This study examines how three bilingual education teachers engaged with a transitional bilingual policy while balancing the demands of monolingual high-stakes assessments in ways that contributed to advocacy on behalf of their bilingual learners. The consequences of high-stakes accountability can be exacerbated in bilingual settings, because in…

This study examines young English readers' ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37…

Existing research on the impact of bilingualism on metalinguistic development has concentrated on the development of phonological awareness. The present study extended the scope of existing research by focusing on morphological awareness, an aspect of metalinguistic awareness that becomes increasingly important beyond the initial phase of literacy…

The primary aim of this study was to explore the relationship between teachers' instruction and students' vocabulary and comprehension in grades 3-5. The secondary aim of this study was to investigate whether this relationship differed for English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual students. To meet these aims, we observed and…

Dual-language learner (DLL) children typically learn to write while still learning English, with vocabulary appearing to be a particularly vulnerable domain. This study investigates how a reduced English lexicon impacts English writing in DLL children. Participants were 100 Spanish-speaking DLLs and 100 of their monolingual classmates in first…

The present study investigated language skills and reading comprehension with English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2-5. Of the 377 children in the sample, 207 were English monolingual and 170 were Spanish-English bilingual. Data were collected within a cohort-sequential design for two academic years in the fall and…

The present study investigated the role of vocabulary depth in reading comprehension among a diverse sample of monolingual and bilingual children in grades 2-4. Vocabulary depth was defined as including morphological awareness, awareness of semantic relations, and syntactic awareness. Two hundred ninety-four children from 3 schools in a…

English reading comprehension skill development was examined in a group of 87 native Spanish-speakers developing English literacy skills, followed from fourth through fifth grade. Specifically, the effects of Spanish (L1) and English (L2) oral language and word reading skills on reading comprehension were investigated. The participants showed…

This article reports on the implementation of the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in an Early Foreign Language Learning program. The goal of this research was to examine the performance of grade 4 and 5 students of Spanish on the IPA. Performance across the three communicative tasks is described and modifications to IPA procedures based on…

Thousands of students in California learn English as a second language in schools that utilize exclusively monolingual--English Only--literacy programs. With such programs students do not have the opportunity to use the knowledge of their first language in order to acquire and master their second language. The project of cooperative bi-literacy…