Research on the effects on early bilingualism on reading development is scarce. Here, we tackle this question by investigating whether the exposure to dual-language contexts (use of two languages in the same conversational situation) induces a boost in phonological and reading performance through more balanced spatial auditory attentional skills.…

Understanding factors that influence reading achievement among bilingual children is considerably more complex than it is for monolingual children. Research on dual language development indicates that bilingual children's oral language abilities are often distributed across languages in varied ways, due to heterogeneity of dual language exposure…

This study analyses the impact of certain cognitive processes on the writing of words in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first and second years of Primary Education. One hundred twenty-eight schoolchildren from Ecuador and 109 from Algiers participated in this study. All the participants were aged…

We present findings across three randomized trials of "Descubriendo la Lectura" (DLL), an intervention designed to improve literacy skills of Spanish-speaking first graders struggling with reading. DLL is a one-to-one Spanish-language literacy program lasting 12-20 weeks offered to a school's lowest performing emerging bilingual first…

Most bilingual children often display greater proficiency and preference for one of their two languages. Researchers refer to this asymmetry as language dominance. However, despite being possible to determine the overall language dominance in bilinguals, there may be substantial flexibility in their language use. In particular, the relative ease…

We examined the relations of language skills (vocabulary, listening comprehension, and oral retell), transcription skills (spelling and handwriting fluency), and domain-general cognitions/executive functions (working memory and attentional control) to writing quality for English-Spanish emergent bilingual children in Grade 1. Data were from a…

Purpose: This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English. Method: One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish--English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from…

This intervention study examined the writing abilities of 1st (ages 6-7) and 2nd (ages 7-8) grade students in the Basque Autonomous Community, utilising Basque, Spanish, and English. We compared two distinct teaching methodologies: the PYCTO methodology, which employs a multilingual approach for teaching writing across the three languages, and the…

This research aims to evaluate the predicting role of executive functions, specially inhibition and flexibility, in reading comprehension. Participants were evaluated with inhibition and flexibility measures in first- grade, and later in third- grade their reading comprehension, oral and silent reading fluency, as well as their decoding skills…

This study analyzes the impact of certain cognitive processes on word and pseudoword reading in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first year of Primary Education. The study was conducted with a group of 113 pupils from Algeria and another group of 128 pupils from Ecuador, from a middle-class background…

Because word problems present mathematical information through a scenario, they are language-intensive and require mathematical and reading comprehension skills to solve them. In addition, they are linguistically complex, which makes them challenging for all learners, especially multilingual learners. Given the rising number of dual-language…

We present findings from a randomized controlled trial of "Descubriendo la Lectura" (DLL), an intervention designed to improve the literacy skills of Spanish-speaking first graders, who are struggling with reading. DLL offers one-on-one native language literacy instruction for 12 to 20 weeks to each school's lowest performing…

This study investigated the dimensionality of bilingual phonological awareness (PA) in English and Spanish by replicating a kindergarten model in Grade 1, and presents alternatives to modeling clustered data. English and Spanish tasks were analyzed from previously collected samples totaling 1,586 first grade Spanish-speaking English learners. Four…

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a Tier 2 intervention within the context of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model implemented by Spanish first- to second-grade primary school teachers to improve at-risk students' transcription skills. Teachers were instructed in the administration of a writing curriculum-based…

This cohort-sequential study explored the working memory (WM) structures that underlie growth in mathematical word problem solving (WPS) performance in elementary school emergent bilingual children whose first language (L1) is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 429) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 in southwest U.S. school districts at Wave 1 were…