Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English…

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English…

The present study aimed to examine the contributions of two separate Pinyin skills and oral vocabulary to Chinese word reading of 70 third graders in a U.S. Mandarin Immersion program where Pinyin was introduced at Grade 3. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that Pinyin initial-final spelling--the skill to spell Chinese syllables using Pinyin…

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 study reveals hitherto overlooked effects of age of onset (AO) in immersive school contexts, using multiple measures over time so as to focus on fluctuations and trends in individual data. The second language (L2) English development was studied in 91 children who received 50-50 content and language integrated learning (CLIL) instruction in…

Written from the perspective of a Grade 5/6 French Immersion teacher, this paper examines the role of music, poetry, and the visual arts in enhancing learner identity, in the context of the elementary school classroom. It begins with a focus on artistic metaphors that represent cultural and linguistic hyphenation. It then addresses practical…

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…

Many teachers of foreign languages struggle with finding alternative ways of exposing their students to the target language. At Kent Gardens Elementary School (KGES) in McLean, Virginia, many students participate in an immersion program from first grade to sixth grade. These students spend half of every school day immersed in French while learning…

As children learn to read, they become sensitive to the patterns that exist in the ways in which their language(s) are represented in print. This skill is known as orthographic processing. We examined the nature of orthographic processing in English and French for children in the first grade of a French immersion program, and the relationship…

The relationship between first language (L1) typology, defined as the classification of languages according to their structural characteristics (e.g. phonological systems and writing systems), and the development of second (L2) and third (L3) language skills and literacy proficiency in multilingual children was investigated in this study. The…

The present study investigated the efficacy of early English immersion in the Shi Da Fu Elementary School in Xi'an, China. Three hundred and fifty one students were tested in Grades 1-6. There were two main purposes that motivated this longitudinal and cross-sectional study. The first goal was to compare the L1 and L2 language and literacy…

In an effort to revitalize the Cherokee language, Cherokee Nation launched an immersion program for preschool and elementary children in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Central to the curriculum is literacy in the Cherokee writing system known as "syllabary". This study focuses on sociocultural and sociolinguistic evidence toward an understanding…

This study analyzed informal Finnish compositions written by the first pupils in Vaasa (Finland) who were taught Swedish by immersion method and the compositions of their parallel class. Compositions in the fourth and fifth forms were compared. The immersion pupils were taught mostly in Swedish, while their peers in the parallel group were taught…