The Houston Independent School District (HISD) currently offers three bilingual programs and two English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for English language learners (ELLs). These programs are intended to facilitate ELLs' integration into the regular school curriculum and to ensure access to equal educational opportunities. This evaluation…

The focus of this mixed method study was to investigate the play behaviors, play interactions, and language use--within a bilingual AS L/English classroom--of a Deaf child who is a native user of American Sign Language (ASL). Play is an essential element in all children's development. Previous research suggests that there is a strong relationship…

The Houston Independent School District offers two primary bilingual programs for Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs). In both programs, students may transition into a pre-exit phase of bilingual education so long as they meet certain performance criteria. In this Pre-Exit phase, predominantly English-language instruction is used in…

Only about one-third of children attending school in the United States can read proficiently at fourth grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the nation's report card." If that is not dismaying enough, consider the outcomes for the nation's most vulnerable students. The first eight years of…

This longitudinal study examined the role of oral proficiency on English reading comprehension, as measured with elicited narratives using a wordless picture book, "Frog Where are You?". The sample consisted 102 English language learners, including both Spanish and Cantonese speakers. Narrative samples were collected in the winter of…

Immigration and the role of language in education have been major issues in governance and education across the world. The current study looks at a family biliteracy program for 2- to 6-year-old students and their parents. The findings shed light on the importance of teacher-community partnerships in bridging the linguistic gap between…

This paper presents a narrative review of the literature at the intersection of bilingualism and practices for teaching children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We highlight the gap in the empirical literature about instructional practices for young bilinguals with ASD. Special attention is given to the monolingual ASD and multicultural…

The United States is experiencing an increase in young students developing literacy in English and Spanish. Schools providing dual-language English/Spanish instruction need technically adequate tools to assess reading skills in the languages of instruction, and interpretation of results needs to acknowledge the complexity of cross-linguistic…

In this article, the author suggests that children's natural inclination to explore nature, or biophilia, can be explored as a factor that encourages both cognitive engagement and language development. The author summarizes the types of scientific inquiries that bilingual elementary students and their university partners engaged in when guided to…

One in five school-age children in the U.S. speaks a language other than English at home (Zeigler & Camarota, 2014). Roughly half of these emerging bilingual students (Garcia, 2009) are classified as English learners (ELs) when they enter school, meaning they do not meet state or district criteria for English proficiency (NCES, 2015). As the…

This two-year autoethnographic action research study explores the processes a multiethnic/multiracial family uses to maintain their children's heritage language of Spanish and the family's multiculturalism. Data sources (including interviews and participant observations in the home and the dual-language school) specifically focus on the eldest…

Drawing from a qualitative case study that examined the language practices and learning in a first grade bilingual classroom, the author discusses one teacher's daily process for the literacy event of the morning message. Primary findings indicate that the ways the teacher listened and responded to students during the morning message provided…

In this discussion, I explore the unfolding effects of Arizona's anti-bilingual education law (Proposition 203) on schools with predominant language-minority student populations. Instead of facilitating academic progress, policies like Proposition 203 impede teachers from "scaffolding" (Long & Adamson, 2012, p. 39) their students'…

One of the challenges to educating English-language learners (ELLs) is ensuring that students become literate in their native language--something that experts say is important for their success in English and other subjects--and learn sufficient English skills before the middle grades, a critical transition point because of the increasingly…

There has been much debate on the politics and pedagogies of bilingual education in K-12 schools, but conspicuously absent in this debate are institutions of higher education. English-only ideologies are deeply embedded and rarely questioned in U.S. institutions of higher education, which predominantly require English language proficiency to…