An important goal in early childhood science education is students' development of academic language. However, scholars disagree on whether academic language must be explicitly taught or whether it can be learned through immersive science experiences. In this case study of a co-taught second grade classroom, we use positioning theory and framings…

The COVID-19 pandemic affected education communities by turning students and teachers abruptly to online teaching. This imposition of digital education is being investigated by various researchers all over the world since it has changed the way we conceive of the use of technology in classrooms and in our lives in general. Nevertheless, the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect relations between short-term memory (STM), reading, oral language, and writing at the letter, word, and discourse levels in young, developing writers both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Method: Participants were 449 English-speaking kindergarten students (52% female)…

Drama has the potential to enrich and enliven established approaches to literacy learning, engaging students and expanding their possibilities for meaning-making. Drama-rich pedagogy is well-established as an effective tool in supporting language and literacy development. However, research to date has not explored the possibilities of using drama…

Despite an increased interest in academic language in recent years, critical and sociopolitical perspectives in this area of scholarship remain scarce. This paper presents brings such perspectives to the study of academic language by proposing a framework that highlights its situated social meanings through a focus on social identities and…

Mathematical language (or the content-specific words in mathematics) has repeatedly shown to be related to mathematical abilities in preschool and in the early grades of primary education. Research in this field has predominantly focused on young children's quantitative and spatial language. At the same time, recent research has discovered that…

Presently, in Malta, syllabi are being replaced by learning outcomes. For ages 3-7, the outcomes are framed holistically (e.g. identity, communication, etc.), and it is recommended that children learn mathematics informally through play and projects. For ages 8-11, learning outcomes are subject-based, and new mathematics textbooks are being phased…

Inquiry-based science instruction has been proposed as an optimal learning environment for language-integrated teaching. While its potential for developing both content knowledge and language skills has been shown for students with limited language proficiency, research focusing on mainstream classrooms has mainly considered domain-specific…

Academic language and its associations with school success have been established in many prior studies. However, the scholarship lacks research on the mechanisms that constitute these relations. This study investigates the mediating role of motivational-­affective variables, specifically reading self-concept and reading enjoyment, in relations…

The purpose of the present study was to examine possible shifts in the presence of academic vocabulary across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core reading program. The authors examined seven program years dating from 1962 to 2013 and computationally determined four categories of academic vocabulary (science,…

This study aimed to examine language at the teacher/classroom level among second-grade classrooms that differ in socioeconomic backgrounds. Measures of teachers' vocabulary input across the school day throughout the school year were examined. There was a significant difference in the proportion of academic word use between classes that differed in…

Learning academic vocabulary is a crucial task for all students, but especially challenging for students with speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN) and those who are multilingual. Following a participatory research strategy, we analyze whether iconic gestures can be integrated in teaching routines in an inclusive elementary school and…

This case study focused on the design and implementation of a third-grade vocabulary-enhanced reading intervention for below grade-level readers. The activities aimed to simultaneously engage students in tending to phonological, orthographic, syntactical, and semantic elements of new vocabulary words while also taking into account the vital role…

Teacher discourse is one way to scaffold instruction for students and is especially important for multilingual learners (MLs). With an ever-growing population of MLs, this topic demands attention. This study takes steps to meet this demand by presenting a language-based approach to content instruction (LACI), a guiding framework comprised of six…

We explored whether knowledge building through read alouds of a conceptually coherent (CC) set of texts might support children's incidental acquisition of vocabulary in these texts and listening comprehension of related texts. Eleven classrooms of first (n = 83) and second grade students (n = 112) were randomly assigned to read alouds of either a…