This paper examines the construct of bilingual phonemic awareness in Irish-English bilinguals. Though traditionally viewed as a skill or ability which transfers across languages, recent accounts have considered whether phonemic awareness has a language-specific component. This study used a cross-sectional design to examine this question. A total…

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…

This study seeks to examine the success of voluntary immigrants in Grade 6 French immersion with a double comparison to Canadian-born (a) Anglophones and (b) multilingual students (children of voluntary immigrants). The findings, that show the immigrant students to outperform the other two groups in French and English, are explored through a…

The present studies revealed different factors associated with the reported advantages found in fully bilingual children for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Participants were 100 children in Study 1 and 80 children in Study 2 in the process of becoming bilingual by attending immersion programs. In both studies, "level of…

This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124…

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring…

Anglophone children in Grades 2 and 5 who attended an intensive French immersion program were examined for linguistic and metalinguistic ability in English and French. Measures of linguistic proficiency (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) were consistently higher in English and remained so even after 5 years of immersion education in French.…

Using a sociocultural theoretical lens, this study examines the nature of student interactions in a dual immersion school to analyze affordances for bilingual language learning, language exchange, and co-construction of language expertise. This article focuses on data from audio- and video-recorded interactions of fifth-grade students engaged in…

A dual immersion program in Chinese and English at the 3e International School in Beijing is helping children become fluent in both languages, even though many students spoke neither language when they entered the school. Children enter the program as young as two years old. Studies indicate that bilingual children have higher levels of cognitive…

During an investigation into the L2 proficiency and L3 acquisition skills of 10- to 12-year-olds in Irish primary schools, questions of metalinguistic awareness and cross-linguistic influence were raised. Do children who are more balanced bilinguals develop a higher sense of metalinguistic awareness than less balanced bilinguals? What evidence of…

Achieving biliteracy is a remarkable accomplishment, and it is important to understand the range of factors that permit its successful realization. The authors investigated a factor known to affect reading in monolingual children that has received little attention in the second-language literature: morphological awareness. The researchers tracked…

A survey of research on French as a second language (FSL) education in Canada suggests that French immersion (FI) students enjoy significant linguistic, academic, and cognitive benefits. We organize our summary of the advantages of FI around these three themes, comparing students' proficiency in French and English across various FI programs, and…

This article reports on a diary study conducted to explore third language acquisition in the immersion setting in Mexico as experienced by a bilingual Russian/English learner of Spanish who had recently immigrated to the USA from Russia. Language learning is approached as a socialization process that involves negotiation of meaning (Vygotsky,…