This study collected interview data from parents of five children identified as having special education needs who were attending or had attended a French Immersion program in Toronto, Ontario. The experiences of these families were qualitatively analyzed to uncover critical themes surrounding experiences and beliefs around French Immersion…

This longitudinal, mixed-methods study reports on the development and implementation of an early phonological awareness screening and intervention program for struggling emergent readers in a French immersion school in Manitoba. The program was created by a professional learning community made up of the school administrator, teachers, and clinical…

In Canada, approximately 12% of school-aged children are enrolled in French Immersion (FI), with some provinces estimating close to 30%. FI programs are intended to produce bilingual individuals who can functionally communicate in both of Canada's official languages. Yet, we are currently underinformed as to how to identify children with French…

French Immersion instruction has often focused on the development of oral language as the primary method of early literacy learning. Manitoba Education endorses this focus with its curricular emphasis on oral language acquisition before formal reading and writing instruction. This article examines the role of early years French immersion teachers…

The 1-year longitudinal study presented here examined the extent to which the ability to build phonologically specific lexical entries as a result of increasing vocabulary size predicts word reading via its impact on phonological awareness within and across languages in 62 emerging English (L1) and French (L2) Grade 1 children (M = 75.69 months,…

This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children…

The Matthew effects suggest that children who struggle when learning to read are less likely to read for pleasure later in life compared to children who ease into reading quickly. One aspect of early literacy instruction that might hamper reading progress is learning to read simultaneously in two languages. Despite the long-lasting and widespread…

Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children's reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge -- of the features of print -- to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual…

English Language Learners, such as my Hutterian students, struggle to overcome a variety of learning barriers. I examined a variety of instructional methods to determine what would help them. The first aspect I explored was how English Language Learners acquire literacy skills. I also investigated how to expand my students' background knowledge.…

In response to Canada's growing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity, educators in French immersion classrooms are increasingly responding with enhanced cross-linguistic initiatives, and dual language books are promising resources in the promotion of multilingualism (Zaidi, 2020; Zaidi & Dooley, 2021). This paper details a research…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the predictive value of a dynamic test of English and French lexical specificity on at-risk reading classification in 13 at-risk and 44 not at-risk emerging English (L1)-French (L2) bilingual Grade 1 children (M = 75.87 months, SD = 3.18) enrolled in an early French immersion program in Canada.…

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

This study examined cross-language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants included 51 Spanish-English and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals. Both groups of children completed parallel measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy,…

In order to examine the effect of the home language on the spelling development in English in children who are learning English as a second language (ESL learners), it is best to directly compare groups of ESL learners from various home language backgrounds. This study compared the oral language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling…

The study reported on in this paper investigated the concurrent development of spelling in children learning two languages. The study compared over time and between languages the types of spelling errors made in English as a first language and French as a second. Fortyseven grade one English-speaking children completed an English and French…