Drawing from a 3-year ethnographic project in one elementary school in the United States, this article examines how a group of 43 first graders perceived and constructed Brazil and the U.S. during a drawing and writing activity in their bilingual (Portuguese-English) classroom. The majority of the participating children (81.4%) either migrated…

Purpose: Using data from 1,868 children from the US, Australia, and Sweden who took a 10-word spelling test in kindergarten and a standardized spelling test in Grades 1, 2, and (except for the Australian children) Grade 4, we examined two questions. First, does the quality of a child's errors on the kindergarten test help predict later spelling…

Identifying and supporting students in early elementary grades with low literacy achievement is critical to help them achieve grade-level proficiency and stay on track academically. "Reading Recovery"® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims…

Identifying and supporting students in early elementary grades with low literacy achievement is critical to help them achieve grade-level proficiency and stay on track academically. "Reading Recovery"® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims…

This study investigates the phonological awareness of a Turkish monolingual and a Turkish-English bilingual child in Turkish. As a case study, the main focus of this study is to explore whether a bilingual advantage exists in phonological processing. Theories of bilingualism and empirical data led to the prediction that the bilingual participant…

We investigated the stability and developmental interplay of word reading and spelling in samples of Swedish (N = 191) and U.S. children (N = 489) followed across four time points: end of kindergarten, grades 1, 2, and 4. Cross-lagged path models revealed that reading and spelling showed moderate to strong autoregressive effects, with reading…

Purpose: Oral narrative, or storytelling, skills may constitute a linguistic strength for African American children, with implications for academic and social well-being. Despite this possibility, few studies have examined individual differences in oral narrative skill among African American children. To address this gap in the literature, this…

This article discusses a comparison of the two focal primary school third-grade Korean bilingual students' language use with their previous language use when they were first-graders by examining their heritage language (HL) use at a Korean language school. For children of immigrant families in the U.S., there has been a pervasive hypothesis that…

We investigated the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH) in samples of U.S. (N = 489), Australian (N = 264), and Scandinavian (N = 293) children followed from preschool to grade 2. Children were assigned to double deficit, single deficit and no deficit subtypes in preschool, kindergarten, and grade 1 and compared on reading and spelling in grades 1 and…

In this article, the authors share their experiences creating and implementing a unit focused on supporting bilingual identities through integrating language domains and translanguaging with authentic writing experiences. Two dual-language first-grade teachers from Colombia and the US worked together to model, celebrate, and support the use of…

The phrase "ready to learn" has been widely used and researched by scholars, policy makers, and education practitioners. School readiness, as a construct, has referred to the basic skills that children need to transition to elementary school. However, there is no consensus on which basic skills students should possess when entering…

Success for All, a multi-tiered school reform program, has its origins in the US and has recently expanded to the Netherlands. Using a multiple case study approach, we investigated similarities and differences in the way struggling readers are supported at two Success for All schools in the US and two in the Netherlands. First- and second-grade…

Academic socialization by low-income immigrant mothers from Mainland China was investigated in two studies. Immigrant Chinese mothers of first graders (n = 52; M[subscript age] = 38.69) in the United States (Study 1) and kindergartners (n = 86; M[subscript age] = 36.81) in Hong Kong (Study 2) tell stories that emphasized achieving the best grade…

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a…

This paper reports provisional Australian comparison data and scoring instructions for the "Test of Word Reading Efficiency" (TOWRE). The TOWRE is a popular reading fluency test used in reading research, classroom assessment and clinical practice. Approximate "norms" were obtained from children attending four primary schools in…