This study aims to disentangle the often-confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3-4;3 on stative (complex) and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5-5;3 on completive…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between school-based kindergarten transition practices and student achievement and executive functioning using recent, nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11. The analysis employed 3-level hierarchical linear models and…

Research to increase the early vocabulary development of urban students has emphasized the central role of teachers and the ways in which teachers use intervention curricula and strategies in their classroom contexts. This study explores teachers' fidelity to different components of a vocabulary intervention, specifically their use of prescribed…

Background/Context: Standard English functions as a dominant language in the English-speaking Caribbean context despite the bidialectal, bilingual, and multilingual nature of countries. Notwithstanding, Caribbean non-Standard English-speaking students continue to be administered literacy assessments that do not take into account their…

The unique relation of language use (i.e., output) to language growth was investigated for forty-seven 30-month-old Spanish-English bilingual children (27 girls, 20 boys) whose choices of which language to speak resulted in their levels of English output differing from their levels of English input. English expressive vocabularies and receptive…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…

One of the focuses of language revitalisation policies is to incorporate minority languages into education. Evaluation of new language-of-instruction models is usually based on the increase of minority language speakers. However, it is also important from an educational perspective to study the possible relationship between performance and…

Societies have become super-diverse due to migration and globalization. Many mainstream classroom teachers feel managing the linguistic variety children bring to school is challenging. This often leads to restrictive language policies. Research on multilingualism has given us insight into the multilingual realities of pupils, which allows us to…

This study illustrates why preschool children who are dual language learners (DLLs) are not a homogeneous group. An empirically developed model of preschool DLL subgroups, based on latent class analysis, was presented. The model reflects three separate subgroups of DLL children present in many classrooms where DLL children are served: Bilinguals,…