ABSTRACT
Large and growing numbers of children who do not speak English as their first language inhabit U.S. classrooms (Nieto, 2002; Garcia, 2000). For example, Thomas and Collier (2004) estimate that by the year 2040, children who speak a first language other than English will comprise almost 40% of the population of school-aged children in America. Already, English is not a first language for over half of the public school students in California (Garcia, 2000). While approximately half of the children who immigrated to the United States in the 1990s came from Latin American countries, the remaining immigrants came from countries all over the world speaking a vast array of different first languages (Malone, Baluja, Constanzo, & Davis, 2003).
