This study aims to explore how the speech act of requesting is performed in Catalan (L1), English (L1) and EFL classrooms by pre-primary teachers. The study examines transcripts of 40-minute video-recorded lessons (six in Catalan/L1, six in English/FL, and three in English/L1) collected in several pre-primary schools in Catalonia, Spain. Recall…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…

Little analytical scrutiny has been devoted to teacher accommodation of academic language at the early childhood level, despite being a critical school-level factor to consider when addressing at-risk learners' academic needs. The present study investigates how fifteen Head Start teachers support three components of academic language during…

Immersion education in Finland is a one-way (monolingual) early total Swedish programme for Finnish-speaking students. This immersion provision is offered at kindergarten level (ages 3-5), at preschool (age 6) and at primary levels (grades 1-9). Here, a brief synthesis of Finnish research studies on the early years in Swedish immersion is first…

This exploratory study investigated the nature and distribution of dual-language preschool teachers' questions across parallel Spanish- and English-medium read-aloud activities. The notions of comprehensible input (Krashen, 1985) and language output (Swain, 1985), along with a reciprocal interaction model of teaching (Cummins, 2000), guided our…