The difficulties experienced by immigrant students indicate that cross-cultural differences in cognition are most probably related to learning practices characteristics of different cultures…These differences can be observed not only between cultures but also within a given culture.

Alex Kozulin (1998)

The Language Minority Assessment Project is a Lesley University Initiative in collaboration with the Lowell Public Schools, MA funded with a grant from the US Department of Education. The primary focus of this action research project is on the development of a process to explore the influence of linguistic and cultural factors in classroom reading assessment for grades one and two.

The cultures selected for this project are associated with Brazil, Cambodia,
Portugal, Azores and Madeira, and the island of Puerto Rico because they reflect the cultural background of most students in the Lowell Public Schools in Massachusetts.

The concept of culture and cultural variations is of paramount importance in understanding CLD students and their performance in school. The notion of culture has been compared to an iceberg with a visible component above the water and an invisible one below the water line.