This study explored the instructional potential of bilingual picturebooks for building word consciousness in bilingual elementary students. Word consciousness refers to knowledge about words as well as interest in and enthusiasm for learning new words. This disposition helps students build their vocabularies and learn more words from talk and…

This study explored the effects of learning activities which encouraged positive crosslinguistic influence from L2 Spanish to L1 English grammar in young learners. The learners (N = 82) were studying Spanish as their compulsory foreign language at an English state primary school in the UK. As part of ten timetabled Spanish classes over a period of…

This paper presents a novel approach to teaching how vaccines work in the body, and introduces a community outreach project and activity we piloted with youth. Our Nuestra Ciencia program addresses scientific misconceptions among bilingual elementary school children in engaging and scientifically accurate ways. Utilizing analogies and…

Developing young learners' language awareness is becoming an important educational goal in a rapidly globalised world characterised by linguistic and cultural diversity. Drawing upon previous research in the field, the article highlights the importance of promoting language diversity and nurturing language awareness from an early age. We present a…

At the intersection of social studies and world language curricula are opportunities to explore students' prior learning with vocabulary-rich content designed to support language acquisition goals. "Funds of knowledge" is defined as socio-cultural, economic, and historical knowledge from home and community settings. The instructional…

Students' attitudes in first-grade dual language immersion (DLI) classes were compared with those of similar students in mainstream English classes. Results for the sample of 81 Latinx students indicated that for attitudes toward activities in Spanish, including reading and speaking in public and with relatives, both ELLs and non-ELLs in DLI had…

Many Latino children in the U.S. speak primarily Spanish at home with few opportunities for exposure to English before entering school. For monolingual children, the strongest early predictor of later school success is oral language skill developed before kindergarten. Less is known about how early oral language skills support later learning in…

A substantial percentage of students in U.S. schools speak languages other than English at home, yet very few are enrolled in educational contexts that seek to develop their bilingual and biliterate skills and identities, despite the fact that research continues to show the importance of creating space for bilingual and biliterate practices in the…

Emergent bilinguals' engagement and participation with learning is closely connected to the identities they are able to construct in this learning. In this paper, I present a model for understanding how young emergent bilinguals begin to construct identities with language and learning across school-based activities. Drawing upon Holland,…

This article focuses on two main issues. On the one hand, it deals with early prevention of literacy difficulties. On the other hand, it deals with the same issue once pupils already present serious difficulties in reading and writing. Consequently, this paper has two main aims. Firstly, it aims to show teachers that, in order to carry out…

This article presents an overview of family learning at the Children's Museum of Houston. Based on educational theory, and designed to support learning literacy and success in school, Museum programs provide parents with tools to help them nurture children's intellectual development. The goal of this work is for parents to become better prepared…

Bilingualism and its reference methodology: CLIL are spreading at a very fast pace all through educative systems from some years on. The young status of bilingual programmes leads to little research about how bilingualism is influencing real learning contexts and which factors play important roles in that influence. In this way, this study aims to…

Latino bilingual children hold rich understandings, which are underexplored and underutilized in the geoscience classroom. Oftentimes, young Latinos possess unique cultural land experiences shaping their place identities. We consider science as language and culture, and propose place-based geoscience hybrid space explorations that are culturally…

Foreign Language Elementary Summer Camp is a fantastic way to spend part of the summer. For the past ten years in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the authors have offered a variety of foreign language elementary camps that meet daily for three hours for three to four weeks during July. Currently, they offer camps for Chinese, English Language Learners…

The bilingual poetry and stories of Salvadoran writer Jorge Argueta have been an invaluable resource in this author's classroom. She has used poems from "Talking with Mother Earth" for homework and class analysis during a study of ecosystems, the story "Xochitl and the Flowers" to lead into persuasive writing, and "Bean Soup" to teach…