Academic language has been shown to significantly contribute to success across school subjects. However, to date, there are no empirical studies addressing its development across primary school age. The present study investigated the growth of academic vocabulary and influential conditions from Grades 2 to 4 based on a newly developed and…

Bilingual experience has an impact on an individual's linguistic processing and general cognitive abilities. The relation between these linguistic and non-linguistic domains, in turn, is mediated by individual linguistic proficiency and developmental changes that take place across the lifespan. This study evaluated this relationship by assessing…

We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause…

Few studies have investigated the discourses and ideologies around parents' enrollment decisions in Chinese-English immersion contexts, and how these discourses and ideologies affect their involvement with their children' bi/multilingual development. Conducted in a K-5 50/50 one-way Mandarin immersion school, this paper focuses on ethnographic…

In English-majority contexts such as British Columbia, French second language (FSL) teachers are increasingly encountering students who are also learning French in addition to English and their home languages. Research findings show that dual language learners are successfully supported through multilingual pedagogies that acknowledge and…

Differences between monolingual and multilingual vocabulary development have been observed but few studies provide a longitudinal perspective on vocabulary development before and following school entry. This study compares vocabulary growth profiles of 106 multilingual children to 211 monolingual peers before and after school entry to examine…

Most academic discussion on the role of language in education in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) supports the extended use of African languages as media of instruction (MoI), while most practice preserves a monolingual role for European languages. Many ministries of education maintain the belief that African languages are not appropriate as MoIs beyond…

This article explores policy and practice in relation to support for speakers of community languages in Northern Ireland primary schools against the backdrop of the broader UK context, with reference also to the Republic of Ireland and wider European and international experiences. After an initial discussion of the educational, social and…

The teaching and research communities in mathematics education agree that mathematical discussions pose challenges in elementary classrooms. These challenges continue to motivate research on mathematical discussions, with a focus on how students use talk in discussions. This study addresses the question, "What can teachers and researchers…

We report on a research project that develops and measures the efficacy of multilingual teaching approaches in the early English foreign language (FL) classroom in Germany. Although there is an abundance of programmatic calls for integrating minority and other languages the students speak in FL teaching, there are few materials and methods for…

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual…

This study set out to compare patterns of relationships among phonological skills, orthographic skills, semantic knowledge, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension in English as a first language (EL1) and English language learners (ELL) students and to test the applicability of the lexical quality hypothesis framework. Participants…

The adoption of the Common Core in many states across the country means we need to explore instructional approaches that promote student language use in order to meet many of the complex linguistic standards that comprise the Common Core. In this Teaching Tip, we provide a blueprint for a 4-week collaborative discussion mini-unit that a second…

This study examines young English readers' ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37…

Research involving monolinguals has demonstrated that language impairment can be noticed in the early years and tends to persist into adolescence. More recently, research has begun to address the challenges of identifying and treating Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) in English Language Learners (ELLs). Developmental patterns of DLD are not…