Purpose: We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth. Method: The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic--speaking…

The on-going implementation of the new curriculum of the new education system in Kenya includes the administration of technology in the classroom. In this study, this was achieved through the use of a gamified app in a local private school in Kenya, a gamified Swahili app. As Swahili is the language that is Kenya's national and one of two official…

The authors examined teachers' (N = 19) use of different question types during small-group comprehension instruction for 6-11-year-olds (N = 115). The authors tagged the corpus of 40 hours of guided reading sessions to enable computer-based searches for syntactic forms of questions. Teachers frequently asked high-challenge "wh-" word…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the role that the 1st language, Spanish, at prekindergarten (pre-K) plays in predicting 2nd language (L2), English, word reading in 1st grade. In addition, it examines the role of conceptual vocabulary in predicting word reading in English. Method: As part of a longitudinal study of…

Recent studies have proposed developments to the Simple View of Reading to reflect reading development across age groups and differences among learner profiles and account for additional factors that explain reading comprehension performance beyond word recognition and language comprehension. One of these proposals is the inclusion of cognitive…

This study examined the roles of first-language (L1) Chinese and second-language (L2) English phonological skills in English and Chinese reading comprehension, respectively, and their association with reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. We tested 258 second graders on nonverbal intelligence,…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the role that the first language (L1), Spanish, at Pre-Kindergarten plays in predicting second language (L2), English, word reading in first grade. In addition, it examines the role of conceptual vocabulary in predicting word reading in English. Method: As part of a longitudinal study of…

This three-year longitudinal study investigated the role of language of instruction in moderating the relationships between initial levels of English oral language proficiency and Spanish reading comprehension and growth in English reading comprehension. The study followed Spanish-speaking English language learners in English-only literacy…

This study draws on the application of sociocultural theory to second-language learning and teaching to examine the impact of a design-based research approach on teacher development and literacy instruction to English-language learners (ELLs). Design-based research methodology was employed to derive theoretical suppositions relating to the process…

This study examines the biliteracy development of a group of bilingual Latino third graders in an elementary school in the south-west USA. It focuses on the role of language in children's reading comprehension of narrative texts in Spanish and English in a school context. The authors frame their analysis within the "Continua of Biliteracy" model…