ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the study of bilingualism. Federal involvement in the provision of compensatory services for the language-minority child has produced a plethora of programs that have been widely criticized and attacked. Unfortunately, however, there is a dearth of empirical research upon which to judge this quality, and one finds that the debate rages on about how the language-minority child should be characterized and treated. The purpose of this chapter is to review the highlights of a recent investigation in which nine different ethnohnguistic groups were examined on a number of dimensions thought to be important in understanding the character of the language-minority child in the schools. These dimensions were selected to represent the major previous approaches to understanding the performance of language minorities.
