The amount of language input bilingual children receive influences their language acquisition. This three-year quasi-longitudinal study determined the extent home language input influences measures of expressive and receptive English vocabulary among Spanish-English school-age bilingual children. The study also determined whether a relationship…

Assessing vocabulary knowledge is an important part of establishing language proficiency in bilingual children. The crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) provide a framework for testing vocabulary development in three-to-six year-olds using a standard procedure and comparable items for multiple languages. This study describes the development of the…

The following article is an adapted and abridged excerpt from The Language Immersion Life: A Guide for Families by Millie Park Mellgren (2017). This book features answers to the most common questions Dr. Mellgren was asked as an elementary immersion principal. The volume features commentary and data gleaned from surveys given to hundreds of former…

This paper addresses the interactional dynamics of one bilingual, two-way immersion classroom where children came from diverse linguistic, cultural, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Based on an ethnographic discourse analytic study of one kindergarten TWI classroom, I analyze interactional data using participant frameworks as the unit of…

Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital city of the bilingual Basque Autonomous Community of Spain, is a largely Spanish-speaking city: over 90% of the city's population claims Spanish as their native language and less than one-fifth of the city's adult population is bilingual in Basque and Spanish (compare with more than one-third of the population of San…

For many preschoolers in Turkish kindergartens, English instruction starts in the third year of their lives when they have barely begun to articulate their thoughts in their own mother tongue, Turkish. Parents have a dual role as models and decision makers in their children's foreign language education. As the fifteen participant parents of this…

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…

L2 learners' problems with English articles have been linked to learners' L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2…

This contribution reports on a qualitative study conducted with 14 young Chinese children enrolled in French immersion in Canada, to explore their multilingual practices, and their simultaneous acquisition of three writing systems. Drawings and in-depth interviews constituted creative and age appropriate narratives to understand children's…

The proceedings presented consist of summaries and reports of the presentations given during a summer institute on teaching linguistically and culturally diverse learners. Summaries of the following papers are provided: "Education 2000 and Beyond: The Challenge of Our Culturally Diverse Students" (Eugene Garcia); "Second Language…

This report includes (1) a paper that was written by Siri Vongthieres and Lawrence Egan regarding the educational needs of both native born and recently arrived Asian Americans, and (2) a review of that paper by Masako Ledward, LaVerne Moore, and Emiko I. Kudo. Issues discussed concerning American born Asian students include: (1) English language…

This guide, written in a question-and-answer format, provides basic information on bilingualism and raises practical issues in plain, clear, and direct language. It is written for both monolingual speakers who want to consider bilingualism and bilingual speakers who want to become better informed. Many of the ideas and perceptions in the first…

This report, sponsored by the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), is a summary of evidence-based research on teaching reading to Chinese, Korean, Navajo, and Russian children. It complements a recent summary of the literature on teaching reading to Spanish speaking students. There is a significant need for evidence-based research on…