Aims: We investigate the relationship between narrative macrostructure, current language exposure, and microstructure in second-grade Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States. Macrostructure knowledge has been claimed to be shared across languages in multilingual individuals. We examine the role of current language exposure and…

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a…

Purpose: This study aims to show the complexities of engagement between students - Venezuelan and Brazilian - and their teachers. This qualitative ethnographic study documents the everyday pedagogies and practices that take place in elementary schools with high levels of refugee and immigrant children. While Brazilian law ensures the basic right…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Spanish-speaking multilingual learner (MLL) students' long-term academic outcomes after participation in an early childhood education (ECE) program with English instruction. The study included 359 Spanish-speaking MLLs who qualified for Free and Reduced Lunch from Grade 1 to Grade 6. Participants…

Purpose: Elementary-age dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States are often characterized as at risk for low vocabulary in both Spanish and English. This longitudinal study examined conceptually scored receptive and expressive vocabulary development among DLLs from Spanish-speaking, low-income homes and…

This study was designed to examine the developmental course of the suffix frequency effect and its role in the development of automatic morpho-lexical access. In Spanish, a highly transparent language from an orthographic point of view, this effect has been shown to be facilitative in adults, but the evidence with children is still inconclusive. A…

Emerging bilingual learners' biliteracy abilities are often underestimated when monolingual reading assessments, such as the DIBELS, are used to identify students as having difficulties in learning or to guide literacy instruction. The authors propose a holistic form of biliterate assessment that uses writing as a means to understand what emerging…

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…

This study investigated the relationship among home language use, parents' beliefs about dual language development, and Spanish-speaking children's vocabulary knowledge. Parents (n = 162) completed a questionnaire about their home language use and beliefs about dual language development, and elementary-age children (N = 190) -- Kindergarten…

Grade retention, the practice of holding a student back in the same grade, has been a controversial topic in the United States for decades. English learners, a growing population in US schools, are consistently identified for grade retention more often than their English-only counterparts. The purpose of this study is to test the impact of grade…

GraphoGame is a computer-based game that trains grapheme-to-phoneme associations and has been shown to benefit reading acquisition in different languages and countries. In transparent languages, such as Spanish, learning grapheme-to-phoneme associations is of great importance when learning to read, and GraphoGame can help children at risk of…

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…

Purpose: Despite the unprecedented growth of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in new destination states--where DLLs have not been historically served--empirical understanding of their language and literacy skills is scant. Drawing on scientific understandings of bilingual language acquisition, we compare monolingually scored and…

Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems,…

Purpose: The general aim of this study is to enhance our understanding of the patterns of language growth in Spanish and English during the school years. In this study, we used a longitudinal retrospective approach to explore the growth of the percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) in both Spanish and English in 2 groups of English learners…