Background: The coherence of learners' pre-instruction conceptions has been debated for some time. Studies on conceptions of force, specifically, have produced very different results in different contexts around the world. In this study, an integrative theoretical framework linking semantic differences across languages to concept learning in…

This study investigates the phonological awareness of a Turkish monolingual and a Turkish-English bilingual child in Turkish. As a case study, the main focus of this study is to explore whether a bilingual advantage exists in phonological processing. Theories of bilingualism and empirical data led to the prediction that the bilingual participant…

Purpose: This study examines the narrative language and reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual students who received instruction with the Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) program, a narrative language intervention. Method: The main effects of the SKILL program were evaluated in a randomized controlled trial in which…

The texts students encounter are becoming increasingly complex and multimodal. There remains a need to understand the semiotic resources students draw upon to make meaning with these multimodal texts. This study draws on social semiotics as a frame to explore the ways in which eight first graders with a wide range of literacy proficiency levels…

Research involving monolinguals has demonstrated that language impairment can be noticed in the early years and tends to persist into adolescence. More recently, research has begun to address the challenges of identifying and treating Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) in English Language Learners (ELLs). Developmental patterns of DLD are not…

We investigated whether young English-French biliterate children can distinguish between English and French orthographic patterns. Children in French immersion programs were asked to play a dictionary game when they were in Grade 2 and again when they were in Grade 3. They were shown pseudowords that contained either an English spelling pattern or…

This study compared bilingual and monolingual school beginners on measures of simple and complex verbal working memory and receptive and expressive vocabulary. The aim was to determine whether the tests of working memory are fairer measures of language ability than the vocabulary tests for bilingual children when tested in their second language.…

Research Findings: The current study reports on the results of a longitudinal investigation of the language and early literacy development of a sample of dual-language learners (DLLs) and monolingual English speakers from low-income families who received an Early Reading First intervention during their Head Start preschool year. A total of 62…

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with…

This study explores influences on bilingual children's phonological awareness (PA) performance in English, examining the role of language of instruction and vocabulary. English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual kindergartners and first graders receiving either English or Spanish literacy instruction were assessed in English PA and in…