The ability to read on grade level is a fundamental skill required for children to achieve academic success. Students who are English language learners (ELLs) and/or those who have learning disabilities often find it extremely difficult to achieve at the reading expectation level. This study examines English phonemic awareness and phonic skills in…

The author spent four years embedded in a multilingual kindergarten classroom in which children spoke six different languages and several more years observing multilingual Head Start classrooms. She shares numerous examples of young dual language learners actively figuring out the way written language works in their first and second languages.…

The present study was undertaken to find ways to help bilingual preservice teachers become more aware of diversity and more questioning of methods for literacy development in order to address issues of critical literacy. Twenty-five bilingual preservice teachers, enrolled in a Spanish Reading Methods at the university tutored 25 kindergarten…

This study identifies how the contextual features of an elementary school setting shaped and often restricted bilingual kindergarten students' access to friendships within their grade-level English-dominant classroom. Data demonstrate how students utilized a teacher-designed lunch card routine to initiate, maintain, and display friendships in…

This article reports on a longitudinal analysis of factors that predict the word reading skills in English and Spanish for a sample of 234 Spanish-speaking students in first grade. The children were assessed at the end of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Data include three subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery and a…

This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children. A vocabulary intervention in science was developed using previous research on effective vocabulary and science instruction. Participants were 39 English-learning, bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking…

This study examines individual growth rates in phonological awareness and letter-word identification skills over an academic year for 150 Latino English-language learners. In October, February, and June of their kindergarten year, participants completed standardized measures of phonological awareness skills. Before the second and third…

This article examines the question: Do lexical, syntactic, fluency, and discourse measures of oral language collected under narrative conditions predict reading achievement both within and across languages for bilingual children? More than 1,500 Spanish-English bilingual children attending kindergarten-third grade participated. Oral narratives…

This article describes the word reading skills in English and Spanish for a sample of 244 Spanish-speaking, English-learning (hence, bilingual) students in first grade and presents a predictive model for English word reading skills. The children in the study were assessed at the end of kindergarten and first grade, respectively. Data were gathered…

By using an extended version of R. Treiman, M. Cassar, and A. Zukowski's (1994) flaps spelling task (wa_er, is it t or d in water?), the authors investigated the metalinguistic awareness of 6-year-old bilingual children from 3 different language backgrounds (LBs): English-LB (English-L1, Mandarin-L2), Chinese-LB (Mandarin-L1, English L2), and…

The purpose of this working paper is to review current literature on literacy programs for parents of English language learners (ELLs). The paper includes a summary of five literacy programs for ELL parents throughout the United States of America. Four of these were system-wide interventions affecting more than one school or classroom. Each…

This study investigated the relation of teacher characteristics, including ratings of teacher quality, to classroom instructional variables and to bilingual students' literacy and oral language outcomes at the end of the kindergarten year. Teacher characteristics included observational measures of oral language proficiency, quality, and classroom…

A significant amount of research treats students who speak a language other than English at home, or language-minority students, as a single demographic group and compares them to students who speak only English at home. If important disparities in early school experiences among language-minority students have been overlooked, then policies aimed…

This article describes a project on chickens and eggs undertaken by 5-year-old children in a bilingual school in Mexico City. It describes the three phases of the project and includes photographs and other documentation of the children's work.

This research article describes the English acquisition of three, young, high-achieving, Korean, bilingual students, their academic development and their social/psychological adjustment in school. All observations and interviews were conducted in the natural classroom setting. The Korean children underwent different school experiences, partially…