At the intersection of social studies and world language curricula are opportunities to explore students' prior learning with vocabulary-rich content designed to support language acquisition goals. "Funds of knowledge" is defined as socio-cultural, economic, and historical knowledge from home and community settings. The instructional…

Language immersion programs are becoming more available as a form of school choice in both private and public education in the United States and beyond. While there is research on the benefits of immersion education regarding overall intelligence, there is still much skepticism as to why parents would place their child in an immersion program vs.…

Grounded in the cross-linguistic influence(s) (CLI) literature, this study used objective measures to compare the use of English, lexical richness and syntactic complexity, and grammatical accuracy and fluency in the texts of three groups of Grade 6 French immersion students: Canadian-born anglophones (C-A), Canadian-born multilinguals (C-M), and…

Schools in Ireland vary in how they introduce reading in the two official languages, Irish and English. There is particular variability within immersion (Irish medium) schools. Some introduce Irish reading first (IRF) and others English reading first (ERF). This study compared the development of Irish and English skills in children attending…

French immersion programs in Saskatchewan have traditionally served to further the goals of additive bilingualism between Canada's two official languages, French and English. Whereas these programs have historically consisted of predominantly Anglophone populations, recent trends in immigration have contributed to the increasingly diverse…

We describe research results and lessons learned from a laboratory/ classroom collaboration with a school system offering both traditional English-only education and a dual-language track (Spanish/English). Through this collaboration, we addressed basic research questions informing malleable factors that impact cognitive development. In a…

Effectively engaging students in mathematics discourse is challenging, especially in a language other than the one in which you learned mathematics. Teachers must manage the academic as well as social function of language. In Spanish-English bilingual classrooms in the U.S., changing the language of instruction to Spanish may not be enough to…

We examined the effects of classroom bilingual experience in children on an array of cognitive skills. Monolingual English-speaking children were compared with children who spoke English as the native language and who had been exposed to Spanish in the context of dual-immersion schooling for an average of 2 years. The groups were compared on a…

This study examined the within-language and cross-language relationships between orthographic processing and word reading in French and English across Grades 1 and 2. Seventy-three children in French Immersion completed measures of orthographic processing and word reading in French and English in Grade 1 and Grade 2, as well as a series of control…

This paper provides a descriptive account of the growing landscape of school choice in Canada through a comparative analysis of funding and student enrolment in the public, independent and home-based education sectors in each province. Given that the provinces have responsibility for K-12 education, the mixture of public, independent and home…

Previous studies have shown that immersion students tend to speak the majority language during peer interactions, regardless of the language of instruction or their dominant language. Researchers have argued that the societal status of the majority language presents an obstacle to providing equitable support for both languages of instruction. To…

Scholars have consistently theorised that language ideologies can influence the ways in which bilingual speakers in minority language settings identify and engage with the linguistic varieties available to them. Research conducted by the author examined the interplay of language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of adults who started in…

The current intervention study investigated the sustained effectiveness of phonological awareness training on the reading development of 16 children in French immersion who were identified as at-risk readers based on grade 1 English measures. The intervention program provided children from three cohorts with supplemental reading in small groups on…

This report summarizes feedback from Austin Independent School District (AISD) elementary dual language teachers who participated in focus group discussions in January and February 2016. Teachers gave their opinions about the program components and suggestions for how to improve the program implementation.

This mixed-methods study investigates the ideologies, attitudes, and understandings of language, bilingualism, and second language acquisition among students, teachers, and parents in a Bay Area dual immersion (DI) program. The work shows that despite rhetoric and awareness of language variation, students' and teachers' approaches to language…