This paper examines teacher discourse and the building of culture circles in an asynchronous collaborative blog that combined two different classes in an Early Childhood MS Ed program. Social speech is often considered non-rational. Coupling grounded theory to analyze speech patterns with relational ethics, we argue that teachers engaged in…

Purpose: This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English. Method: One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish--English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from…

Language skills are vital to children's learning and well-being, and the first 5 years of life are an especially critical time for language acquisition. Research suggests that when early childhood teachers create language-rich environments, children develop stronger receptive and expressive language abilities, especially children from low-income…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

Children are known to be fast learners due to their neural plasticity. Learning a non-native language (L2) requires the mastering of new production patterns. In classroom settings, learners are not only exposed to the acoustic input, but also to the unfamiliar grapheme-phoneme correspondences of the L2 orthography. We tested how 9-10-year-old…

Science education in the Arab world is conducted in various multilingual contexts. When science is taught in Arabic, diglossia -- the coexistence of the formal language of literacy alongside a local spoken variety -- constitutes a multilingual setting the pedagogical implications of which need to be understood. This study compares teacher--student…

This study explored the patterns and predictors of code-switching (CS) in Singapore preschoolers by analyzing the data elicited from an existing early childhood corpus. Altogether 943 cases of CS produced by 111 children aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6, respectively, were analyzed. The results indicated that: (1) 'insertion', 'intersentential', and…

Purpose: Elementary-age dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States are often characterized as at risk for low vocabulary in both Spanish and English. This longitudinal study examined conceptually scored receptive and expressive vocabulary development among DLLs from Spanish-speaking, low-income homes and…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

The objective of this study is to detect the effect of using cooperative learning for teaching idioms to first grade students, learning French as a foreign language. The study was carried out on two groups -- experimental group and control group -- during the academic year of 2017-2018 in the lesson "Reading in French". The lesson was…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and…

Educators often do not recognize biliteracy and bidialectalism in African American Language (AAL) speakers. Chronicling the experiences of twin four/five-year old AAL and emergent Standard English speakers, we discuss the importance of recognizing and building on the routines and identities of African American children and families. We present…

In this study it was researched whether visualized proverbs, idioms and epigrams have effect of primary school 3rd, 5th and 7th grade students' speaking skills. The study was executed in spring semester of the academic year of 2010-2011, with 30 students studying at primary school in 3rd, 5th and 7th grade. The students who participated in the…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning…

This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of…