The main purpose of this investigation was to analyze both quantitatively and qualitatively reader's oral reading miscues and the retellings of Venezuelan fourth graders in five Venezuelan dialect regions. The major question to be answered was: In what ways do Venezuelan children who speak variations of Spanish use their syntactic, semantic, graphophonic and pragmatic systems and their reading strategies (sampling, predicting, confirming, and correcting) in their process of meaning construction during oral reading? The answer to the major research question reveals that informants from the highlands: Merida and Trujillo are more proficient readers in their meaning construction. In the group of informants from the lowlands the percentages show that at least half of the subjects are similar to the most proficient readers from the highlands. The findings are supportive of a definition of reading as meaning construction. They were able to retell the events in an ordered sequence and to name and develop most of the characters in the story. There were no major dialect features differences between the five Venezuelan regions' informants. Most of the dialect features that children displayed in the oral reading were also present in reader's oral retellings. Among these groups of informants, their dialect can be considered as an unrelated factor to their reading proficiency.

The study investigated the degree of compliance of selected Arizona public school districts with a set of state statutes which placed a limit on the amount bilingual education services a district could provide to students. The existing literature on implementation and compliance suggested that several conditions might influence districts to implement programs of instruction which would be at variance with the state laws. The study used questionnaires to gather program data from 40 school districts in southeastern Arizona. These questionnaires were screened to determine those districts offering programs of instructions which exceeded the restrictions of state law. Six such districts were found. Interviews were conducted with program administrators in each district to determine the explanations for noncompliance. An interview was also obtained with an Arizona Department of Education official to determine the role of the state regarding the bilingual statutes. Information obtained from the interviews revealed that several of the programs had been established under federal pressure to provide equal educational opportunity to limited-English-proficient children. These programs had existed long before these state statutes were put into effect in 1981. Data also indicated that the state statutes lacked enforcement mechanisms. The state agency responsible for those programs received no mandate to monitor districts or to enforce state restrictions. Also, this agency was federally-funded with a primary loyalty to federal priorities to keep programs in operation and with a service rather than an enforcement orientation toward local districts. No enforcement of the restrictions found in the 1981 bilingual statutes took place. Furthermore, administrative regulations for the 1981 statutes were formulated which permitted programs of instruction exceeding state limitations to continue. In 1984 new bilingual statutes were put into effect which removed the restrictions of the old statutes. The new statutes are discussed from the historical perspective of the earlier statutes.

Language maintenance investigations have, for the most part, been limited to the study of the effect that socio-cultural factors have on language preservation. Unfortunately, language maintenance has been studied in tandem with language shift. Language shift has generated more interested from scholars than has language maintenance. This dissertation is an attempt to open up new ways to look at the study of language maintenance by presenting a theoretical framework whereby the domain of language use is the principal focus of study. I studied the domain of religion, subdivided into several dimensions. One dimension, that of ideology, is at the center of my study. The main objective of the dissertation was to identify ideological themes within the doctrinal body of the church selected for the study. Twenty-five such themes were identified and analyzed to determine the ways in which the themes influence language maintenance among the church members. The case study approach and the use of several ethnographic data collection methods were employed to assist us in having a better understanding of the phenomenon of language maintenance and to pave the way for future language maintenance studies.