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 article looks at how arts integration can boost the language development of limited English proficient students in kindergarten through second grade. I first review existing research on how young children learn and describe the special challenges faced by children who must learn in an unfamiliar language. I then identify arts-based mechanisms…

AISD staff's top three suggested priorities for the Dual Language (DL) program in 2013-2014 were: professional development opportunities, program alignment, and increased availability of materials and resources.

This study investigated the link between phoneme and onset-rime awareness and reading outcomes in children learning to read in a second language (L2). Closely matched phoneme and onset-rime awareness tasks were administered in English and French in the spring of kindergarten to English-dominant children in French immersion programmes (n=98).…

Learning a FL [foreign language] may be frustrating for some young learners; however, integrating fun in learning would encourage them to develop positive attitudes towards learning a language (Ellis & Brewster, 1991). Stories are an effective and enthusiastic technique in teaching young learners; they inject lots of amusement and help…

This study analyzes how a teacher in the United States used systemic functional linguistics to design a blog-mediated writing curriculum to support second grade English language learners' (ELLs) literacy development and abilities to use computer-mediated communication tools for social and academic purposes in and out of school. The questions posed…

This study examined the relations of age, preschool experience, and gender with children's school readiness levels at kindergarten entry. The sample included 5,512 children of predominantly Hispanic heritage and from families experiencing low socioeconomic circumstances. A series of between-subjects ANOVAs indicated that age…

This paper describes a subset of results from a large-scale two-year independent evaluation study conducted with the "Scientists in School" (SiS) outreach program and two large school boards in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it explores the responses of elementary students (n= 811) from typically underrepresented groups in science…

The purpose of this study was to assess students' attitudes toward several aspects of biliteracy within the context of a dual immersion program. Attitudes toward perceived competencies in reading in two languages, along with the social and personal values of literacy in each language (English and Spanish), and the personal and social value of…

Code-switching is a natural part of being bilingual. Yet two-way immersion programs are known to insist upon separation of languages, discouraging both teachers and students from drawing on both linguistic codes at once. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power, I examine one second-grade classroom in which the teacher instituted a…

This article evaluates the results of a Norwegian trial scheme involving free half-day day care for all four and five-year-olds in a district of Oslo with a large immigrant population. Although the scheme applied to all children in this age group, the target group was children whose parents came from non-Western countries. The evaluation, which is…

Two-way bilingual immersion education, offered in a fast-growing number of primary schools in the United States, provides primary language maintenance to minority language speakers while simultaneously offering an enrichment "foreign" language immersion experience to English-speaking children in the same classroom, generally with the same teacher.…

A long-time detractor of immersion education has been the concern that a substantial proportion of teaching in and about a language other than English might potentially lead to irreparable damage to immersion students' development in English and, hence, their ability to function in an English-dominant society. The assessment in this article,…

The negotiation of integrated home and school identities of 3 second grade Hispanic English language learners (ELLs) included in an English-dominant classroom are explored through sociocultural paradigms, with an emphasis on the role of the individual's agency in the social construction of identities. In addition, we examine the conditions within…

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggest that Chinese…