The present research explores working memory (WM) development in monolingual as well as emergent bilingual children immersed in an L2 at school. Evidence from recent years suggests that bilingualism may boost domain-general executive control, but impair nonexecutive linguistic processing. Both are relevant for verbal WM, but different paradigms…

Given the increasingly diverse, multilingual student body in Canada, the call for increased inclusion in education, and in light of research highlighting the potential for inclusion in French immersion (FI) to be limited by gatekeepers, this study examines the beliefs of kindergarten teachers regarding the inclusion of English language learners in…

Translanguaging practices come into play in social interactions between bilinguals when they are making use of all their shared linguistic resources and blending their languages in natural ways. Stemming from these practices is translanguaging pedagogy, which is designed so that students in school-based additive bilingual programs can benefit from…

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been…

Scholarship suggests that bilingual students' translanguaging skills -- their multilingual and multimodal communicative competencies -- should be leveraged as a valuable meaning-making resource and that translanguaging pedagogies can disrupt linguistic hierarchies and the ideologies of race, class, and nationhood that constitute them.…

Students seeking to study abroad are increasingly able to select their preferred level of immersion in such areas as program duration, similarity of classmates, language of instruction, and housing environment. As researchers endeavor to understand the relative contribution of these decisions to intercultural learning outcomes, information is…

There have been sweeping changes in foreign language education in the United States. As the world is experiencing unprecedented globalization, knowledge of a foreign language and familiarity with other cultures have become increasingly important. Public schools are now implementing dual immersion programs to better prepare students for the…

This article starts with a review of definitions of bilingualism. It then discusses the definition of bilingual education with its focus on the analysis of bilingual competence. It is subsequently suggested that a theoretical hard nut to be cracked in today's bilingual research is to establish the scope of discussion of bilingualism models meeting…

This Information Capsule summarizes the research on Structured English Immersion (SEI) programs. Most school districts use either the SEI or Bilingual Education (BE) model to instruct elementary level English Language Learners (ELLs). In SEI programs, ELLs receive all or most of their instruction in English. BE programs provide instruction in two…

This report documents how native English speaking students enrolled in the two-way dual language program at Austin Independent School District (AISD) performed on STAMP 4Se, a Spanish-language proficiency test during the 2016-2017 school year.

This study investigated a new writing task that utilizes drawing to elicit students' language and original thinking. Two forms of pictures were designed and administered to 118 children. One form was conventional and consisted of completed pictures, requiring students to simply describe the pictures in writing. The other form, which was new,…

Using input and outcome data from a randomized study of dual-language immersion programs in an urban district, we examine the mediating relationships of dosage, expenditures, and classroom characteristics to students' academic performance, and the moderating role of students' race/ethnicity. Differential costs of immersion were concentrated at the…

This article briefly reviews the social, political, and economic context that explains the present status of elementary language education in the United States and addresses the challenges identified by recent reports on the state of language education in the United States. Different curricular models of world language education--exploratory,…

This qualitative study explored the awareness and perceptions of a select group of parents about specialty and charter school offerings in a large countywide school system in a mid-Atlantic state. The study utilized focus groups as the primary source of data collection to obtain information from parents about their knowledge and opinion of current…

Under the theoretical underpinnings of language socialization and continua of biliteracy, this ethnographic case study documents how cultural performing arts, as part of extracurricular activities, promote bicultural identity and biliteracy development among Vietnamese American children. The study was set in two transnational contexts: a…