This paper examines the construct of bilingual phonemic awareness in Irish-English bilinguals. Though traditionally viewed as a skill or ability which transfers across languages, recent accounts have considered whether phonemic awareness has a language-specific component. This study used a cross-sectional design to examine this question. A total…

For bilingual children, home literacy experiences contribute to the development of both languages. In this study, survey data were gathered on the frequency of home literacy activities in two languages for forty-two early-elementary students in a French-English dual language immersion program. Using growth modeling, this study focuses on the…

Purpose: This study examined the frequency of code-switching by Spanish-English-speaking children as a function of language proficiency in each language and diagnosis (developmental language disorder [DLD] or typical language development [TLD]). Method: Sixty-two Spanish-English-speaking children, 5-7 years of age, participated in this study (24…

Purpose: The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether parallel measures of narrative-based listening comprehension and reading comprehension reflected the same construct and yielded comparable scores from a diverse sample of second- and third-grade students. One hundred ten students participated in this study. Method: Three listening…

Canadian students enrolled in either French-immersion or English-instruction programs were followed from Grades 2 to 3 (M[subscript age] = 7.8 years to 8.9 years; N = 244; 55% girls). In each grade, students completed two mathematical tasks that required oral language processing (i.e., word-problem solving and number transcoding from dictation)…

Sparse attention in the educational leadership literature is given to those leading immersion schools, despite the established connection between educational leadership and context, including cultural context. By eliciting principals' accounts of practices in leading Irish language-medium immersion education in secondary schools, this study begins…

The present study examined parents' and teachers' perceptions of student learning in Spanish-English Dual Language Education (DLE) programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants included 72 parents of students from kindergarten to second grade and eight teachers in two schools in the southeastern U.S. Parents retrospectively reported…

This three-article dissertation examined how policy choices in three key policy areas -- initial enrollment, service provision, and reclassification -- impact English learner (EL)-classified students. The first article examined the national landscape of state statutes, regulations, and state education agencies' (SEA) guidance that support…

This study investigates the within- and cross-language relations between orthographic processing and spelling for children learning to read in languages that share the same Roman script: namely, English and French. We examined these relations in a group of 152 children attending grade 1 in a French immersion program. Measures of English and French…

This study investigated an emergent interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge in the prediction of reading comprehension among French immersion students in Grades 2 and 3. A group of 66 students were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, vocabulary, word reading…

This study examines the writing skills of students in grades 1 to 5 of an Italian-English two-way immersion program. Narrative writing samples were collected in both languages and scored for content, organization, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, text length, and overall total score. The results show that writing skills improved as a function of…

The present study investigated the contribution of morphological and cognate awareness to the development of English and French vocabulary knowledge among young minority and majority language children who were enrolled in a French immersion program. Participating children (n = 75) were assessed in English and French on measures of morphological…

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

This paper examines the French achievement results of three groups of students: Canadian-born English/French bilingual, Canadian-born multilingual and immigrant multilingual Grade 6 French immersion students, by investigating how the variables of integrative and instrumental motivations, attitudes to the learning situation, French language…

This comparative case study (based on observational, interview, and picture-sort data) examines how teachers and students talk about cultural, linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic difference in two elementary Spanish-English two-way immersion programs. In addition, I analyze how those discourses are associated with both contextual conditions and…