Previous papers in these pages have dealt empirically with the child's first words, the child's first imitations, and the use of yes/no and wh-questions with infants. In this study, we touch on all these issues, but attempt to place them in a systemic-functional language framework and a cultural-historical learning one. First, we deal with some of…

This study aimed to test three competing hypotheses concerning the strength of the cross-language relationship in listening comprehension proficiency in emergent bilinguals: Cummins's developmental linguistic interdependence hypothesis, Proctor, August, Snow, and Barr's interdependence continuum hypothesis, and Goodrich, Lonigan, Kleuver, and…

Pierce "et al." (2017) have proposed that variations in the timing, quality and quantity of language input during the earliest stages of development are related to variations in the development of phonological working memory and, in turn, to later language learning outcomes. To examine this hypothesis, three groups of children who are…

According to various psychological studies, children's drawings can tell us more than we can ever imagine. They can tell us stories about their author's level of education, problems and knowledge gaps. According to the theory on the comparative multi-level picture analysis, drawings reveal the inner world of a child and can be used to improve…

It has long been acknowledged that immigrant children who are originally exposed to home languages become rapidly socialized into using only English. Although many children ultimately develop receptive skills in their home language, they often become English dominant and rarely have the opportunity for literacy development. There is also a common…

In this essay Naomi Mulvihill uses vignettes from her bilingual kindergarten classroom to explore the dynamic processes by which young children make sense of language, focusing on instances in which she asks her students to compare texts presented in English and Spanish. Using Piaget's concept of disequilibrium as a guiding framework,…

Researchers into moral education, and ethics educators too, often find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, we wish to know what the child will do beyond the narrow range of communicative functions carried out in a classroom, and to do this, we employ purely hypothetical problems, that is, problems that from the child's…

Children who enter school with limited proficiency in the language of instruction face a range of challenges in negotiating this new context, yet limited data have been available to describe the early developmental outcomes of this subpopulation in the Australian context. The Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) is a teacher-rated checklist…

Each year, approximately 100,000 refugees arrive in the United States (Refugee Council USA). Nearly half of these arrivals are children. The number of refugees worldwide has more than sextupled since the 1950s, and according to the United States Committee for Refugees and immigrants (USCRI) this number is expected to continue to grow in coming…

In order to initiate and maintain meaningful interaction in a young learner L2 classroom, an adult teacher needs to approach children in ways consistent with their developmental profile and adjust teaching methodology so as to accommodate young learners' current skills. This requires the ability to predict the child's possible responses to…

This article analyses adult and child development in the zone of proximal development in an educational practice based in Vygotsky's theories of play: the playworld educational practice. The playworld educational practice is a central component of a Scandinavian play pedagogy that promotes shared responsibility amongst adults and children for…

Typically language development in children closely coincides with development in many other areas. This makes it difficult to determine whether observed correlations are coincidental or causal in nature. The three studies presented here explore these relationships by looking at two populations of learners who are delayed in exposure to English,…

This book captures the diversity and richness of writing as it relates to different forms of abilities, skills, competencies, and expertise. Psychologists, educators, researchers, and practitioners in neighboring areas are interested in exploring how writing develops and in what manner this development can be fostered, but they lack a handy,…

This paper is concerned with a specific case of L3 acquisition: the starting position for English vowel acquisition by infant German-Italian bilinguals will be investigated in light of prototype theory. The chosen example of triple language contact is characterised by consecutive bilingualism as the basis of L3 acquisition, where the learners' L2…

This paper takes a sociocultural approach to exploring the factors that enhance young children's bilingual development. The language excerpts presented were gathered as part of a three-year Early Childhood Centre of Innovation project funded by the New Zealand government. Data gathered in this project challenge Krashen's (1981) position that young…