This study investigated the direct and indirect associations of different executive function skills with Chinese word reading and writing. A total of 213 Cantonese-speaking kindergarteners (97 girls, mean age = 73.3 months) participated in this study. Their working memory, inhibition control, cognitive flexibility, orthographic knowledge,…

Young children's language skills have a significant positive impact on their academic success throughout school, especially on reading and writing performance. The spread of COVID-19, which has resulted in lockdowns, fewer learning hours in kindergarten, and distance learning, might have affected children's exposure to learning opportunities. The…

All Arabic-speaking children grow up in diglossia. They use a spoken Arabic vernacular (SpA) for everyday speech but Standard Arabic (StA) for reading/writing. The current study reports a pilot diglossia-centred intervention among Palestinian-Arabic-speaking kindergarteners (N = 290; mean age 64.52 months). The study examines the effectiveness of…

Pure copying skill (copying of unfamiliar scripts) and delayed copying (copying of unfamiliar Chinese characters presented previously) can both be important correlates in learning to write Chinese. The present study tested both traditional literacy-related skills and copying skills among 267 Chinese kindergarteners (mean age = 5.52) to examine the…

Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, African American Language (AAL) remains stigmatized throughout the United States education system. There have been proposals to counteract this through curricula and/or ideological interventions targeted at teachers that seek to validate AAL while maintaining Dominant American English (DAE) as an…

The potential of speech technology to improve educational outcomes has been a topic of great interest in recent years. For example, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems could be employed to provide kindergarten-aged children with real-time feedback on their literacy and pronunciation as they practice reading aloud. Within these systems,…

The development of emergent literacy, a precursor to formal reading, has been linked to subsequent conventional literacy skills in Chinese children. The factors important for acquiring Chinese reading skills, such as phonological and morphological awareness, have primarily been studied in primary school children rather than preschoolers. The…

The purpose of this 3-year longitudinal study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA) aspects (inflectional, derivational, and lexical compounding) in the spelling of specific morphemes. Two hundred and fifteen Greek children were followed from kindergarten (K) to grade 2 (G2). In K and grade 1 (G1) they were tested on…

This article discusses the role of vocabulary learning in supporting multilingual students' participation in disciplinary practices and discourses in K-12 content-area classrooms. First, the authors discuss the strengths and limitations of incidental and intentional vocabulary learning. They then propose a new approach to vocabulary instruction in…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew -- a highly transparent orthography, and whether this…

Teacher preparation programs throughout the United States have begun to include issues of second language teaching and learning in their curriculum in an effort to better prepare their teacher candidates to meet the needs of the increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse student population in K-12 schools. In this article, we argue for the…

This study examined how a dialogic reading (DR) program with a component of multisensory learning (MS) of Chinese characters improved early Chinese reading and writing skills in L2 Chinese-speaking kindergarteners in Hong Kong. The DR + MS program was compared to the same DR program but focusing on morphological awareness (MA) training. A total of…

Reading identities are the ways that a person constructs the self as a reader across contexts and time. This study explores reading identities as a developmental process in multilingual children in prekindergarten and kindergarten. Participants were six children ages three to four participating in a Chinese-English family literacy program over a…

This study examined the elements of [critical] multicultural awareness ([C]MA) and [critical] multilingual awareness ([C]MLA) identified in the pedagogical responsiveness of five literacy teacher educators (LTEs), the factors that influenced such awareness, and the ways in which these forms of awareness shaped educators' pedagogical responsiveness…

This scoping review explores the causal relationship between morphological instruction and reading development in young L2 learners by synthesizing 12 primary studies published between 2004 and 2019 (N = 1,535). These studies focused on reading English as the target language and involved participants between kindergarten and Grade 12 from four…