Research on the implementation of CLIL at the onset of primary school is limited and has largely overlooked the role of other sources of individual differences. This study investigated the effects of the CLIL approach to English learning, together with the effects of out-of-school exposure to the language through media and other sources of…

Research Findings: The current study examined whether collective small-group behavioral engagement and teacher behavior management during small-group instruction predicted print knowledge, phonological awareness, letter writing, and expressive vocabulary gains for preschoolers at-risk for literacy difficulties. This study, part of a larger…

Research Findings: The current study examined whether collective small-group behavioral engagement and teacher behavior management during small-group instruction predicted print knowledge, phonological awareness, letter writing, and expressive vocabulary gains for preschoolers at-risk for literacy difficulties. This study, part of a larger…

The purpose of the present study was to examine how foreign language education may affect preschool children's native language development. The study was carried out with 70 children who were 48-60 months-old and attending a public preschool in Alanya, a district of Antalya, in Turkey. The research method of the study was Solomon Four-Group…

This study investigated endogenous and exogenous predictors of early literacy in Turkish-speaking children. Whether children's language and working memory performances (as the endogenous factors) and home literacy environment (as the exogenous factor) in the beginning of kindergarten predict the children's current and year-end early literacy…

Early vocabulary knowledge is vital for later reading comprehension and academic success. Studies have found that augmenting explicit teaching of word meanings with nonverbal visual aids, particularly pictures and gestures, assists young learners in building rich lexical representations. Research has focused on the effects of visual supports in…

The purpose of this study is to examine the bidirectional relationship between children's language development and challenging behaviors as well as the moderating roles of gender and race/ethnicity. We conducted a number of structural equation modeling analyses with a national representative sample (N = 2,462) of Head Start children from the 2014…

We examined the relation of morphological awareness with language and literacy skills, namely phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. We also examined potential moderators of the relations (grade level, orthographic depth of language, receptive vs.…

The purpose of this research study is to compare the effects of digital, dialogic and traditional reading on children's language development aged 48-66 months. Fifty-six randomly selected children enrolled in three different classrooms in a public preschool in Turkey participated in the study. The three classrooms were again randomly assigned as…

This study examined the effects of older siblings' L1/L2 use on the vocabulary and fast mapping skills in preschool-age children who learn Cantonese (L1) as a home language and start to learn English (L2) in preschool settings. Two groups of bilingual children participated in this study: (1) children whose older siblings used mostly L1 at home…

Purpose: Cantonese lexical tone awareness is closely associated with 1st language Cantonese vocabulary knowledge, but its role in 2nd language English vocabulary knowledge was unclear. We addressed this issue by investigating whether and, if so, how Cantonese lexical tone awareness contributes to English expressive vocabulary knowledge in Hong…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…

Research has found that children who attend Head Start for more than one year tend to score higher on cognitive skills at the end of pre-K or at kindergarten entry than children who attend for one year or less (Lee 2011; Wen et al. 2012b; Xue et al. 2016). Although attending Head Start for more years is linked with higher cognitive scores,…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

In this study we sought to identify profiles of talk during Head Start preschool mealtime conversations involving teachers and students. Videos of 44 Head Start classrooms' lunch interactions were analyzed for the ratio of teacher-child talk and amount of academic vocabulary, and then coded for instances of academic/food, social/personal, and…