Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that led 28 teachers of emergent bilingual (EB) students to seek a master's in educational administration with a focus on bilingual/English as a second language (ESL). Design/methodology/approach: To address the study objectives, the authors used a qualitative…

While translingual and translanguaging orientations have been posited as supportive for emergent bilingual children in schools, limited research explores how children in English-medium spaces enact translingual composing practices. Drawing on theorizations of translingual composing as an interactional process, this paper analyzes data from a…

This study investigates how an elementary-level content classroom teacher and an elementary-level ESL teacher in a metropolitan region in Massachusetts negotiated teachers' identities and identity dissonances in teachers' attempt to advocate for emergent bilinguals. Using critical discourse analysis of qualitative data, this study examines the…

In this autoethnographic article, I describe the ways in which I have used and adapted Descriptive Inquiry and the descriptive processes to further understand and support the needs of marginalized populations across three settings: a bilingual special education classroom in an urban school district, a research study with Spanish-dominant mothers,…

Oral language is foundational to literacy. Because their language is under construction, emergent bilingual students have unique needs related to literacy development regardless of the language of instruction. Knowledge teachers gain through formative assessment of student oral language can guide decisions about literacy instruction. The purpose…

Success in mathematics contributes to children's future career and lifelong financial security. There have been reports that dual-language education conveys academic advantages in mathematics achievement, although there is debate. This study aimed to investigate whether dual-language education benefits children's mathematics achievement and…

Purpose: The emergence of tense-morpheme marking during language acquisition is highly variable, which confounds the use of tense marking as a diagnostic indicator of language impairment in linguistically diverse populations. In this study, we seek to better understand tense-marking patterns in young bilingual children by comparing phonological…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effect of bilingual narrative intervention on vocabulary gains in Hebrew (school language) and English (home language) among English-Hebrew bilinguals, using a block design (one language at a time), and to determine whether there was cross-linguistic transfer to the language that was…

This study was conducted to determine the writing skills of bilingual students whose mother tongue is Kurdish and monoligual students whose mother tongue is Turkish in the fifth grade of secondary school. More specifically, the story and essay writing skills of bilingual students are compared with the writing skills of monolingual students based…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the kindergarten, first-, and second-grade predictors of reading comprehension in bilingual children. Specifically, we evaluated the role that Spanish and English skills play in predicting English reading comprehension in third grade. Method: As part of a longitudinal study, 248 bilingual children…

Purpose: This study examined the frequency of code-switching by Spanish-English-speaking children as a function of language proficiency in each language and diagnosis (developmental language disorder [DLD] or typical language development [TLD]). Method: Sixty-two Spanish-English-speaking children, 5-7 years of age, participated in this study (24…

Although a multilingual, translanguaging approach to teaching reading has been found to have a positive impact on literacy development of Dual Language Learners, bilingual programs continue to fail students by delivering literacy instruction in separate linguistic times and spaces. In this article, we propose an approach we call Transleyendo,…

This paper seeks to identify the attitudes of bilingual future teachers towards translanguaging when writing stories for bilingual young learners, and to understand the various forces that shape their attitudes. Translanguaging, in the context of this study, refers to the dynamic and intended shuttling between languages or dialects. An assignment…

This brief is the first of a four-part series that focuses on bilingual education, bilingual educators, and addressing the bilingual teacher shortage in contexts across the United States. This research was commissioned by the New Jersey State Department of Education, which is committed to providing quality bilingual education to its linguistically…

The increased numbers of emergent bilinguals (EBs) in mainstream classrooms demand that teachers employ high leverage practices for all students. One powerful teaching practice that holds promise for supporting all students is formative assessment. However, little attention has been given to the connection between teachers' assessment expertise,…