Anita C. Hernández

Reinforcing Expository Reading and Writing Skills: A More Versatile Sentence Completion Task

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause–effect, compare–contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated sentences and presented in a random order, students are challenged in several ways: First, students must fill in the blanks with the appropriate vocabulary word. Then they must separate the related sentences from the unrelated ones. Next, they must locate the main idea or topic sentence. Finally, students must arrange the related sentences to form a cohesive paragraph. The results of an investigation conducted with fourth- and fifth-grade students suggest that use of this strategy facilitates locating main ideas in addition to providing practice in forming logical paragraphs. Recommendations for introducing, creating, and modifying this activity are offered.

Being a Librarian Isn't Enough: The Importance of a Nonlibrary Research Agenda for the Academic Librarian: A Case Study

Subject specialist college librarians can become producers and disseminators of knowledge by pursuing an active research agenda in their nonlibrary field. Research in an academic discipline can inform and enhance the college librarians teaching, research, and collection development practices. Through such research, college librarians can elevate their personal status among their nonlibrary colleagues and students, as well as the prestige of their library and the library profession. Suggestions for managing traditional librarian duties and pursuing a nonlibrary research agenda are included.

Identifying Spanish–English Cognates to Scaffold Instruction for Latino ELs

Spanish–English cognates have been used for decades to facilitate the acquisition of English by Latino English learners (ELs). Using the online program, WordSift, in tandem with the online Find-a-Cognate database, teachers can identify important Spanish–English cognates and noncognate words in text. With this information, teachers can plan and devise vocabulary lessons that benefit ELs and native English speakers.

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY AND MORPHOLOGY OF SPANISH-ENGLISH COGNATE ADJECTIVES

The English and Spanish languages share over 20,000 cognates. Cognates are words that are orthographically, semantically, and syntactically similar in two languages. In 2009, Montelongo, Hernández, and Herter collected orthographic transparency ratings for over 2,000 Spanish–English cognate nouns and cognate adjectives drawn from the Juilland and Chang-Rodríguez’ Frequency Dictionary of Spanish Words. The present analysis of the cognate adjectives in the Montelongo, et al. norms identified orthographic and morphological characteristics which affected ratings of cognate transparency. The analysis identified an initial-letter effect: the earlier an English word deviates from its Spanish equivalent, the lower it is rated. Similarly, the more orthographically similar an English suffix is to its Spanish suffix equivalent, the higher its rating.

The Teachers' Choices Cognate Database for K–3 Teachers of Latino English Learners

The purpose of the present paper is to introduce the Teachers’ Choices Cognate Database. English-Spanish cognates are words that are orthographically and semantically identical or nearly identical in both English and Spanish. To create this free online database, the cognates from every one of the 146 International Reading Associations Teachers’ Choices books for the years, 1998-2012, were compiled and published at www.angelfire.com/ill/monte/teacherschoices.html. The cognates in the database may be used to create vocabulary lessons or mini-lessons to accompany book read-alouds for Latino English Language Learners (ELLs) in the early primary grades. Ideas for teaching English-Spanish cognates through picture book read-alouds are presented and discussed.