Purpose: We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth. Method: The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic--speaking…

This study investigates the integration of computational thinking (CT) into early elementary literacy, focusing on kindergarten to second grade students, using multiple representations to understand their ideas of CT. Through clinical task-based interviews with 12 students, we found that concrete manipulatives, pictorial/graphical representations,…

This article bridges scholarship in global education with elementary classroom teaching by presenting a series of lessons that challenge the idea of national culture as fixed and stable. When teaching about another country other than the United States, teachers tend to rely on misappropriated generalizations around food, holidays, and folktales…

This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (PreK) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS PreK from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

The presented study focuses on children aged from 5 to 6.5 who attend Czech kindergartens. Its purpose is to explore a potential positive impact of an educational game application on malleability of children's spatial skills through the application usage. The research was conducted as a pedagogical experiment in which the pre-test and post-test…

English, the global lingua franca, enjoys a growing status worldwide. The high status of English is also linked to the increasing interest in teaching English to young learners (EYL), and is reciprocally linked to complex political, cultural and social forces. Research on the advantages of learning English at a young age is controversial and…

This article reports from a Teacher-led Innovation Fund project that investigated connecting practices and resources for mathematical learning between a kindergarten and the first year of school. Teachers at both sites were teacher-researchers in the 2-year project. Our results highlighted expected and unexpected aspects of connections and…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the role that the 1st language, Spanish, at prekindergarten (pre-K) plays in predicting 2nd language (L2), English, word reading in 1st grade. In addition, it examines the role of conceptual vocabulary in predicting word reading in English. Method: As part of a longitudinal study of…

Education policy seeks to define the purpose of schooling and design the educational sphere according to authorities' objectives and people's needs. Governments set policies and principles to reach their intended goals in education, preserving people's values and culture. Many countries provide learning foreign languages in their curriculum to…

Book retelling has been frequently used as an indicator of children's reading proficiency. However, how children's performance varies across retelling narrative and expository texts and whether that has different implications for reading proficiency remains understudied. The present study examined 85 high-poverty second- and third-graders'…

The aim of this article is to explore how the teaching of English as a foreign language is planned in three plurilingual state schools in Catalonia. We carried out classroom observations (first and second grade of primary education) and interviewed the English teachers who teach these lessons and the headmasters of the three schools. The use of…

Science education in the Arab world is conducted in various multilingual contexts. When science is taught in Arabic, diglossia -- the coexistence of the formal language of literacy alongside a local spoken variety -- constitutes a multilingual setting the pedagogical implications of which need to be understood. This study compares teacher--student…

Informed by positioning theory as well as a nexus of multimembership, the year-long case study examined how a 7-year-old Korean American bilingual child, Meeso, constructed her ethnic identity across different educational contexts. Data were collected through observations of Meeso's interactions with her monolingual and bilingual peers and…

Most U.S. educational reforms have narrowly focused on how to improve the ways in which students use language, and most specifically English. But in the last two decades, it is something called "academic language" that has permeated all education discourse. Here we discuss the development of the construct of academic language and the…

Amidst the current climate surrounding bilingual education in the U.S., this study looked critically at the ways language education policies informed bilingual education as language was constructed and performed in a dual language bilingual, Spanish-English, third-grade classroom. This four-year ethnographic study explored the hegemonic realities…