Positioning theory [van Langenhove and Harré (1999). Introducing positioning theory. In R. Harre, & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), "Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action" (pp. 14-31). Blackwell Publishers] provides a useful analytical lens to examine how teachers' positioning in moment-to-moment interactions can expand…

With a growing number of multilingual children entering early childhood education, teachers are challenged to create appropriate learning opportunities for all children. Given diverse literacy skills and cultural backgrounds, early childhood educators might provide different support to children after an inappropriate child response depending on…

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 book follows four emergent bilingual students in an English-medium pre-kindergarten in the US as they navigate the social and linguistic demands of school. It illustrates how students' differing classroom social positions shaped their participation in interaction and, in turn, their English language learning across a school year. With a…

With U.S. classrooms increasingly characterized by linguistic diversity, policies mandating teacher training around English learning have proliferated. Recent federal oversight prompted Massachusetts to implement an initiative to endorse its 70,000+ teachers in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI). While policy research has productively emphasized…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese,…