships between biological and cultural diversity. While each of these perspectives is useful in its own way for understanding aspects of language in society, and all of them overlap in meaningful ways, the focus here is on the first perspective since it is arguably the most widely used with respect to the study of language (in) education. In this regard, the ecology of language is a conceptual orientation to critical thinking about multilingualism in and around teaching and learning.  From this point of view, the ecology of language highlights the importance of being aware of the social and political environment in which language learning and teaching takes place. This includes paying attention to how language education relates to large-scale linguistic ecosystems like regions, countries, and cities as well as to small scales like communities, schools, classrooms, and interpersonal interactions.  This text examines foundations, controversies, major contributions, and future directions in ecological perspectives on multilingual education.

Bilingualism and multilingualism are the speaker’s ability to speak two or more languages. This capability is achieved by the individual speakers, where besides the mother tongue (L1) learners different languages on a parallel basis or gradually, indifferent times and places, creating different language competence, which memorializes in his cognitive and uses the self-actualization in the process of instruction in the language required in compliance with contextual communication situation.
Linguistic diversity reflected in multicultural social community enables all individuals to develop bilingualism and multilingualism skills ranging from family environment with mixed marriages and social environment with formal education systems, formal and informal education for the achievement of personal and collective in ward-processing versatile in every aspect of life.
Achievements of the Individual in ward-processing to multilingual speakers reflected on the enrichment cognitive with different competitive languages, in developing affective achieving empathic on respecting the principle of multicultural democratic society toward psychomotor skills development of oral and written expression in every language, communication towards the provision and acceptance of different messaging and social terms with the facilitation of providing vital existential unemployment challenge in the XXI century.
This project aims to clarify scientific theoretical concepts about bilingualism and multilingualism and with empirical research to illuminate the current state of bilingualism and multilingualism which is used by the speakers to provide vital existentiality in everyday life in the city of Gostivar, Republic of Macedonia. In this research shall use combined questionnaires prepared in advance according to Likert scale and with alternative questions for three groups of bilingual speakers. The survey will held with employed citizens of three ethnic groups in Gostivar with Albanians, Macedonians and Turks.

"Latinos are now the largest ethnic minority population in the United States and still they encounter a great deal of misunderstanding, prejudice, and discrimination. Utilizing a strengths-based perspective, Social Work Practice with Latinos addresses the unique needs of this diverse population.

Written by practitioners and scholars from many disciplines, this book discusses social issues of consequence to Latinos and specific strengths and risk factors of the Latino community. They then offer methods that utilize these strengths to ensure a culturally-competent approach to practice with Latino populations. Each chapter is accompanied by key questions for personal and group reflection to facilitate discussion and understanding of these vital themes.

The editors have nearly three decades of combined experience working with Latino populations inside and outside the United States. Drawing on this experience, they integrate these varied perspectives to prepare students and practitioners for practice with this richly diverse community."