English is undoubtedly an important language for educational and socio-economic mobility in numerous countries including Malaysia. Regardless of its importance, studies to document English language acquisition among Malaysian children acquiring English in the local context remain scarce. This normative data is imperative for syllabus-designers,…

Uganda's "early exit" language policy positions African languages ambiguously in public education provision. Runyoro-Rutooro and Runyankore-Rukiga are spoken in Western Uganda in public spaces where translanguaging happens as a matter of course. These languages are heard at pre-primary and lower primary levels but are superseded by…

Early childhood professionals can act as catalysts in encouraging home language maintenance in multilingual families. However, there is a dearth of research on whether these professionals advise parents to speak their home language(s) to their offspring, and furthermore, little is known about what prompts professionals to proffer language advice.…

The implementation of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy in the Philippine basic education has gained traction among educators. Skepticism as to its effectiveness is evident especially in mathematics class where English is the universally recognised medium. This study explored how elementary teachers from a rural…

Post-colonial Hong Kong is an officially trilingual city with significant numbers of residents speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some combination of all three. Competency in these languages is promoted through educational policies and practices at all levels of schooling. Using concepts from the Deweyan framework of democracy and…

The aim of the current study is to expand our understanding of cross-linguistic transfer (CLT) to new languages and settings under-represented in the research literature. Empirical evidence of CLT is almost exclusively demonstrated in studies examining European and Asian languages in high-income countries. Literacy data were collected from 3561…

This study reports on an investigation into the perspectives of different stakeholders (e.g. administrators, teachers, students, and parents) towards motivations for introducing English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy in low-resourced public schools, serving minoritized students, and language ideologies that form its practices. Framed…

The current study investigates the impact of the teachers' societal dominant language use within a weak version of translanguaging in early heritage language education. We explored five preschool teachers' use of English, the dominant majority language, in Tamil heritage language classes in Singapore and examined its impact on 33 children's…

The present study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing parents' beliefs about, and attitudes toward, supporting young children's English as a second/foreign language development -- Parent English Language Belief and Attitude Questionnaire (PELBA-Q). The PELBA-Q was piloted with 173 parents of kindergarten-aged children and…

This study considered the songs currently in use in Gaelic groups for 0-3 year olds in Scotland, whilst investigating how practitioners use them in the groups. In this article, I argue that Gaelic Early Years practitioners insufficiently understand the potential of song in relation to Gaelic language acquisition with young children and their…

This paper explores preschool children's (aged 5:6) language development in nursery and at home. The study examines how children learn a new language in nursery and practise their learning at home. The data in this study is drawn from a long ethnographic research, which included two stages of data collection. I used participant observation, audio…

This study explored the family language policy, bilingual parenting profiles, and the predictors among Chinese parents in Singapore. Altogether 175 parents of Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers (aged 2;6-5;6) were sampled and surveyed. The research results indicated that: (1) a majority of the parents (93.7%) believed in early bilingualism but…

This paper explores family language policy in Turkish-speaking families in Sweden. Questionnaires were administered to the parents of 105 Turkish/Swedish children (age 4-7), targeting family language practices (including parent-parent, parent-child, child-parent, child-and-sibling conversation and language-fostering activities such as joint book…

Although calls for responding to migration-related diversity in education are not novel, few studies have examined linguistic and affective outcomes of diversity-sensitive approaches for vocabulary teaching. This article reports on an intervention study in which beginner English-foreign-language learners (N = 51, M[subscript age] = 8.67 years)…

In response to a growing call for developing flexible, multilingual spaces in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, this paper explored how [Sánchez, M. T., O. García, and C. Solorza. 2018. "Reframing Language Allocation Policy in Dual Language Bilingual Education." Bilingual Research Journal 41 (1): 37-51.] translanguaging…