Heightened attention to the importance of equitable educational practices in today's schools reveals a growing number of emergent bilingual students who have not received consistent formal education and may be struggling with overall literacy. Labeled as Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE), these learners require novel educational…

Phonological awareness is the stepping-stone to learning to read as it helps children map language sounds onto letters. Theories of bilingualism posit that phonological awareness is a language-common literacy skill. However, bilingual learners are also thought to build language-specific representations. To illuminate common and specific…

The existing literature on reading motivation primarily focuses on monolingual children and adolescents using quantitative approaches. To date, there is an absence of qualitative studies exploring bilingual college students' reading motivation that can provide details of participants' views, beliefs, and experiences related to reading motivation.…

Embodied cognition posits that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has shown that perceived power is spatially embodied along the vertical axis. However, it is unclear whether such mapping applies equally in the two languages of bilinguals. Using event-related potentials, we compared spatial embodiment…

The author examines some of the critical issues raised by Baker-Bell (2020a) about language education in the United States. The challenges associated with linguistic justice are related to a history of linguistic discrimination in the United States, which many sources have documented and affected many different linguistic backgrounds and peoples.…

This article using a persuasive writing example to showcase how digital technologies can be used to support all students, especially emerging bilingual learners, as they learn genre-specific norms for writing.

Equity in education has become increasingly prioritized, due to the growing mainstream recognition of the inequitable practices that historically have and presently continue to exist in K-12 education. With the K-12 student population diversity continuously increasing in areas such as abilities, race/ethnicities, socioeconomic status, languages,…

Through the application of the Douglas Fir Group's transdisciplinary framework, this study investigated how three levels of mutually dependent influence (i.e., the micro level of social action and interaction, meso level of sociocultural institutions and communities, and macro level of ideological structures) operate across time and space to shape…

Picture book reading is widely regarded as an activity that promotes multiple aspects of children's language acquisition, including their vocabulary development. Historically, researchers interested in what underlies the link between picture book reading and vocabulary development have investigated a suite of caregiver behaviors during picture…

Dual-language books' (DLBs) two-language format could support biliteracy development, but little is known about how children read them. Fifty-four third and fifth graders read aloud DLBs with English or Spanish first on each page to determine DLBs' potential affordances. Although there were no significant differences in oral reading fluency or…

Although the emergent bilingual status of foreign language (FL) students is often overlooked, that is not to say that students do not, on some level of consciousness, experience changes in their identity as a result of their emergent bilingualism. The continuous process of identity (re)negotiation, that is, the reorganising of one's subject…

Bilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)--words in different languages that share similar meanings. Documenting TE learning over development may give us insight into the mechanisms underlying word learning in young bilingual…

Active learning practices, like groupwork, are becoming more widely used in post-secondary mathematics classrooms. These practices are often talk-intensive and require interpersonal interactions. As such, it remains an open question the extent to which practices like groupwork equitably support students with different social identities, including…

The present dissertation examined the initial state of L3 phonology in native speakers of French and German who were Spanish-English bilinguals. The present work analyzed perception (Chapter 3), production (Chapter 4) and the perception production interface (Chapter 5). The results revealed that these bilinguals are influenced by both of their…

Despite a rapid growth in the number of dual language learning children (DLLs) in the United States, there is a limited understanding of what parents of DLLs believe and know about dual language learning and education, and how parental beliefs and knowledge relate to children's dual language experiences at home. In the current study, 225 parents…