Although English-Chinese bilingual development has been studied in community contexts, it has not been adequately addressed in the K-12 Chinese immersion classrooms despite the increasing number of Chinese immersion programs across the United States. To inform effective pedagogies in Chinese immersion classrooms, this study reports on a nine-month…

The growing demand for Indigenous language education in the United States often relies on community teachers with widely varying proficiencies as part of local language reclamation efforts. While these English-dominant 'teacher-learners' play a central role in the success of classroom-based K-12 language programs, their classroom experiences and…

In teacher training curricula, books are presented as an ideal material for building and enriching young children's language. Yet, the routine of reading at home with children is hardly ever mentioned. In this chapter, the author proposes analyses of story-reading activities from a usage-based and first language acquisition perspective. The goal…

This dissertation research is a longitudinal classroom ethnography in a second-grade classroom in a public Northeastern suburban school. It is a story of surprise for me as researcher, as I discover the multiplicity of how engagement can be conceptualized in this English-medium classroom with emergent bi/multilingual children. As tensions flowed…

This study visually and linguistically examines the various manifestations of power and language in mainstream and alternative children's picture books, and analyzes the students' linguistic production by utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a tool to uncover misrepresentations of race, class, and language. The aim of the study is…

From the field of developmental psycholinguistics and from conceptual development theory there is evidence that excessive linguistic "code-switching" in early school education may pose some hazards for the learning of young multilingual children. In this article the author addresses the issue, invoking post-Piagetian and neo-Vygotskian…

This naturalistic study reports the language and literacy-learning opportunities, and the conditions necessary to bring them about, in the art component of an innovative intergenerational programme. The focus is on the children in the programme (median age 4), their interaction with adult participants (median age 85) and facilitators, and the ways…