Understanding factors that influence reading achievement among bilingual children is considerably more complex than it is for monolingual children. Research on dual language development indicates that bilingual children's oral language abilities are often distributed across languages in varied ways, due to heterogeneity of dual language exposure…

We examined spelling errors patterns, cohesive ties, and syntax features in English and Spanish essays written by Spanish-English emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. In Study 1, we addressed whether students made consistent spelling errors…

This study, which utilized a modified metalinguistic awareness test adopted from Dita's (2009), probed on young children's metalinguistic awareness in identifying syntactic errors; determining sounds and the use of phonological segments; and explaining a word on their own by describing its appearance or its functions in English, Filipino, and…

In this study, we elicited grammatical forms (oral production) from a group of child heritage speakers of Spanish (N = 45) in English and Spanish, using the morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA), (Peña et al. 2014). A cross-sectional design was used with 25 participants in kindergarten and 20 in first grade. All…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe change in dual language learners' (DLLs) morphosyntactic skills from kindergarten to first grade based on a sentence repetition task in English and Spanish. Methods: The sample included Spanish-English speaking children (n = 25). Investigators employed a repeated measures analysis of variance with one…

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish-English bilingual children. First- (N = 586) and third-graders (N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information…

The present study examined the roles of different dimensions of syntactic skills in predicting reading comprehension within and across two languages with contrasting structural properties: Chinese and English. A total of 413 young Cantonese-English bilingual students in Hong Kong (202 first graders and 211 third graders) were tested on word order…

This study aimed to describe home literacy (HL) activities of Spanish-/English-speaking children of low-socioeconomic status backgrounds and examine the relationship between HL and performance on standardized assessments. Parents of 65 dual-language learners (DLLs) in kindergarten completed an HL questionnaire. Parents reported an average of 17…

In this correlational study, we analyzed data from 71 Spanish-English biliterate students in grades 3 (n=21), 4 (n=23), and 5 (n=27) with the goal of investigating the applicability of the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) in English and in Spanish for this population. The simple view posits that decoding…

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…