Despite the increasing emphasis on social studies in Early Childhood Education, there has been a serious paucity of empirical studies on how culturally and linguistically diverse children develop their emergent understanding on their identities and citizenships in different racial and cultural surroundings. The main purpose of this article is to…

Research on the effects of bilingualism on third language (L3) development set in bilingual communities is scarce, outdated, and has provided mixed results.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 study explores the perspectives of the two authors, who have very different language backgrounds, reflecting the subtleties of first and additional language development. We distinguish between a 'literacy-track' (i.e. starting from written language) and an oracy track (starting from spoken language). We draw on duoethnography for our dialogic…

Developing emotional competence during childhood is critical because it is a significant resource for building psychological well-being, social relationships and even school achievement. Language plays an important role in fostering emotional competence among monolingual children but for bilingual children, the relationship between culture,…

The goal of the present study is to explore bilinguals' intercultural style of requesting in a workplace setting and thereby contribute to the understanding of bilingual pragmatic competence. The relatively unexplored intercultural style hypothesis suggests that bilinguals show a unique pragmatic pattern related to but distinct from the contact…

This mixed-methods study investigated the impact of musical lyrics and working memory capacities on second language (L2) English reading comprehension among adult Chinese native speakers. Participants were 57 adult ESL learners with advanced L2 proficiency, divided into high and low working memory capacity groups based on a pre-test. They…

There is currently limited investigation of readers' comprehension of AI simplified text from the perspective of educators, but such research can help to more effectively address the specific needs and perspectives of language teachers and learners regarding the comprehensibility of AI simplified text. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to…

Many educators teach an increasing number of newcomer students such as immigrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers. These students need to acquire a new language as well as content in the language arts and other disciplines. This study explores how to share new ideas in literacy and language teaching and learning with teachers of newcomers while…

As a key component of fluent linguistic production, multi-word sequences called lexical bundles are considered an important distinguishing feature of discourse in different registers, genres, and disciplines. They are also an important aspect of empirically correct and proficient language use in a corpus of natural language because they enable…

This paper reports on the shifts in understanding experienced by participants in a postgraduate initial teacher education course designed around pedagogical translanguaging as a core theoretical and pedagogical concept. Throughout the semester-long unit, teacher education students engaged with culturally and linguistically responsive teaching…

In their first year, infants begin to learn the speech sounds of their language. This process is typically modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem in which phonetically similar speech-sound tokens are grouped into phonetic categories by infants using their domain-general inference abilities. We argue here that maternal speech is too…

An indigenous or community language is the language that nurtures the child in the early years of his or her life. The UNESCO land mark publication in 1953 underscores the importance of educating children in their community languages: an education that is packaged in a language which the child does not understand is simply difficult for the child.…

The role of agency in language planning and policy (LPP) is a recent focus of scholarship. Interest in agency has seen new issues and contexts being given prominence in LPP research. In this introduction, we present an overview of theoretical definitions of agency and the ways it has emerged as a concept in LPP scholarship. We consider how…

This study aims to illuminate factors that explain changes in literacy skills across up to six years of adulthood, using data from two waves of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS; N = 4,359). More specifically, we gauge the relative importance of three groups of factors that previous research and theorizing have highlighted as…

First language literacy is a prerequisite both for proper formal education and second language learning. When children start school, not all of them succeed in learning reading perfectly; for some of them, it may take more time to reach the desired reading proficiency. This study aimed to examine the relationship between the first language oral…