Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard…

Purpose: Word learning requires the creation of phonological and semantic representations and links in long-term memory. Phonological distance of a given word from the spoken language affects children's lexical-phonological representations and processing. The study investigates the role of the phonological distance of Modern Standard Arabic (StA)…

Interactive book reading (IBR) is an effective method to foster children's language development. Previous studies pointed at smaller gains for children at risk for language and literacy impairments due to socio-economic, ethnic, or minority background or due to home language. However, possible differences in interaction patterns with children at…

Purpose: In this validation study, we examined the factor structure of the mediated learning observation (MLO) used during the teaching phase of dynamic assessment. As an indicator of validity, we evaluated whether the MLO factor structure was consistent across children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Two hundred…

Responding to concerns that play is at risk in the early years of education, this article investigates teachers' current use of play in language and literacy instruction in Grade 1 and 2 Alberta classrooms. It addresses what teachers say they need to make play part of school-based language and literacy education. Survey findings show a recognition…

In this manuscript we show how readalouds can significantly enrich student vocabulary and comprehension by demonstrating enhancements that will foster student learning and language development. We anchor our examples to empirical evidence demonstrating that the content of a readaloud (i.e., the what we teach) as well as the quality of the…

This content analysis explored children's fictional storybooks and informational science books to determine their differences in high-quality text features that support oral language (OL) development. We also explored the opportunities for OL development in curricular books compared to trade books. Using systematic coding procedures, we evaluated…

Vocabulary development remains an active and robust research area, yet little is known about what students, particularly young students, think during vocabulary learning. A commonly held assumption is that young learners employ few, if any, cognitive and metacognitive strategies when engaged in literacy tasks. Conversely, decades of research…

The study examined 37 language samples of 37 Spanish-English kindergartners and first graders from a larger sample of the Multitudes Project in California. The focus was on investigating how these young English language learners produced narratives in English, what language elements they included, and whether these elements correlated or related…

This study collected interview data from parents of five children identified as having special education needs who were attending or had attended a French Immersion program in Toronto, Ontario. The experiences of these families were qualitatively analyzed to uncover critical themes surrounding experiences and beliefs around French Immersion…

Observational studies comparing child outcomes in early care and education classrooms of differing quality are often confounded by between-child differences. A within-child design, tracking children across contexts, can identify the effects of quality with less confounding. An analysis of Australian children (N = 1128, mean age 5 years, 48%…

This mixed-methods study was designed to examine how different home literacy environments shape gender differences in Chinese-Canadian first graders' (N = 76) bilingual lexical attainment and literacy engagement. Quantitative analyses indicated that girls outperform boys in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2) vocabulary. Gender differences were not…

The purpose is to contribute knowledge to the field regarding the role of aesthetic experience when young students participate in intertwined science-art activities in science class. More precisely, we scrutinise how science suggestions are shaped in students' processes of imagination when exploring animal's ecology. Data corpus comprises audio…

Using an economically and culturally diverse sample of 451 children and their parents from the Family Life Project, this study explored mothers' and fathers' language engagement as measured by a latent construct of parents' wh and non-wh questions and conversational turns with their 24- to 36-month-old children. Differences between mothers' and…

This study examined within and cross-language relations, and specifically, the role of phonological awareness (PA) skills in reading among young Hindi-speaking children (L1) who were learning to read English (L2) in Delhi, India. Data was collected from 143 children in Grades 1 and 2 using measures validated for this population. The analyses…