Background: Guidelines for the successful implementation of two-way dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs foreground the role of program leadership, hiring and preparing culturally and linguistically competent teachers, family involvement, and the alignment between curriculum, assessments, and instruction in both languages. Absent in…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

The phrase "ready to learn" has been widely used and researched by scholars, policy makers, and education practitioners. School readiness, as a construct, has referred to the basic skills that children need to transition to elementary school. However, there is no consensus on which basic skills students should possess when entering…

Our aim was to assess the impact of an invented spelling programme conducted in small groups on children's written language acquisition in Portuguese. We expected the experimental group to have better post-test results than the control group in spelling and reading. Participants were 160 preschool-age children who were randomly divided into an…

The U.S. government encourages the study of critical languages spoken in geographic areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security and the global economy through a variety of discretionary grants and scholarship programs. U.S. students are traditionally underrepresented in the study of these languages; however, many of the nation's K-12…