The amount of language input bilingual children receive influences their language acquisition. This three-year quasi-longitudinal study determined the extent home language input influences measures of expressive and receptive English vocabulary among Spanish-English school-age bilingual children. The study also determined whether a relationship…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

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…

Advanced oral proficiency is an integral part of language teacher education and has been for decades. To date, little research exists that investigates practicing K-12 nonnative language teachers' target language (TL) maintenance habits. This study presents the results of a research study that investigated the TL proficiency maintenance practices…

The purpose of this study is to examine the professional development (PD) needs of Chinese dual language immersion program (DLI) educators, particularly the PD supports these teachers receive. This instrumental case study examined the professional learning of four Chinese language DLI teachers through semi-structured interviews and observations of…

Bilingual education--chiefly the subcategory of dual language bilingual education--has been undergoing a pattern where the interests of language-minoritized communities have in several contexts been pushed out of the way. One aspect of this gentrification process has been the "fiftyfication" of dual language bilingual education policy,…

This study explored the development of oral narrative retell proficiency among Mandarin Chinese-English dual language immersion (DLI) learners in Utah. The study compared the younger and the older DLI learners' oral narrative retelling production in order to provide information regarding the Mandarin narrative developmental trend of the DLI…

A growing body of research has demonstrated that neoliberal discourses have negatively impacted dual language bilingual education (DLBE) for students designated as English learners. This study uses the concept of expropriation to refer to the co-opting and dispossessing of educational resources, opportunities, and rights from language-minoritized…

In response to the call for centering critical consciousness as a foundational goal in dual language bilingual education (DLBE), this article explores secondary Chinese teachers' instructional practices in Utah Mandarin Chinese DLBE programs and how their instructional practices reflect the missed opportunities and implementational spaces for…

Emergent bilingual (EB) students are a growing population in the U.S. school system currently comprising over 10% of the total population. U.S. school districts have educated EB students using a myriad of practices, including dual language immersion (DLI). Many studies have looked at the academic achievement of native-Spanish speaking EB students,…

Utilizing Utah state data, the aim of this study is to examine the association between language program types programs (dual language programs [DLI], sheltered instruction [SEI], and English as a second language [ESL]) since first grade and third-grade basic literacy skills of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States. We employ…

This study investigated the oral reading strategy use of 51 first-grade readers in a Chinese Dual-Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) programme. It attempted to answer the following research questions: (1) What reading strategies do first-grade Mandarin Chinese DLBE learners employ to decode Chinese text during oral reading? (2) Do the first-grade…

Students who participate in advanced coursework in high school are more likely to enroll and persist in college. This study measured college readiness indicators of high school seniors enrolled in the Utah Spanish Bridge Program and analyzed whether performance differed based on race/ethnicity or on parent college completion. Findings show that…

Using the 2.4-million-word written Spanish subsection of the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion, collected from a large-scale standardized writing assessment of K-12 Spanish second language (L2) students, this study focuses on lexical complexity as operationalized by three measures: lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical…

Modern vocabulary size tests are generally based on the notion that the more frequent a word is in a language, the more likely a learner will know that word. However, this assumption has been seldom questioned in the literature concerning vocabulary size tests. Using the Vocabulary of American-English Size Test (VAST) based on the Corpus of…