Spanish is the second most common language among US children aged 5-17, with 26.8% speaking it at home. To foster cultural understanding and promote positive relationships, it's crucial to introduce young children to different languages and cultures. Preschool language education can cultivate respect and empathy, building more inclusive…

In this article we identify ways to scaffold content-specific instruction to support your multilingual learners' academic language development. With the definition that academic language compromises of vocabulary, linguistic functions, and syntax, we share ways to integrate three instructional practices across your instruction. These practices…

Teachers spend a lot of time finding 'just right' picture books for their students. However, much of what is known about a book's difficulty level was developed with native English speakers. More needs to be developed with the distinctive characteristics of English Learners (ELs). This study reports on the selection of picture books to teach in an…

The field of reading instruction has long valued storytelling for literacy development, but what kinds of stories are bi/multilingual students exposed to at school? Through the cognitive phenomena of conceptual metonymy and metaphor, this article links language to identity and exposes practices that act to fracture the identities of…

As K-5 dual language programs gain popularity in the United States, language teaching, however, often still prioritizes discrete and decontextualized learning that is not built on students' interests and experiences or their multilingual and multimodal resources. This article reports on a classroom-based ethnographic case study and illustrates how…

Because dual-language books (DLBs) print the entire text in two languages nearby on the page, they have great potential for supporting children's biliteracy development by providing contexts to compare/contrast languages. However, little is known about how children read DLBs independently and how they may/may not use such characteristics to…

The Pasifika Early Literacy Project supports teachers to make space for the languages and cultures of Pacific children and families in early childhood settings in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dual-language books in five Pacific languages and English validate Pacific children's languages, literacies, and identities. We highlight teacher practices…

When working with bilingual readers, teaching for equity means building on students' linguistic strengths. To do so, we must provide intentionally designed holistic literacy instruction that encourages students to use their full literacy and linguistic repertoire. This article describes an asset-oriented approach called "Transliteracy"…

Arabic is the second most common home language of English learners in the United States. Educators seek to design culturally sustaining pedagogy to develop Arabic-speaking English learners' English skills while nourishing their heritage language and affirming their culture's values. The authors report on a series of interviews with three Arabic…

Music experience during early childhood can promote language and literacy skills, particularly phonological awareness, vocabulary, and turntaking and self-regulation skills useful for communication more broadly. Incorporating music activities into the early childhood classroom can be particularly useful for Dual Language Learners' (DLLs) language…

The author introduces the literature selection bookmark, a tool that inservice and preservice teachers who are teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in international contexts can use to guide them in selecting authentic children's English literature and analyze its utility in the elementary English-language classroom. Authentic children's…

This article shares a case study of a classroom of multicultural and multilingual children in an early childhood center to explore how iPad apps can support young children in learning English as an additional language. Situated in Sydney, Australia, this study found that iPad apps have the potential to promote 4- and 5-year-old children's language…

The authors present a tool that teachers can use to evaluate the rigor of vocabulary apps for their English learners. The tool asks about effective instructional practices, types of instructional activities, and technology features. The authors used the evaluation tool to examine 53 vocabulary apps for English learners and found overall app…

This study introduces parents' roles in the community Korean-English bilingual family literacy program named Family Storytime. It was offered at the Korean church for 30 minutes during lunch time on Sundays over 3 months. The Korean parents played two major roles: facilitators and participants. As facilitators, the parents advertised the literacy…

Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework, a team of university staff and educators at a traditionally under-performing urban elementary school built a collaboration aimed at enhancing writing instruction. The current qualitative research study, which was part of this larger project, focused on biography writing in Eva…