Purpose: This study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children's first and second language predicts reading comprehension. Method: Children's ability to detect inconsistencies in orally presented stories was measured by response to a judgment question about whether the story made sense and by the identification of the…

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…

Canadian students enrolled in either French-immersion or English-instruction programs were followed from Grades 2 to 3 (M[subscript age] = 7.8 years to 8.9 years; N = 244; 55% girls). In each grade, students completed two mathematical tasks that required oral language processing (i.e., word-problem solving and number transcoding from dictation)…

The present study examined parents' and teachers' perceptions of student learning in Spanish-English Dual Language Education (DLE) programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants included 72 parents of students from kindergarten to second grade and eight teachers in two schools in the southeastern U.S. Parents retrospectively reported…

This study examined the oral language skills of grade-two anglophone children enrolled in French Immersion and English-stream programs. The study had two objectives: (1) to compare performance between the groups on measures of receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, and narrative production (i.e., structure and language) in English; and (2)…

Spanish-English emergent bilingual children's range of sociocultural and linguistic knowledge have typically gone devalued in relation to school literacy curricula. This case study examines how emergent bilingual children in a second grade one-way immersion dual language classroom draw on their prior cultural-experiential knowledge and dynamic…

This study reports on a small-scale, longitudinal investigation on L2 Spanish oral development by English-home language (EHL) learners in an English/Spanish Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program in rural, eastern United States. It examined EHL learners' oral ability in L2 Spanish based on longitudinal assessment data from Kindergarten, Grade 2, and…

This study investigated the effect of mother tongue instruction and gender on second language acquisition using a causal-comparative quantitative research design. The two distinguishing groups compared were (i) learners that were taught in their mother tongue (Afrikaans) and (ii) learners that were not taught in their mother tongue but in English,…

The development of English and Spanish reading and oral language skills from kindergarten to third grade was examined with a sample of 502 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) enrolled in three instructional programs. The students in the transitional bilingual and dual-language programs had significantly higher scores than the…

There are many types of programs for Spanish speaking students in the US, with varying methods and goals. Some preliminary work suggests that bilingual classrooms may differ widely in instruction, even under the same program labels. However, there are few studies which have compared the extent to which various bilingual program models differ in…

We tracked the developmental influences of exposure to French on developing English phonological awareness, decoding and reading comprehension of English-speaking at-risk readers from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Teacher-nominated at-risk readers were matched with not-at-risk readers in French immersion and English language programs. Exposure to spoken…

A Mandarin/English two-way immersion elementary program is described from its inception and implementation through the fifth grade, the culminating year of the program. All students in all grades were assessed on their oral/listening, reading, and writing performance in Mandarin using program-created assessment measures. Fifth-grade students also…

Students whose first language is not English are the fastest-growing group in public schools in all regions of the United States. Almost 10 million children between the ages of five and 17 live in the homes and communities in which a language other than English in spoken and presently most schools in the U.S. are under-educating many English…

The Atse Kituwah Academy (New Kituwah Academy) houses the new Cherokee immersion school in Cherokee, North Carolina. Cherokee is located on the Qualla Boundary in the mountains of the western part of the state, the contemporary homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). In 2005, a comprehensive study of the health of the Cherokee…

The present study investigated the efficacy of early English immersion in the Shi Da Fu Elementary School in Xi'an, China. Three hundred and fifty one students were tested in Grades 1-6. There were two main purposes that motivated this longitudinal and cross-sectional study. The first goal was to compare the L1 and L2 language and literacy…