Children who speak non-standardized language varieties are at risk for both over- and under-referral to speech-language and special education services (e.g., Morgan et al., 2016; Pearson et al., 2014). Extensive research with bidialectal (Craig, 2016; Kohn et al., 2021) and bilingual (Goldstein, 2022; Paradis et al., 2021) children has shown the…

Purpose: Syntax provides critical support for both academic success and linguistic growth, yet it has not been a focus of language research in school-age African American children. This study examines complex syntax performance of African American children in second through fifth grades. Method: The current study explores the syntactic…

To explore the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and language domain (vocabulary, syntax, process), the QUILS was administered to 212 kindergartners. Children from very-high poverty schools performed significantly below children from high poverty and mid-low poverty schools. SES impacts language-learning processes (i.e., fast…

Background: Difficulties in language development are related to social and emotional problems, lower academic outcomes, and lower quality of life from childhood to adolescence. These grave consequences might be significantly reduced by timely identification and professional support. The introduction of systematic screening for language delay (LD)…

This study investigated if the difficulty of instructional classroom English in primary teacher-guidebooks of English is adequately manipulated by learner-proficiency. Corpora of classroom English were compiled from 20 guidebooks from five publishers, approved following the 2015 Revised National Curriculum of Korea. Extracted materials from grades…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

The construct of academic language--while of great interest, in part, because of recently adopted or revised content and English-language development (ELD) standards that explicitly focus on academic language--and its role in the academic success of all students, including young learners and English learners (ELs), is far from clearly understood.…

This practical guide shows teachers how to introduce academic language to young children, with an emphasis on appreciating and leveraging linguistic diversity. New educational standards are asking students to master content-area concepts and increasingly complex texts in earlier grades. This practitioner-friendly text provides instructional…

This study integrated reading and bilingual theories to examine the reading behaviors of second grade Latinx students in a Dual Language program. It explored how the students' differing language backgrounds (simultaneous bilinguals and sequential bilinguals who had developed Spanish as a home language) might influence their early reading…

In this study, we elicited grammatical forms (oral production) from a group of child heritage speakers of Spanish (N = 45) in English and Spanish, using the morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA), (Peña et al. 2014). A cross-sectional design was used with 25 participants in kindergarten and 20 in first grade. All…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe change in dual language learners' (DLLs) morphosyntactic skills from kindergarten to first grade based on a sentence repetition task in English and Spanish. Methods: The sample included Spanish-English speaking children (n = 25). Investigators employed a repeated measures analysis of variance with one…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine relations between teachers' conversational techniques and language gains made by their deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Specifically, we considered teachers' reformulations of child utterances, language elicitations, explicit vocabulary and syntax instruction, and wait time. Method: This was an…

Purpose: We examined the relationship between maternal level of education as an index of socioeconomic status (SES) on the narrative story retells of school-aged children who are English language learners (ELLs) to guide interpretation of results. Method: Using data available from the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts database (Miller…

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish-English bilingual children. First- (N = 586) and third-graders (N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information…