This article details a classroom-based study designed to provide agency and voice to first and second grade emergent bilinguals as they processed the COVID-19 pandemic. Two California teachers created a narrative writing unit not only to teach specific writing skills, but also to challenge pervasive deficit assumptions that young children…

Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English-medium schools where their bilingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. Research suggests this is harmful for students, but little empirical work has examined how teachers in English-dominant schools can support students' biliteracy. To address this problem, this qualitative…

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…

Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English-medium schools where their bi- and multi-lingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. This article draws on a social literacies perspective to explore how a second-grade teacher and her multilingual students re-framed one English-medium classroom to welcome and include…

This report presents findings from a follow-up exploratory study of the development of writing ability in an attempt to identify key component skills and competencies for elementary school literacy learners, grades 2nd, 4th and 6th. The first evaluation consisted in scoring first draft narrative texts for coherence, the second, an assessment of…

As culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms become increasingly common, research looking at ways teachers can support language and literacy practices of all students in these spaces is needed. Using qualitative methods, this project examined second-grade, multilingual students' practices during a Writing Workshop activity that invited them…

Growing numbers of scholars in composition studies support translingual orientations in their postsecondary writing classrooms. However, translingual orientations are rarely extended to elementary school writers, who are often asked to compose exclusively in Dominant American English. Drawing on theories of translingualism and emergent biliteracy,…

This study used a within-subjects design to explore two instructional conditions for developing vocabulary in second-grade Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs)--extended instruction and embedded instruction implemented during shared interactive reading. Words assigned to the extended condition were directly taught using a multifaceted approach…

Dual-language learner (DLL) children typically learn to write while still learning English, with vocabulary appearing to be a particularly vulnerable domain. This study investigates how a reduced English lexicon impacts English writing in DLL children. Participants were 100 Spanish-speaking DLLs and 100 of their monolingual classmates in first…

This study investigated the relationship between elementary classroom (N = 50) reading activities in Year 1 and reading performance (i.e., passage comprehension, letter-word identification, and word attack) 1 year later for English language learners (ELLs; N = 270). A cross-classification hierarchical model indicated that compared to other reading…

This study explores a second-grade English language learner's literacy development and ability to use blogging for social and academic purposes, in the context of learning academic writing genres in a US urban school. Grounded in sociocultural theories, it conceptualizes learning as appropriation, and language as a dynamic and functional system of…

For their 56th annual meeting, the Association of Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the Amway Grand Hotel. This year's conference theme was Literacy Is Transformative, which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 35. Included are double-peer reviewed papers, the presidential address,…

The 25 mini-lessons provided in this book are designed to develop students' self-regulated writing behaviors and enhance their self-perceived writing abilities. These foundational writing strategies are applicable and adaptable to all primary students: emergent, advanced, English Language Learners, and struggling writers. Following the SCAMPER…

In this article, the author describes her experience of teaching Mandarin Chinese at Stopher Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky. Through growing and learning with her students, the author has become a firm believer in the importance of early childhood language acquisition and a passionate advocate for world language education.

This practical, teacher-friendly book provides indispensable guidance for implementing research-based reading instruction that is responsive to students' diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Structured around the "big five" core topics of an effective reading program--phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension--the…