The growth of Utah's dual language immersion (DLI) program has led to situations where student and mentor teachers teach in settings far different from their home countries' schools, while supervisors observe lessons in unfamiliar languages. This study examined critical incidents in a cross-cultural student teaching experience consisting of a…

The purpose of this study is to investigate challenges and tensions encountered by university supervisors working with student teachers in dual language immersion (DLI) settings. Despite the growth of Utah's statewide DLI program, Utah university teacher programs have few faculty members familiar with the partner cultures and languages of Utah's…

The amount of language input bilingual children receive influences their language acquisition. This three-year quasi-longitudinal study determined the extent home language input influences measures of expressive and receptive English vocabulary among Spanish-English school-age bilingual children. The study also determined whether a relationship…

The rising demand for dual-language immersion (DLI) programs, which offer core instruction in two languages from early grades onward, has raised questions about program design and access. We leverage the rapid expansion of DLI schools across the U.S. state of Utah to estimate effects of DLI program availability on the academic achievement of…

The purpose of this study is to examine the professional development (PD) needs of Chinese dual language immersion program (DLI) educators, particularly the PD supports these teachers receive. This instrumental case study examined the professional learning of four Chinese language DLI teachers through semi-structured interviews and observations of…

This study explored the development of oral narrative retell proficiency among Mandarin Chinese-English dual language immersion (DLI) learners in Utah. The study compared the younger and the older DLI learners' oral narrative retelling production in order to provide information regarding the Mandarin narrative developmental trend of the DLI…

A growing body of research has demonstrated that neoliberal discourses have negatively impacted dual language bilingual education (DLBE) for students designated as English learners. This study uses the concept of expropriation to refer to the co-opting and dispossessing of educational resources, opportunities, and rights from language-minoritized…

Using the 2.4-million-word written Spanish subsection of the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion, collected from a large-scale standardized writing assessment of K-12 Spanish second language (L2) students, this study focuses on lexical complexity as operationalized by three measures: lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical…

This study invited parents in 21 one-way Mandarin Chinese dual immersion programs in Utah to respond to a survey on-line. Five hundred and eighty parents participated in this study. The objectives of the survey study were to learn the parents' reasons for enrollment, their program satisfaction, and whether there was a group difference based on the…

An important component of the teacher knowledge base is how aware a teacher is of language, including how it is acquired and best taught. Equally important are teacher beliefs about language or language ideologies. Because this combination of beliefs and awareness guides most pedagogical decisions, our study used explanatory sequential mixed…

Dual language immersion programs are increasing in popularity. Yet little is known about what motivates parents to enroll their children in dual language immersion. The theory of planned behavior posits that behavior is based on attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. The current study was an exploratory evaluation of the…

This study considers the opinions of dual immersion elementary school principals in investigating the following research questions: (1) What do dual immersion principals identify as the skills and traits for the school leader that lead to the principal's success in a dual immersion context? and (2) What were the differences of opinion, if any,…

This study looks at how parents in one Spanish-English two-way immersion (TWI) charter school report their participation in various home language and literacy practices. Parent groups, based on a cluster analysis, highlight the heterogeneity of Latino parents at the school while acknowledging the commonalities as well. Four parent groups emerged…