Purpose: We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth. Method: The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic--speaking…

Emergent bilingual students draw on their linguistic repertoires, moving fluidly between named languages and varieties to meet communicative ends. However, these translanguaging abilities are often not supported in English-dominant school settings. The author proposes six design principles that educators can use to create instructional strategies…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

All native speakers of Arabic read in a language variety that is remarkably distant from the one they use in everyday speech. The study tested the impact of this distance on reading accuracy and fluency by comparing reading of Standard Arabic (StA) words, used in StA only, versus Spoken Arabic (SpA) words, used in SpA too, among Arabic native…

This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom…