Early childhood education serves an increasing number of multilingual children, and teachers are challenged to create high-quality learning opportunities in the classroom for all children. The child's engagement and interactions with the teacher are important in this respect. The present study therefore examined how multilingualism relates to…

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…

Despite much research examining whether bilingual individuals demonstrate superior executive function (EF) skills compared to monolinguals, the purported bilingual advantage remains controversial. One potential reason for discrepant findings across studies examining the bilingual advantage is the difficulty in matching monolingual and bilingual…

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…

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…

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'…

Few studies have investigated the discourses and ideologies around parents' enrollment decisions in Chinese-English immersion contexts, and how these discourses and ideologies affect their involvement with their children' bi/multilingual development. Conducted in a K-5 50/50 one-way Mandarin immersion school, this paper focuses on ethnographic…

Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that encounter the issue of bilingualism due to the spread of private schools that offer programs in different languages. This research is an attempt to investigate the impact of bilingualism on the creative capabilities (Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Details) of kindergarten children in Riyadh. It aims at…

Background: Although some investigations of phonological development have found that segmental accuracy is comparable in monolingual children and their bilingual peers, there is evidence that language use affects segmental accuracy in both languages. Aims: To investigate the influence of age of first exposure to English and the amount of current…

The aim of the present study is to explore a variety of cognitive and social variables which are most relevant to children's linguistic success in an educational setting. The study examines kindergarten English language outcomes in classrooms containing monolingual English speaking children and bilingual children who speak English and one other…

This study examined the vocabulary development of Norwegian second language (L2) learners with Urdu/Punjabi as their first language (L1) at two time-points from kindergarten to primary school, and compared it to the vocabulary development of monolingual Norwegian children. Using path models, the associations between number of picture books in the…