In the preceding quote, Rosa Hernandez, a Mexican immigrant from a working-class background, recounts a common theme in the literature on children's language development: language learning as a negotiated activity. This perspective is routinely supported using evidence from studies on the language-learning environments available to middle-class, English-speaking students. These studies portray middle-class homes as places where parents initiate conversations with their children and adjust their own conversation to make it more accessible to their children. They elicit clarifications and elaborations, expand and extend children's utterances, and regularly engage children in predictable conversational routines (Brown and Bellugi, 1964; Ratner and Bruner, 1977; Ninio and Bruner, 1977; Snow, 1977, 1983; Cazden, 1979; Scollon and Scollon, 1981). Evidence from ethnographic research suggests that the language learning environment of ethnic minority children from working-class populations living in the United States is quite different from that of white middle-class children. In the minority communities authors such as Miller (1982), Heath (1983), Boggs (1985), and Philips (1983) studied, adults didn't engage children in extended conversations or accommodate their speech to their children's developmental level.