This study investigated the relations between bilingual students' amount of talk during classroom discussion, motivation, and self-reported bi-literacy skills (i.e. reading, writing skills in their native and school languages). Sixth-grade Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States (N = 121; M age = 12.119 years old; SD = 0.358) reported on…

Building on previous listening strategy research, the author aimed to explore the differences between Chinese high-proficiency listeners (HLs) and low-proficiency listeners (LLs) on their strategy use, problems, and motivation in native language (L1) listening. It involved 1,290 Grade 7 and 1,515 Grade 9 students. Both quantitative and qualitative…

Socioeconomic disparities in early language are widespread and have long-lasting effects. The aim of this study is to investigate when social gaps in language problems arise and how they change across the first years of schooling. We address this question in two large longitudinal Norwegian datasets: the Behavior Outlook Norwegian Developmental…

This paper investigated linguistic practices and choices of Australian children of Indian descent, an under-researched group, who are studying Hindi in primary education. Data was collected using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with sixty participants across 3 primary schools in the Sydney area. The findings revealed, as expected,…

The aim of the present study is to identify teachers' reading strategy use in L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (foreign language), and also to examine whether background variables such as gender, qualification, teaching experience, platform of teaching, reading habits, majors, L2 level and the number of L2s known make a difference in teachers' reading…

The current study examines the relationship between bilingual children's dual language experience (i.e. language input, language output and vocabulary proficiency), and their social-emotional and behavioral skills. Data were analysed from 805 Singaporean bilingual preschoolers (ages 4; 1-5; 8 years), who are learning English and either Mandarin (n…

With the trend toward globalization and the continual change of the ethnic composition of the U.S. population, there is increasing awareness in the U.S. that not every child is raised in an English-only family. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationships among heritage language proficiency, ethnic identity, and self-esteem in the…

In this paper, we present a synthesis of a series of studies, carried out by our research groups, from the Greek educational context on teachers' and immigrant students' views on issues of bilingual acquisition and of heritage language learning and teaching. Albeit including heterogeneous samples and employing quantitative and qualitative…

The use of home languages has previously been advocated in highly multilingual UK classrooms. However, drawing on the home languages and cultural insight of children who use English as an Additional Language (EAL) may also have important social and academic benefits in contexts where monolingualism is the norm. Conducted in a small local authority…

The authors tested theoretically driven predictions as to the ways in which syntactic awareness, or awareness of word order within sentences, might contribute to reading comprehension, the end goal of reading development and instruction. They conducted a longitudinal study of 100 English-speaking children followed from Grade 3 to 4. Children…

This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5-6-year-old children were tested: monolingual…

Previous research in first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition has provided evidence that linguistic confidence is a key construct that can explain linguistic behaviour. In this paper, we apply previous research in the socio-contextual model of L2 learning to data from Catalonia. More specifically, the paper investigates linguistic…

The African Storybook (ASb) is a digital initiative that promotes multilingual literacy for African children by providing openly licenced children's stories in multiple African languages, as well as English, French, and Portuguese. Based on Darvin and Norton's (2015) model of identity and investment, and drawing on the Douglas Fir Group's (2016)…

The contribution of phonological memory to syntactic abilities has been demonstrated in various populations, but its relationship to metasyntactic abilities, defined as the ability to control syntactic aspects of language, remains largely unexplored. This study therefore aims to examine the contribution of phonological memory in the completion of…

This paper examines the micro planning activities that schools engage in to address learners' needs to make education work in rural primary schools of Botswana. The national language plan prescribes the use of English and Setswana only as languages of instruction at the primary school level. However, this plan is not practical in some regions…