Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

According to Diane August (2002), at the Center for Applied Linguistics, Multilingual Learners (MLs) spend less than two percent of their school day in oral language development. Echevarria and Goldenberg (2017) support that creating numerous opportunities for ML students to speak will accelerate their vocabulary and oral language development to…

Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest subgroup of emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Spanish-English EBs, we explore profiles of English reading trajectories and how early individual differences (i.e., early Spanish reading and English oral proficiency)…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine whether English learners who participated in transitional kindergarten perform equally or better than English learners who did not participate in transitional kindergarten in the areas of oral language, written language, and overall language as measured by the…

This study reports on a small-scale, longitudinal investigation on L2 Spanish oral development by English-home language (EHL) learners in an English/Spanish Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program in rural, eastern United States. It examined EHL learners' oral ability in L2 Spanish based on longitudinal assessment data from Kindergarten, Grade 2, and…

Oral narrative retelling is a complex linguistic and cognitive task that has been shown to map onto reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand oral retelling skill, especially among "emergent bilingual" children--those who are learning two languages simultaneously. In this article, exploratory…

This project aimed to describe oral narrative retells of Spanish-English speaking dual language learners (DLLs) and examine relationships with standardized vocabulary assessments. Investigators described oral narrative retells of 145 DLLs in kindergarten and first grade by number of different words (NDW), words per minute (WPM), and…

Repetitive articulatory rate or Oral Diadochokinesis (oral-DDK) shows a guideline for appraisal and diagnosis of subjects with oral-motor disorder. Traditionally, meaningless words repetition has been utilized in this task and preschool children have challenges with them. Therefore, we aimed to determine some meaningful words in order to test…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

The aim of the present study is to examine the influence of diglossia on linguistic and narrative structures in Arab kindergarten children by testing performance in production and comprehension. The 30 children who participated in our study were asked to retell one narrative text that was read aloud to them in Literary Arabic and another narrative…

This study looks at the impact of a cost-effective professional development model in which teaching artists helped early elementary teachers master arts-based strategies for boosting the oral language development of English-language learners (ELLs). Teaching artists visited K-2 classrooms for 50 minutes weekly for 28 weeks. Student scores on the…

Reading comprehension--the ability to understand the meaning of text--is a foundational ability that enables children to learn in school and throughout life. Children who struggle with reading comprehension in the third or fourth grade are at high risk for dropping out of school, with detrimental effects on their future employment, income, and…

Educators have generally believed that foreign language instruction should begin in kindergarten or earlier to promote optimum oral language development (e.g., Abbott, 1998; Curtain & Dahlberg, 2010; Rhodes & Pufahl, 2010; Rosenbusch, 1991; Swender & Duncan, 1998). This article describes two Spanish programs in the Westport…