Starting bilingual education from birth and early childhood allows the child to be introduced to the advantages of bilingualism at an early age. This study was conducted to explore the perspectives of early childhood teachers working in private preschools that offer education in a foreign language and monolingual teachers working in public…

Guided by translanguaging pedagogy, this study examines how monolingual English teachers in a Pre-K school in China navigate between English and Chinese to construct a translanguaging classroom. Findings based on classroom observations and interviews reveal that, despite being constrained by their monolingualism, the English teachers enacted…

Using a large sample of longitudinal assessment data from children in publicly funded infant/toddler care, preschool, and kindergarten (analytic N = 453,468), this study modeled language and literacy trajectories from early infancy through kindergarten for dual language learners (DLLs) from homes representing many different languages and their…

Providing first language (L1) translations in L2 vocabulary interventions may be beneficial for L2 vocabulary learning. However, in linguistically diverse L2 classrooms, teachers cannot provide L1 translations to all children. Social robots do offer such opportunities, as they can be programmed to speak any combination of languages. This study…

How do teachers deal with multilingual pupils, and what reasons govern these choices? Whereas most studies on this topic have examined teachers in schools with monolingual policies, this paper includes teachers at bilingual schools. Framed by pedagogical theory, we present a qualitative research study based on interviews with teachers in the…

Foreign language learning is generally not required in the United States, despite its link to various cognitive and social benefits later in life. Students who speak a home language different from the instructional language of school may experience unique benefits when learning additional languages in school. The present study examined whether…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

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…

Effective peer interaction is fundamental to social development, cognitive development, and academic success. Young children's early exposure to and development of social competence begins in the home and is further developed upon entry into early childhood programmes. In the United States, where early childhood programmes serve increasingly…

This article investigates the language orientations in education policy documents for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland and Norway. Finland, an officially bilingual country, and Norway, a predominantly monolingual country, share similar views on ECEC. However, the ECEC field in both countries has undergone major changes in…

Using classical and quantile regression analyses, we investigated whether predictor variables for early reading comprehension differed depending on language background and ability level in a mixed group of 161 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) children in second grade (6--8 years). Although L2 readers scored lower on oral language skills and…

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/."…

The number of English language learners (ELLs) in early childhood education (ECE) continues to increase, particularly with students whose first language (L1) is Spanish. Recent studies have shown the connection between teachers' self-efficacy and student achievement, but very few specifically address early childhood education teachers'…

This article reports on a case study of a kindergarten, monolingual teacher and how she used Spanish, the home language of her Latino/a students who are English language learners (ELLs), in the classroom. The article focuses on how the teacher develops and uses her emerging knowledge of Spanish to scaffold students' learning, specifically when…

The simple view of reading (SVR) model proposes that reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and language comprehension, and that both components make independent contributions to reading skill (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). The model posits that there are good readers and three types of poor readers--dyslexic, hyperlexic, and garden…