In children's early years, they frequently pretend, create and take on roles while engaging in the dramatic play area where symbols, language and culture are spontaneously developed and applied. Although abundant research has been conducted on sociodramatic play incorporating digital tools and using props, previous research has given less…

An important goal in early childhood science education is students' development of academic language. However, scholars disagree on whether academic language must be explicitly taught or whether it can be learned through immersive science experiences. In this case study of a co-taught second grade classroom, we use positioning theory and framings…

Inspired by research in language play and linguistic ethnography, this article examines children's language play in early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a locally situated generic practice created through children's semiotic repertoires. The article is based on video-recorded linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish day care centre.…

This article aims at exploring family language policies and practices of immigrant families in Iceland as well as educational practices and partnerships in their children's preschools. The article draws on interviews with preschool principals and teachers in three preschools in Iceland, and presents findings related to state, municipal, and school…

Across multiple age groups and academic disciplines, research has shown that incorporating multimodal signs into instruction can enhance student learning. For instance, gesture might be synchronized with speech or written signs. The present study reports on the semiotic resources used by a teacher-researcher to support kindergarten students'…

Research shows that experiences with nature have positive direct and indirect effects on multiple domains of child development, including language skills. However, few studies have examined the relationship between young children's language and outdoor nature settings. In this quantitative study, we compared children's language use in an indoor…

Aims: We investigate the relationship between narrative macrostructure, current language exposure, and microstructure in second-grade Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States. Macrostructure knowledge has been claimed to be shared across languages in multilingual individuals. We examine the role of current language exposure and…

Taking a languaging perspective, this paper considers how kindergarten students and their teacher are relationally and intellectually responsive to one another in authoring conversations by constructing a sense of copresence. Copresence is defined by Goffman (1966) as being "uniquely accessible, available, and subject to one another" (p.…

The term "engagement" is widely used in teacher education and professional development. There is, however, a lack of consensus about the meaning of this term: it is defined in numerous ways with various theoretical underpinnings. This article employs a postqualitative approach to explore conceptualizations of engagement and their…

This reflection on practice explores dehumanizing educator talk as an explicit topic within multicultural/diversity/anti-bias and anti-racist teacher education. Dehumanizing educator talk is defined as formal or informal conversation during which targeted individuals or groups are openly demeaned with offensive generalizations in the absence of…

This article engages speculatively with Rachel Tonkin's award-winning work of children's literary non-fiction "Leaf litter: Exploring the mysteries of a hidden world" as a potential text for study in the primary or secondary literacy/English classroom. It considers the affordances and issues that may accompany teaching this text, and the…

This study investigates the conceptualizations of childhood in the Iranian culture through a linguistic analysis of three Persian lexical items for a child ("bache, kudak, tefl") and their implications for Early Childhood Education (ECE). Employing a corpus-based approach supplemented with ethnographic insights, the study investigates…

How does early educational quality affect longer-term academic outcomes? We shed light on this question via a natural experiment in the Philippines--the implementation of a mother tongue education policy in public schools in kindergarten to Grade 3. This policy led to an unexpected decline in educational quality, but differentially in a subset of…

In early childhood centres, decontextualised talk is often associated with literacy activities. In this study, however, we investigated toddler-educator conversations across various activities with a focus on those about topics that were not related to the immediate context. We examined the communicative purposes and linguistic features of these…

To date, little attention has been paid to the impact of immersion programs on learning interests in a second language (L2). The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two types of Hakka-Chinese bilingual programs (immersion vs. non-immersion) on L2 learning interests. Four kindergarten teachers (two in each program)…