Given the changing demographics of young children served by U.S. schools, educational equity practices must include ways of sustaining cultural heritage practices of children from ethno-linguistic, minoritized, and under-resourced communities. In the present study, we partnered with a bilingual Head Start serving mostly children of immigrant…

Research Findings: Are family literacy activities linked to gains in preschool-aged dual language learners' (DLLs') societal language vocabulary? To understand connections between literacy activities and vocabulary, we separately considered literacy activities in the respective heritage language and in the societal language, German, and accounted…

Research Findings: This study reports initial descriptive and validity results of a new early childhood classroom observation measure, the Classroom Language Environment Observation Scales (CLEOS), designed to capture teachers' use of both implicit language supports (e.g., incidental scaffolding and shared reading) and more explicit language…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…

Research Findings: This research examined preschoolers' exposure to 6 types of language stimulation techniques (LSTs) in classrooms serving at-risk children and considered whether specific activity contexts were associated with educators' rate of use of different LSTs. Several teacher-directed and child-directed activity contexts were videotaped…