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…

This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

Thinking together in primary classrooms has received much scholarly attention in recent years, with a focus on educational dialogue at the forefront of studies concerned with identifying what constitutes effective language for learning. Whilst the expression of explicit reasoning is often discussed, less attention has been given to the role that…

Purpose: This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English. Method: One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish--English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from…

Children are known to be fast learners due to their neural plasticity. Learning a non-native language (L2) requires the mastering of new production patterns. In classroom settings, learners are not only exposed to the acoustic input, but also to the unfamiliar grapheme-phoneme correspondences of the L2 orthography. We tested how 9-10-year-old…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

The present study analyzed how a group of young Spanish-speaking English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) science class responded to an instructional unit integrating attention to functional language and an inquiry-oriented approach to science. Working in cooperation with the researchers, a…

Purpose: Elementary-age dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States are often characterized as at risk for low vocabulary in both Spanish and English. This longitudinal study examined conceptually scored receptive and expressive vocabulary development among DLLs from Spanish-speaking, low-income homes and…

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and…

Purpose: Better auditory prostheses and earlier interventions have led to remarkable improvements in spoken language abilities for children with hearing loss (HL), but these children often still struggle academically. This study tested a hypothesis for why this may be, proposing that the language of school becomes increasingly disconnected from…

The research purpose is examining the poems in Turkish textbooks for 1st-8th grade in terms of figurative language usage. The data source used in this qualitative study was gathered from the Turkish textbooks for the 1st-8th grade which was published in 2015-2016. The data were collected through document analysis and analysed via content analysis.…

While previous sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that children faithfully acquire probabilistic input constrained by sociolinguistic and linguistic factors (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status), research suggests children regularize inconsistent input-probabilistic input that is not sociolinguistically constrained (e.g., Hudson Kam &…