A compulsory foreign language in Finland starts now in Grade 1 instead of Grade 3. The change has forced teachers to adopt new teaching methods. As young learners are not yet literate, teaching should focus on oral skills and awareness of diversity. Video data from 19 early foreign language lessons of five English, German, or French teachers in…

The Direct Method, a pedagogical approach for teaching additional languages through immersion, emphasizes oral interaction and everyday language usage to facilitate language acquisition. This method discourages reliance on translation and minimizes emphasis on grammatical rules. However, a fundamental question arises about the effectiveness of…

Research on the effects of bilingualism on third language (L3) development set in bilingual communities is scarce, outdated, and has provided mixed results. This study investigated the effects of exposure and age of onset of acquisition (AOA) of L3-English, as well as first and second language (L1/L2) skills and use, in the development of…

This qualitative study examined the inclusive strategies in language teaching that teachers (ties) employed to cater to the different linguistic backgrounds (tongues) of the primary learners in the Philippines. It also explored the effects of these inclusive strategies on the pupils' learning. Five teachers teaching in a classroom with…

This article reports the findings of a qualitative interpretive research study that explored the social representations children have about the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language in elementary schools in Medellín, Colombia. Sixty children in first, third, and fifth grades of public and private schools participated in the study.…

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…

This research employs a language ideologies framework to examine the language practices and beliefs of bilingual first grade students in an ESL classroom, in which the teacher valued and encouraged Spanish and translingual talk and writing. Using ethnographic methods of data collection and analysis, the findings pointed to the influence of both…

This dissertation examined the ways in which African American Language (AAL) speakers utilized AAL in various discursive contexts in an elementary two-way immersion (TWI) Spanish/English dual-language program. In this study, I problematize the notion of TWI programs as an additive program for AAL speakers by investigating the phenomenon from three…

Elementary French immersion (FI) language arts teachers often organize instruction around small learning groups. Students rotate through learning stations/centres and work independently with their peers on L2 literacy skills. This study examined how principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) can be used and/or adapted to further support…

This research describes language use by four first-grade students during mathematics and Language Arts instruction in a one-way 50/50 Mandarin immersion classroom. The urban public school was situated in the heart of an African-American community in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Participants were video- and audio-recorded…

Oral narrative retells are rich sources of information for language development. Investigators collected English-language oral narrative retells during the fall and spring from 65 Spanish-English-speaking dual language learners (DLL) in kindergarten and first grade. Investigators examined transcripts of oral narratives for (a) inclusion and…

Though a number of language socialization processes are theorized to promote children's heritage language proficiency (HLP), little research has considered these processes in a single study and examined their prospective relations to multiple domains of HLP in school-age children. In a two-wave longitudinal study of Chinese American children of…

This research describes the biliteracy learning of young bilingual children in an English as a Second Language classroom. In particular, it explores factors influencing their biliteracy in a context that provided systematic and formalized instruction only in English. Using a holistic perspective on bilingualism and sociocultural theories of…

This study that adopts descriptive and inferential research methods investigated the status of elementary grade pupils' English proficiency, particularly the Grades 1, 2 and 3 pupils who are simultaneously taking up subjects in the Mother Tongue and English that are integrated in their curricula. The research population was sourced from a single…

This article explores the interactional co-construction of identities among two first-grade students learning Spanish as a third language in a Spanish-English dual language classroom. Drawing on ethnographic and interactional data, the article focuses on a single interaction between these two "Spanish learners" and two of their…