The study investigated how parental belief and family socio economic status (SES) were related to the home literacy environment and to early literacy-related skills in a foreign language (English). Eighty-six Chinese children in kindergarten (Mage = 5 years 5 months, 44 girls) were assessed on English phonological awareness, English receptive…

Adult refugees often turn to informal learning opportunities, such as family literacy programs, to learn English. These programs often promote dominant, neoliberal ideologies and invoke a deficit lens that intends to fix newcomers. This chapter looks at the learning experiences of Kurdish refugees who participated in a family literacy program in…

Chinese speakers are the second largest language minority group in the U.S., and transnational migration redefines their lives in many ways, including families' educational practices. This case study examined the English home literacy and language learning (EHLLL) practices of two transnational Chinese families during their year abroad while…

Families play a critical role in promoting students' literacy development. Family literacy practices refer to oral, written, and reading strategies that impart cultural traditions and knowledge of the world and that occur in the dominant or native language of a family. It is especially important for educators to understand and build upon such…

Most recent research on language learning and identity emphasizes on investing learners' capital as affordance to affirm their identities (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton, 2013). Learners' capital refers to prior knowledge, home literacies/native languages. Drawing on data from English language academies from Pakistan, this study finds a…

Many family literacy programs are designed to teach bi/multilingual families school-based reading strategies, which often downplays families' rich cultural and linguistic resources and accentuates the gap between home and school literacy. We designed Reading Without Words to investigate how wordless picture books could be used to feature the…

Bilingual children demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in each of the two languages to which they are exposed. Even though it is widely acknowledged that bilingual children are not a homogenous group, existing studies on dual-language profiles in bilingual children have focused on expressive language profiles. In this study, we used the…

In the "Bilingual Literacy Development Model: A holistic way to support Spanish-speaking children" research study, I studied bilingual families over a 5-month period in their home environments through home visits. Drawing from data obtained through home visits, including interviews with mothers and observations of family literacy…

This qualitative, single case study of linguistically diverse sixth-grade students to understand how these students explored and experienced their English literacy development (ELD) by using Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) and Collaborative Retrospective Miscue Analysis (CRMA). In addition, the study explored the roles that families and…

Educators and researchers consider vocabulary development foundational in young children's language and literacy learning and for academic achievement; adult-child shared book reading is potentially a rich site for word learning and concept development. In this article, we report on how an immigrant father and his four year old daughter, English…

As the number of dual language learners (DLLs) increases globally, it is critical that well-developed questionnaires are available to researchers and educators that capture the characteristics and language experiences of preschool DLLs and their families. To fill this need, the Center for Early Care and Education Research-Dual Language Learners…

Reading identities are the ways that a person constructs the self as a reader across contexts and time. This study explores reading identities as a developmental process in multilingual children in prekindergarten and kindergarten. Participants were six children ages three to four participating in a Chinese-English family literacy program over a…

This paper is a quantitative synthesis of research on home literacy environment (HLE) and children's English as a second language (ESL) learning outcomes through a meta-analysis of 18 articles in kindergarten, primary, and secondary school students (N = 4401) carried out between 2000 and 2018. It examines the associations between HLE factors and…

In the United States, adult education for emergent multilingual language learners (EMLL) is governed by the American Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA). The AEFLA defines literacy as an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in "English." This definition erases the multilingual and multicultural assets that adult EMLLs…

This study investigated Chinese parents' experiences of reading English storybooks to their preschool children. While the spread of English as a global language is associated with an increasing emphasis on English education, few studies have examined its impact on the early home literacy practices in non-English speaking countries. With the most…