The purpose of the present study was to explore the dimensionality of the English home language and literacy environment (HLLE) construct in multilingual home settings for fourth- and fifth-grade emergent bilinguals. The authors also evaluated a framework of mediating mechanisms underlying the effects of emergent bilinguals' English HLLE on…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…

Child peer interaction in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings has recently received increasing attention with respect to age, instruction type and first language (L1) use, but longitudinal studies remain scarce and the effects of proficiency pairing and language choice on meaning negotiation strategies are still rather unexplored. Within…

Purpose: We examined the association between language experience and elementary students' eligibility for special education in Massachusetts. Method: A secondary descriptive data analysis was conducted on the anonymized demographic data obtained from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Third, 4th, and 5th grade…

Prominent discourses about emergent bilinguals' academic abilities tend to focus on performance as measured by test scores and perpetuate the message that emergent bilinguals trail far behind their peers. When we remove the constraints of formal testing situations, what can emergent bilinguals do in English as they engage in naturally occurring…

In this article, we describe how students were invited to write and publicly read their "momentos de cambio" (moments of change) stories--memoirs in which they recount moments of significant change, both joyful and traumatic, in their lives. Drawing from elements of Latino critical theory, we conceptualize these stories in part as…

As English-only efforts continue in the US schooling system, dual-language programs have served as attempts to preserve students' home language. An after-school, dual-language, Spanish-English, mathematics program, Los Rayos was developed in a predominantly Mexican/Mexican-American neighborhood in Chicago. As participant observers with a…

The purpose of this study was to examine how fourth-grade Spanish-English speaking bilingual students in the USA participated differently in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) literature groups when they were invited to use all of their linguistic resources vs. when they were restricted to communicate in English only. The theoretical underpinning…

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons…

A 30-item scale was developed to identify Hispanic acculturation level by assessing Spanish usage by 92 Chicano fourth-grade children and significant others. Reported Spanish usage by grandparents, parents, and children were significantly different. Scale reliability was .92. Validity rs were .50 with a bilingual scale and .58 with SES. (Author/DC)

This paper adopts a sociocultural perspective on learning (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986) to explore connections between the concept of voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) and a Year four student's second language learning in Australia. Results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted in the Australian outback, through ethnographic research strategies, which…

This study examined the language use practices of three bilingual students enrolled in a fourth-grade class and of the class as a whole. The study found that most children reported using greater amounts of English as they progressed through the grades, and that children consistently held very positive attitudes toward Spanish and bilingualism.…

The study examined the relation of language use and logical thought to social experience with both age and class held constant. The primary assumptions under study were: that the logic of symbolic grouping was highly sensitive to a child's experience with the objects to which that logic was applied; that the existence of diglossia in a bilingual…