The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

Teachers play an essential role in fostering linguistic security in their classrooms. The aim of this study is to identify the language ideologies articulated by teachers in the Francophone schools of the English-dominant context of British Columbia (Canada) in order to explore how the different practices they implement to foster the use of French…

Assessing vocabulary knowledge is an important part of establishing language proficiency in bilingual children. The crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) provide a framework for testing vocabulary development in three-to-six year-olds using a standard procedure and comparable items for multiple languages. This study describes the development of the…

This critical ethnography examines how the language ideologies of non-teaching staff (NTS) shape language practices in a bilingual PreK-8 school. Recent research on two-way bilingual education reveals the ways that the language ideologies of teachers, administrators, and parents can support the privileging of English in bilingual programs by…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

Finland is constitutionally bilingual and there are several small minority languages. With recent migration from different parts of the world, the linguistic environment has become even more diversified. National curricula take linguistic diversity among the pupils into consideration and stress the importance of supporting pupils' language…

Home language (HL) effects on academic language literacy have been extensively discussed. However, previous research has mostly focused on Indo--European languages. This study extends the literature by using data (n = 17,600) collected in a diversified language area: Guangxi, China. We examined the effects of four HLs and four socioeconomic…

This study provides the first systematic account of word-final cluster acquisition in bilingual children. To this end, forty Welsh-English bilingual children differing in language dominance and age (2;6 to 5;0) participated in a picture-naming task in English and Welsh. The results revealed significant age and dominance effects on cluster…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

This study investigated the role of language exposure in vocabulary acquisition in Irish, a threatened minority language in Ireland which is usually acquired with English in a bilingual context. Using a bilingual Irish-English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories) [Fenson, L., V. A. Marchman, D. J. Thal, P. S.…

Within dual language education programs, well-structured peer interactions can facilitate the learning of language and curricular content simultaneously. Research has found that even very young bilingual students can engage in peer linguistic mediation to help less proficient classmates participate in small group work. In this article, I analyze…

Background/Context: Two-way dual-language programs have become an increasingly popular educational model in the United States for language minority and majority speakers, with a small but growing number of programs at the high school level. Little is known, however, about how adolescents' social networks develop in the contexts of these programs.…

This study explores the extent to which bilingual speakers in stable bilingual communities become fully bilingual in their two community languages. Growing evidence shows that in bilingual communities in which one language is very dominant, acquisition of the dominant language may be quite unproblematic across sub-groups, while acquisition of the…

During the past two decades, field linguists have expressed serious concerns over the unprecedented rapid loss of "indigenous languages", the endangerment of many others, and the implications of these processes for the education and economic development of "indigenous populations", among other matters. The book to which this article responds is a…

Two international conferences held in southern Africa in 2005 gathered education and language experts to discuss practical, theoretical, and political aspects of the development of African languages for education. Despite the diversity of the participants, there was unanimous agreement that the economic and social benefits of providing…