This systematic review aims to synthesize the literature on the effects of cross-linguistic transfer on Spanish/English bilinguals' reading comprehension skills. The search yielded at least 90 studies in which participants were Spanish/English bilinguals aged birth to Grade 12. Researchers assessed participants' decoding and/or linguistic…

This study explores the collaborative process that two Korean-English and one Spanish-English bilingual Early Head Start family childcare educators, two instructional coaches, and the author engaged in as they co-created intentional bilingual approaches to supporting young emergent bilinguals. A thematic analysis of the design-based approach of…

SciMath-DLL is a preschool professional development (PD) model including STEM instructional offerings that aims to improve the quality of instruction for all children, including dual language learners (DLLs). The purpose of the PD model is to create practical and authentic STEM and DLL supports for early childhood educators, who are generally not…

This longitudinal qualitative study examined the progression in the levels of writing conceptualizations in Spanish and English of 20 simultaneous bilingual children from PreK-K. Using a constructivist framework and a holistic bilingual perspective, we examined children's understandings about writing in their two languages as demonstrated in their…

A study of bilingual development in preschool children had two components: (1) a followup of a previous study in which the English and Spanish language development of children in a high-quality bilingual preschool remained stable over time, and (2) a replication of the study with a different cohort. The original study found that native…

A study investigated the hypothesis that children learning Spanish as a first language learn rules for assigning stress, as opposed to simply memorizing stress for individual words. The subjects were 50 Spanish-speaking preschool children. In one portion of the experiment, they imitated sets of 2, 3, or 4 Spanish nonsense words that were…

A study investigated the changes in English and Spanish oral expression and comprehension skills of 18 male and 25 female Spanish-speaking Latino children attending a preschool that emphasized English language learning but supported maintenance of Spanish skills. For comparison purposes, the English skills of African American children (n=16 boys,…

The Preschool IDEA Oral Language Proficiency Test: Spanish (Pre-IPT:Spanish) developed by W. Williams and E. Dalton (1989) purports to determine the level of oral language proficiency for preschool children, aged 3 to 5 years. The instrument is designed to identify the dominant language of bilingual or primarily Spanish-speaking children, and the…

Determining the cross-cultural equivalence of multilingual tests is a challenge that is more complex than simple horizontal equating of test forms. This study examines the functioning of a trilingual test of preschool readiness to determine the equivalence. Different forms of the test have previously been examined using classical statistical…

Spanish-English bilingual and monolingual English children aged 3-5 years were recorded in interaction with their mothers. Bilingual children were recorded twice each month, once in Spanish and once in English, and were also observed in a home situation. An analysis of the recorded language was done using selected morphological and syntactic…

A total of 102 Spanish-speaking and 104 English-speaking preschool 4-year-old pupils were individually administered the Spanish and English versions of the Cooperative Preschool Inventory (CPI) to examine item responses for possible bias. Miminum logit chi-square regression was applied to each of the 30 items of the CPI verbal scale. Each of the…

Whether preschoolers extend count nouns to other members of the same noun category was studied with 87 French- and 45 Spanish-speaking children. Results suggest that mapping between count nouns and object categories may be a universal phenomenon, although mappings between adjectives and associated applications vary among languages. (SLD)

A total of 21 full-day structured classroom observations were conducted in six classes of the Austin Independent School District Bilingual Preschool Project (Texas) having a high incidence of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students. Each class consisted of 15 LEP students and 3 English-proficient students. It was anticipated that…

The Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program promotes school readiness by providing services directly to parents through home visitation. This study describes the outcomes of the HIPPY program for Latino immigrant families in a large Southwestern city. A quasi-experimental design compared 48 families on the program…

The phenomenon of "invented spelling" in young children, observed in many preschool age children who produce written messages using words that are generated through an original system of orthography, was researched with Spanish-speaking children. The following conclusions were made from previous research with English-speaking children concerning…