Chinese immersion programs have been increasingly popular in US schools. However, we have insufficient data on young English-speaking children's acquisition of Chinese as a second language in these programs, and specifically on social contextual variables systematically promoting or hindering Chinese language use. Taking a variationist…

This study investigated the unique role of nonverbal reasoning in early English word decoding for native Chinese-speaking children across three studies. In Study 1, 80 Grade 1 and 2 participants completed assessments including nonverbal reasoning tests, English pseudoword reading, Chinese character reading, Chinese phonological awareness (CPA),…

We examined the developmental trajectories and cognitive predictors of first language Chinese reading, second language English reading, and mathematics skills in Hong Kong children in Grades 1-5. We used longitudinal data of 1,000 children (M[subscript age] = 7.59 years) assessed on phonological awareness, rapid naming, and morphological awareness…

This study examines the intricate relationships between home language use, oral language skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and receptive vocabulary), and literacy skills (word reading and spelling) in English and Chinese among young bilinguals. The sample includes 249 first-grade and 263 third-grade bilingual students in…

Morphological knowledge is known to be positively associated with reading ability. However, whether morphological knowledge affects children's learning of new orthographic representations is less clear. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate morphological effects on orthographic learning in English, and whether this effect, if any, is different…

Background or Context: There is increasing research focusing on dual language (DL) education program policies and practices regarding who has access to bilingualism and whose bilingualism is valued and represented. However, limited research is situated in the context of Chinese-English DL education and its service of emergent bilingual learners…

Though a number of language socialization processes are theorized to promote children's heritage language proficiency (HLP), little research has considered these processes in a single study and examined their prospective relations to multiple domains of HLP in school-age children. In a two-wave longitudinal study of Chinese American children of…

How do native Chinese-speaking (CS) and non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) children learn to read and write in Chinese? In the present study, 29 CS and 34 NCS second and third graders aged 76 to 122 months (M = 93.65) participated in an experiment where they were taught 16 new Chinese characters in one of four conditions--copy, radical, phonological and…

Two experiments investigated whether exposure to Chinese characters and pinyin would facilitate oral vocabulary learning for Chinese as a first (L1) and second (L2) language learners. In Experiment 1, 48 second Chinese graders studied 15 made-up associations between spoken labels and pictures accompanied either by no orthography, by pinyin, or…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

This paper is about implementing a translanguaging approach to teach reading skills in English with simultaneous bilinguals who speak substantial amounts of Malay and Chinese at home. This new pedagogical approach was tried out with 2nd graders in 3 schools in Singapore: instead of the typical immersion approach to teaching reading skills in…

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…

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) robustly predicts early reading abilities across languages, but its underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study found that RAN associated significantly with processing speed but not with phonological awareness or orthographic knowledge in 89 Hong Kong Chinese second-graders. RAN overlaps more with processing…

Pinyin is a sound-annotating system for Chinese characters using Roman letters. Teaching and learning Pinyin has been an important educational practice in Mainland China for native Chinese children, and it is also typically taught to beginning learners of Chinese as a foreign/second language in tertiary-level classrooms. However, whether it should…

The Doss Elementary Mandarin FLI Program parents participated in an in-depth survey of their experiences as parents and their perceptions of their child's experiences in the Mandarin language immersion program in grades kindergarten through 2.