This study investigates the use of overt and null subjects in Bulgarian in child heritage speakers with L2 German. The alternation of overt and null pronominal subjects in null-subject languages like Bulgarian depends on grammatical and discourse conditions and contrasts with German. Oral narratives were elicited in Bulgarian, comparing the…

This study investigated the relationship between the level of cognitive-linguistic difficulty of task input and the size of the cross-linguistic relationship for academic listening comprehension in emergent bilinguals. It was theoretically motivated by task-dependent cross-linguistic interaction frameworks. We hypothesized that task item sets that…

The phonological loop of the working memory system plays a key role in language learning. This study examined the trajectories between two dual-language learner groups (English Learners [ELs] and Spanish Learners [SLs]) on phonological loop measures in L1 and L2. At Grade 1, children completed a battery of vocabulary and cognitive measures and…

This study aims to determine the positive and/or negative situations and the reactions of the students and teachers to these situations emerged during the education process carried out in a multicultural class with Syrian and Iraqi refugee students. This study is a case study in which the data were collected from classroom observations and teacher…

This study has investigated, in a quantitative survey, how the attitudes toward English lessons and the motivation for learning English as a foreign language (EFL) of 276 Danish EFL learners (starting age 7 and 9 years) changed within one year. Second, a subsample of children were interviewed. The study investigated what they liked and disliked…

The present study examined the effect of children's enrollment in U.S. dual-language immersion (DLI) programs in first grade on English development across five years, using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2011 (ECLS-K:2011) database. Propensity score matching was used to create comparable groups of DLI and non-DLI…

Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

The present study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 to examine whether the relationship between first-grade word-reading and reading-comprehension growth through eighth grade was different for language-minority learners (LMs) versus native English-speaking students (NEs). Among high word…

Children cannot learn to speak a language simply from occasional noninteractive exposure to native speakers' input (e.g., by hearing television dialogues), but can they learn something about its phonology? To answer this question, the present study varied ambient hearing experience for 126 5- to 7-year-old native Cantonese-Chinese speakers…

This article analyses adult and child development in the zone of proximal development in an educational practice based in Vygotsky's theories of play: the playworld educational practice. The playworld educational practice is a central component of a Scandinavian play pedagogy that promotes shared responsibility amongst adults and children for…

Over many decades, the efforts of researchers to understand key issues in the reading performance of those children most at risk for developing later reading problems has been relentless. This article presents the author's commentary to three studies: (1) Vanderwood, Linklater, and Healy (2008); (2) Edl, Jones, and Estell (2008); and (3) Baker et…