The rising demand for dual-language immersion (DLI) programs, which offer core instruction in two languages from early grades onward, has raised questions about program design and access. We leverage the rapid expansion of DLI schools across the U.S. state of Utah to estimate effects of DLI program availability on the academic achievement of…

Multilingualism is often associated with advantages for acquiring additional languages. Theoretical approaches explain these advantages by assuming a Common Underlying Proficiency or a Metalinguistic Awareness. At the State Europe School in Berlin, students from different language backgrounds receive instruction in German and a partner language…

The current study examined cognitive effects of two pathways of second language (L2) acquisition longitudinally in Chinese speakers learning English in an L2-dominant environment. Thirty-nine participants who attended an intensive 10-week English course (L2-instruction group) were compared to 38 participants who attended regular university courses…

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French…

The two-way immersion dual language education program design includes the use of language labels to identify students as either the English speaker or the speaker of a language other than English. This paper examines four focal student and two teacher interviews to consider the ways in which the idea of a 'language expert' transpired during…

This study examined (a) the identification of various reading groups across languages in Chinese (L1) adolescents learning English as a second language (ESL), in terms of their word-reading and reading comprehension skills, (b) overlap in reading group membership across languages, and (c) the performance of the various reading groups on…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

This study examined the oral language skills of grade-two anglophone children enrolled in French Immersion and English-stream programs. The study had two objectives: (1) to compare performance between the groups on measures of receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, and narrative production (i.e., structure and language) in English; and (2)…

Whilst the links between learner corpus research (LCR) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have long been debated, McEnery et al. (2019. "Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 39: 74-92. doi:10.1017/S0267190519000096) claim that learner corpus…

The purpose of this study was to create and prototype a dual language assessment task that allows young English learners to use their entire cadre of linguistic resources (language and non-verbal resources) to obtain information about their emergent language abilities. We developed a dual language assessment task in which students described a…

This study reports on a small-scale, longitudinal investigation on L2 Spanish oral development by English-home language (EHL) learners in an English/Spanish Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program in rural, eastern United States. It examined EHL learners' oral ability in L2 Spanish based on longitudinal assessment data from Kindergarten, Grade 2, and…

Input is considered one of the most important factors in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical skills. Input has been found to interact with other factors, such as learner cognitive skills and the circumstances where language is heard. Language learning itself has sometimes been found to enhance cognitive skills. Indeed, intensive contact…

The critical importance of second language (L2) input, output, and interaction in TESOL notwithstanding, the decision between immersive (L2-English only) versus nonimmersive approaches is considered "the most fundamental question facing second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, language teachers, and policymakers" (Macaro, 2014, p.…

The assessment of dual language immersion (DLI) students' proficiency in the partner language plays a key role in program evaluation. This article reports findings from a large-scale study, drawing on cross-sectional assessment data from 73 schools and longitudinal data from 25 schools. Students were tested in the interpretive (listening and…

This dissertation presents the findings from interviews conducted with language nest workers, teachers, language nest coordinators, administrators of language revitalization programs, principals and directors of language immersion schools that work in close proximity with language nests, and linguists involved in language revitalization efforts.…