The purpose of this evaluation was threefold: (1) to assess Diversity Unified School District's Hmong dual language immersion program for implementation alignment; (2) to examine whether the program was meeting intended outcomes; and (3) to measure parent perceptions of the program's impact on their child's development of bilingualism, biliteracy,…

With the promise of achieving bilingualism, biliteracy, and cultural pluralism, Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) in North America, especially the US, have been proliferating in the past two decades. Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing. This…

Georgia and North Carolina are part of what some call the New Latinx South, a region where Latinx populations more than doubled recently. Both states have struggled to educate language minoritized students (evidenced by low graduation rates), yet are among the top three states for numbers of dual language (DL) programs in the Southeast. This model…

The 2024 Central States Conference was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 14-16. This year's theme, Reclaim Your Joy!, reflects the choice we make every day as educators to bring the joy of acquiring a language to our students. Even though the last several years have been fraught with challenges, we are finding ways to bring back the joy into…

This work reports, from a qualitative research perspective, the development of an English Corner project for a preschool Children's House classroom in central Mexico over the course of a 3-year period. It shows the transition of a language specialist over six consecutive periods of work, from a traditional understanding and practice of teaching…

We investigated the dimensionality and relations between L1 (a speaker's first language) and L2 (a speaker's second language) writing skills in narrative and informational genres and higher order cognitive skills--inference, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring--for Spanish-English dual language learners in primary grades. Dimensions…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

This research synthesis aims to investigate the broader trends in K-12 French as a second language (FSL) published research from 2000-2017 (inclusive). We assembled a database of 181 peer-reviewed articles relating to FSL education to examine what we already know about specific issues. We used Nvivo 11 (Pro) to facilitate coding the articles for…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

We investigated the dimensionality and relations between L1 (a speaker's first language) and L2 (a speaker's second language) writing skills in narrative and informational genres and higher order cognitive skills--inference, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring--for Spanish-English dual language learners in primary grades. Dimensions…

In addition to fostering bilingualism and biliteracy for all students, one of the main goals of Two-Way Immersion (TWI) programs is building positive cross-cultural relationships (). This can lead to TWI programs having ambitious goals for the kinds of bridges it can build between students, families, and communities, which is a challenge when the…

Under the theoretical underpinnings of language socialization and continua of biliteracy, this ethnographic case study documents how cultural performing arts, as part of extracurricular activities, promote bicultural identity and biliteracy development among Vietnamese American children. The study was set in two transnational contexts: a…

Pinyin is a sound-annotating system for Chinese characters using Roman letters. Teaching and learning Pinyin has been an important educational practice in Mainland China for native Chinese children, and it is also typically taught to beginning learners of Chinese as a foreign/second language in tertiary-level classrooms. However, whether it should…

Using qualitative methodology, this research examines how graduates of a K-5 dual language immersion program have experienced multiple and competing social, cultural, institutional, and political forces at play in complex processes that ultimately affect one's mobilities of language, literacy, and learning. These students have now grown into…

Schools in Ireland vary in how they introduce reading in the two official languages, Irish and English. There is particular variability within immersion (Irish medium) schools. Some introduce Irish reading first (IRF) and others English reading first (ERF). This study compared the development of Irish and English skills in children attending…