This study investigated cross-linguistic priming in six-year-old, balanced Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 60). We examined bilinguals' production of transitive forms in English (active, passive) after exposure to Spanish transitives (Study 1; M age = 6.2 years; SD = 0.3) and their production of transitive forms in Spanish (active, passive) after…

Spanish-English cognates (words from ancestrally related languages similar in appearance and meaning) are plentiful in students' reading materials, but few researchers have documented elementary-age bilingual (Spanish-English) students' actual use of cognates. The authors drew from two qualitative research studies to show how bilingual students…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to describe how the language diversity (i.e., the within-group variability in dual-language skills) of Latino dual-language learner (DLL) preschoolers was related to their science readiness skills and (b) to describe the importance of language of science instruction for Spanish-dominant children.…

The Individual with Disabilities Education Act specifies that families should be include in the special education process and they must provide informed consent. However, families from Spanish-speaking backgrounds, often report barriers to participation. In this study, we provided a forum for Spanish-speaking families to tell their stories using…

Bilingual children demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in each of the two languages to which they are exposed. Even though it is widely acknowledged that bilingual children are not a homogenous group, existing studies on dual-language profiles in bilingual children have focused on expressive language profiles. In this study, we used the…

California's K-12 student population is one of the most linguistically diverse in the nation, with nearly 40% of students who speak a language other than English. Despite federal and landmark K-12 policies supporting inclusion for multilingual learners (MLs), as revealed by the literature, MLs are often viewed through a white normative…

This research uses a descriptive quantitative statistical design to examine campus-level results from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR). The focus is on describing the achievement disparities between campuses that implemented Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) programs and those implementing Dual Language (DL)…

This study examined how parents, teachers, and administrators conceptualised dual-language immersion (DLI) education and its goals at Bobcat Canyon School (BCS, pseudonym), a private preschool in the Southwestern USA where 64% students were White and 36% were students of colour. Through interviews with 15 parents, eight teachers, and two school…

Research supports the importance of developing early literacy skills through culturally relevant activities and school/home partnerships as essential ingredients in high quality early learning environments (Bentley & Souto-Manning, 2019; Gay, 2000). Educators, however, frequently dismiss the significance of honoring a child's first language,…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

Reading identities, or the ways that a child constructs the self as a reader across contexts and time, play a role in the development of early reading. Prior research on reading identities has reported primarily on the identities of monolingual children. This multiple case study examines the reading identities of young multilingual children.…

We explored the role of three math instructional practices by teachers (explicit instruction, guided practice, peer interaction) in predicting current Spanish and English reading comprehension and later Spanish and English math problem-solving performance of English learners (ELs). In this study, math was taught in Spanish. We had 26 teachers and…

Language separation policies in two-way bilingual education (TWBE) reflect ideologies of double monolingualism (Heller, 1995) and ignore the sociolinguistic realities of bi/multilingual students (García & Lin, 2017). This case study investigates the design and implementation of collaborative multilingual identity text projects (Prasad, 2018)…

Research Findings: Children's oral language skills lay the foundation for later literacy and can be fostered through responsive conversations with teachers. However, such conversations are rare in preschool, particularly between teachers and dual language learners (DLLs), or students who speak a minoritized language at home. DLLs benefit when…

Purpose: The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether parallel measures of narrative-based listening comprehension and reading comprehension reflected the same construct and yielded comparable scores from a diverse sample of second- and third-grade students. One hundred ten students participated in this study. Method: Three listening…