Emerging bilingual learners' biliteracy abilities are often underestimated when monolingual reading assessments, such as the DIBELS, are used to identify students as having difficulties in learning or to guide literacy instruction. The authors propose a holistic form of biliterate assessment that uses writing as a means to understand what emerging…

Purpose: Despite the unprecedented growth of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in new destination states--where DLLs have not been historically served--empirical understanding of their language and literacy skills is scant. Drawing on scientific understandings of bilingual language acquisition, we compare monolingually scored and…

This study compared language minority bilingual (LMB) second graders with two groups of monolingual peers (with comparable low SES or with high SES) in a set of literacy skills (reading fluency, spelling, reading and oral comprehension) tested in the target school language (L2 for bilinguals). The aim was to disentangle the roles of bilingualism…

Using classical and quantile regression analyses, we investigated whether predictor variables for early reading comprehension differed depending on language background and ability level in a mixed group of 161 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) children in second grade (6--8 years). Although L2 readers scored lower on oral language skills and…

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…

Dual-language learner (DLL) children typically learn to write while still learning English, with vocabulary appearing to be a particularly vulnerable domain. This study investigates how a reduced English lexicon impacts English writing in DLL children. Participants were 100 Spanish-speaking DLLs and 100 of their monolingual classmates in first…

The universality of reading comprehension strategies across languages is a view generally accepted. What has not been clearly established, however, is the degree to which specific comprehension strategies are used by skilled L1 and L2 readers in the early grades. To investigate this issue, similarities and differences in the reading strategies of…

This study used a copying task to examine spelling acquisition in French and Spanish from a perception and action perspective. Experiment 1 compared French and Spanish-speaking monolingual children's performance. Experiment 2 analysed the behaviour of bilingual children when copying words in French and Spanish. Gaze lift analysis showed that in…