The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to examine whether English finite morphology has the potential to differentiate children with and without language impairment (LI) from Spanish-speaking backgrounds and different levels of English proficiency in comparison to Hispanic English speakers and (b) to investigate the extent to which children who…

The author shares findings from a qualitative study of white, monolingual preservice teachers enrolled in a sociolinguistics course that examines the interplay of language and ethnicity in the United States. The primary aims of the study were to learn more about the preservice teachers' awareness of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds and to…

This article reports on a longitudinal analysis of factors that predict the word reading skills in English and Spanish for a sample of 234 Spanish-speaking students in first grade. The children were assessed at the end of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Data include three subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery and a…

Globalization has led to unprecedented interest in expanding foreign language instruction in U.S. schools, particularly at grade levels where traditionally it has not been an option. Languages that previously have been rarely taught, such as Chinese, are frequently the choice of new programs at every level in the K-12 range. As No Child Left…

"Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives" offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions; and activities designed for second or foreign language learning. Conducted…

This paper examines language development of Samoan students in bilingual contexts in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In the absence of valid and standardized assessments tools in Samoan, one was designed to test reading comprehension and oral language development for Samoan students using common narratives as a base. For reading comprehension, the tool…

This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children. A vocabulary intervention in science was developed using previous research on effective vocabulary and science instruction. Participants were 39 English-learning, bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking…

The study investigated the ability of 10-month-old infants, from monolingual English speaking environments, to categorize comforting and approving infant-directed speech (IDS) utterances across languages. Infants participated in an infant-controlled habituation procedure, in which they heard up to 12 different exemplars, in 12 different languages,…

Bilingualism is often considered an inappropriate developmental choice for children with specific language impairment (SLI) because, according to a widespread belief, these children's limited capacity for language would be overtaxed by learning two linguistic systems. However, there has not been adequate empirical investigation of SLI in bilingual…

This study reports on the use of (c)overt subjects and subject-verb agreement in Hebrew in the spontaneous speech of a child, EK, acquiring Hebrew and English simultaneously from birth and of five slightly younger Hebrew monolingual controls. Analysis shows that EK's production of pragmatically inappropriate overt subjects is more than three times…

Purpose: To evaluate the discriminant accuracy of a grammatical measure for the identification of language impairment (LI) in Latino English-speaking children. Specifically, the study examined the diagnostic accuracy of the Test of English Morphosyntax (E-MST; Pena, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore (n.d.) to determine (a)…

The paper problematises student writing as social practice from the perspective of lecturers' discursive practices. The paper uses data from a major study at a higher learning institution in Tanzania to explore lecturers' discursive practices and familiarity with the university orders of discourse including English medium of instruction, in…

Advanced inhibitory control skills have been found in bilingual speakers as compared to monolingual controls ( Bialystok, 1999 ). We examined whether this effect is generalized to an unstudied language group (Spanish-English bilingual) and multiple measures of executive function by administering a battery of tasks to 50 kindergarten children drawn…

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to…

Between 69 percent and 90 percent of English language learners (ELLs) in middle and high schools were born in the United States and have been in U.S. schools since kindergarten still have not achieved the academic proficiency to succeed in an all-English mainstream program. Various ELL program options are available for school districts to…