Emergent Bilinguals Research Articles

Conceptual and Total Vocabulary in Spanish-English Bilinguals from 23 to 35 Months: Assessing Vocabulary Among Young, Migrant Emergent Bilingual Children

Migrant and seasonal agriculture workers, mostly of Latino origin, largely supply the labor that goes into crop production, cultivation, and harvest in the agricultural industry in the United States. A major challenge of this population is having stable childcare and access to quality education services for their children. Unfortunately, most assessments overlook the various aspects of emergent bilingual children’s development, leading to underestimation of their conceptual understandings and linguistic skills. This calls for a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to assessment. Three scoring methods have been identified as the most appropriate ways to score linguistic capabilities in bilingual children: single-language scoring, total scoring, and conceptual scoring (Bedore et al., 2005; Core et al., 2013). Each method presents advantages and disadvantages and is used according to the questions being asked. This longitudinal study aims to (1) compare total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary in a group of two-year-old emergent bilingual children across time, (2) compare total and conceptual vocabulary with normed monolingual performance on a single-language measure across time using total and conceptual scoring methods, and (3) to determine which method of assessing vocabulary in two languages is most appropriate for two-year-old migrant bilingual children. Eight emergent bilingual children (50% female; Age: Time 1: M = 23.25 months, SD = 3.34) attending the Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) or Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RMCA) were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory at three timepoints. Results showed that children’s total vocabulary scores were larger than their conceptual vocabulary scores and when comparing to monolingual norms their total scores were larger than their conceptual scores. Implications and recommendations will be discussed further.

An investigation of teacher candidates’ ideologies towards emergent bilingual students

ABSTRACT This study examined how teacher candidates’ beliefs about language and ideologies towards emergent bilinguals (EBs’) are influenced by the number of bilingual and English as a second language methods (BEM) courses they complete, and if their perspectives further evolve as they spend time in field placements. A total of 293 pre-service teachers completed Fitzsimmons-Doolan’s 2011 language ideology dimensions survey at the beginning of an academic semester. At the end of the term candidates responded to three open-ended questions, and responses were analysed and categorised into three themes: what candidates need to know, what EBs’ academic needs are, and what a culturally relevant teacher preparation curriculum must offer. Findings suggest participants’ visions of schooling seemed to change after completing two or more BEM courses, and after reaching a 21–30 clinical hour scaffold working in an instructional capacity with EBs in K-12 schools.

Morphophonemic analysis boosts orthographic and semantic learning of academic words for Spanish–English bilinguals

BackgroundUpper elementary grade students encounter increasingly complex texts with abundant morphologically complex words. Despite the positive effects of morphology‐based vocabulary instruction, emergent bilinguals with limited word reading skills may need additional support.MethodsThis study investigated the effects of morphological analysis and morphophonemic analysis instruction on the orthographic and semantic learning of morphologically complex academic words. Fourth‐ and fifth‐grade Spanish–English bilingual students (N = 30) in the United States participated in two learning tasks. In learning task one, participants learned two sets of carefully matched derivational words under morphological and whole‐word learning conditions. In learning task two, the same participants learned two other sets of words under morphophonemic and whole‐word learning conditions. Each learning task included two learning sessions interweaved by meaning recall and spelling production assessments. Cross‐classified multilevel regression was used to assess the effects of intervention conditions, child and item predictors, as well as cross‐level interactions.ResultsFindings showed no significant difference in meaning recall and spelling measures between morphological and whole‐word conditions. Students performed significantly better in the morphophonemic condition than in the whole‐word condition for both meaning and affix spelling outcomes. The effect of morphophonemic intervention over whole word condition was stronger for younger students and words of lower base frequencies. Student meaning and spelling performance was significantly predicted by their word reading skills.ConclusionsMorphophonemic analysis instruction enhances word meaning recall and spelling of complex derivative words.

Science and language education: emergent bilinguals engage in modeling, explanation and argumentation for sense-making

This is a qualitative case study framed by a sociosemiotic theoretical framework to explore science and language instruction with three Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) in sixth grade. The study details the modeling and explanatory processes used by EBs to mediate science learning through evidence-based argumentation. A thematic analysis of students’ models, explanations and arguments was conducted. Three themes emerged from the analysis: (1) modeling and explanatory processes evolved from illustrative to causal purpose, (2) students engaged in discursive practices similar to scientific communities, and (3) students mediated science learning through evidence-based argumentation. The three themes revealed that when EBs are taught through integrated science and language instruction they are provided with opportunities to approximate the discipline-specific language register of science through three language functions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Modeling and explaining scaffolded evidence-based argumentation tasks through which EBs critiqued each other’s models and explanations and revised their conceptual understanding of science concepts to increase sense-making. Implications suggest integrated content and language instruction to provide students with experiential learning opportunities while affording discourse and interactive opportunities on a larger scale and via other research methodologies to include a larger sample size of EBs.

Linguistically responsive formative assessment for emergent bilinguals: exploration of an elementary teacher’s practice in a math classroom

ABSTRACT This study explores the responsiveness of an elementary teacher’s support for emergent bilingual students by examining the connections between the teacher’s assessment expertise, formative assessment practices, and emergent bilinguals’ unique language needs in math classes. The study, which investigated the indicators that characterize a linguistically responsive and equitable formative assessment, included and prioritized the perspectives of emergent bilingual students. Primary data sources included classroom observations, teacher interviews, and student interviews. This study elucidates pedagogical practices that are beneficial for emergent bilinguals. It found that both emergent bilinguals and teachers generally agree on the best practices, including their understanding of the language support. However, at times, there is a discrepancy between what the teacher said and the support that emergent bilingual students need. This study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of what and how teachers should know and act for performing responsive formative assessments for emergent bilinguals. It has implications for further research and for teachers who work with emergent bilingual students in core content areas.

Distributed liderazgo: the making of spaces and leadership structures for a multilingual school ecology

ABSTRACT This qualitative study conducted at a Midwestern U.S. elementary school with a ‘strand’ bilingual programme examines the ways that administrators, teachers, and parents create learning environments for emergent bilinguals (EBs) that promote a positive view of bilingualism. To frame the study, the author used distributed leadership to emphasise the multiple stakeholders and levels on which leadership is exercised. Liderazgo is used to emphasise the collective mission behind these leadership practices to create wider multilingual school ecology. Critically applying these perspectives to the data, the author developed the notion of ‘distributed liderazgo’ to identify actions taken and needed to contribute to the school's multilingual ecology. Promising instances include a shared mission focused on EBs, teacher collaboration reinforced by shared planning and opportunities for students to interact outside their programmes, and parent-led meetings. Additional steps could be taken to further the visibility of parent leadership and opportunities to support more languages at the school. The notion of distributed liderazgo is useful for practitioners and researchers to consider how leadership practices can contribute to a school's assets-based orientation to bilingualism. Work like this is important to contest monolingual orientations and deficit discourses about EBs that persist in otherwise English-dominant classrooms and schools.

Toward a Multilingual Perspective on Reading: Aligning Emergent Bilinguals' Resources with Theories of Reading and Implications for Instruction

AbstractThis article puts forth a multilingual perspective on reading to counter the prevailing monolingualism that dominates reading instruction. First, it brings theories together to develop a cohesive understanding of teaching reading with emergent bilinguals at the center. Second, it illuminates ways educators can design reading instruction, which is responsive to and normalizes emergent bilinguals' resources. In taking up a multilingual perspective of reading, educators have a challenge and opportunity to engage in intellectual and practical work to ensure emergent bilinguals' strengths are at the center of reading instruction.

Disciplinary skills are not enough: Resituating historical thinking within students’ racialized and linguistic experiences

ABSTRACT Background Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students’ racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students’ experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students’ experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with seeing language segregation as a proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination. Methods The first author collected three days of classroom field notes, conducted 15 student interviews, and collected 177 student work samples. The authors used a grounded theory approach to identify how students’ racialized experiences help or hinder their historical analysis. Findings The findings suggest that students’ racialized experiences interplay with the disciplinary concepts of contextualization and presentism. Our findings complicate how disciplinary concepts alone do not sufficiently help students analyze how systemic racism manifests differently across historical moments. Contribution This paper offers implications for how historical thinking skills can make space for students’ racialized and linguistic experiences. Incorporating raciolinguistic analysis in tandem with historical thinking skills can lead to more nuanced conversations in the classroom about race/ethnicity and language in the past and present.

The Conflation of Dual Language Bilingual Education With Gifted Programs in New York City Schools

As neighborhoods across New York City gentrify, Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) has become a big draw for gentrifier families. Our research contributes to growing literature on DLBE gentrification by examining how a racially diverse group of parents in two communities perceived DLBE as a school choice option. We found that schools with DLBE programs screened potential students via academic screening tests or school choice processes to determine admission into DLBE programs. This screening process has contributed to a) the conflation of DLBE with the city’s gifted programs, and b) a focus away from admitting and centering emergent bilinguals. While this screening served to further advantage gentrifier families, some parents resisted the opportunity hoarding behaviors of their peers through their alternative school choices and advocacy efforts. In this way, we show how all parents are constrained and impacted by the neoliberal logics of contemporary DLBE policy and school choice.

English learners? Emergent bilinguals? Multilingual learners?: Goals, contexts, and consequences in labeling students

AbstractIn this essay, the authors explore the dilemmas facing researchers, educators, and policymakers in how to refer to multilingual students who are deemed in need of language support in school. There is a growing concern with the label English learner, the term currently used in U.S. federal legislation, as focusing exclusively on students' English language acquisition and ignoring their multilingual resources. Alternative terms such as emergent bilingual and multilingual learner that underscore students' multilingual assets have become widespread alternatives. The authors argue that the critiques of the term English learner must be taken seriously. They also argue that, given that being classified as English learners in schools has material consequences for students' academic and occupational trajectories, this label cannot simply be wished away. In fact, debating over labels alone carries the danger of mislocating the primary site of struggle for equity and justice in the labels themselves, rather than in the systems that position and frame linguistically minoritized students in a deficit light in the first place. As researchers who have worked with this population for years, the authors, too, are grappling with how to refer to them. Each of them shares the dilemmas they have encountered, and they conclude by offering a multidimensional tool that might assist scholars, educators, and policymakers in reflecting on what is gained and lost by using different terms.

Effects of Emergent Bilingual Students’ and Their Teacher’s Talk-Turns on Students’ Comprehension During Read-Aloud Discussions

ABSTRACT This article explores the unique contributions of 2nd-grade emergent bilingual (EB) students’ talk-turns vs. those of their teacher on students’ expressions of comprehension during interactive read-aloud discussions in a pull-out classroom. They engaged in eight video-recorded, interactive read-aloud discussions across four books. This mixed methods study used emergent coding and constant comparative analysis to identify codes that reflected each talk-turn in the discussion. Then, statistical discourse analysis determined how previous talk-turns (3,419 in all) impacted subsequent talk-turns in which students expressed comprehension (i.e. providing information, a connection/comparison/contrast, inference, or opinion). Findings show that EB students more often engaged in several talk-turns that predicted students’ subsequent expressions of comprehension as compared to their teacher. Likewise, the teacher also engaged more often in certain talk-turns that predicted students’ subsequent expressions of comprehension as compared to students. Further, teachers sometimes engaged in talk-turns that reduced students’ likelihood of expressing comprehension. Thus, teachers should explicitly create space for student-initiated participation during interactive read-alouds.

The reflective positioning of Japanese EFL students in the negotiation of their own emergent bilingual identities

ABSTRACT Although the emergent bilingual status of foreign language (FL) students is often overlooked, that is not to say that students do not, on some level of consciousness, experience changes in their identity as a result of their emergent bilingualism. The continuous process of identity (re)negotiation, that is, the reorganising of one’s subject position in relation to contextualised linguistic and social factors, has a significant impact on FL students. The present study takes a multi-theoretical approach to investigate the factors involved in the negotiation of Japanese EFL students’ emergent bilingual identities through the use of a questionnaire. The results show that the majority of the participants perceived some level of change in their identity, unrelated to any specific determinants. Furthermore, those with longer EFL learning histories, higher proficiency levels, or those majoring in globally-minded studies were more likely to feel they belong to English-speaking (imagined) communities.

The Voices of Transnational MotherScholars of Emergent Bilinguals

In this article, we—three Asian MotherScholars in the field of language and literacy education—conducted a collaborative self-study to examine how our individual and shared experiences as transnational mothers of emergent bilinguals have shaped our ways of promoting bilingualism and biliteracy. Our study drew on transnational feminist perspectives and used multimodal data and narratives shared in an online inquiry group. We highlighted ways we leverage our strengths and make conscious efforts to navigate burdens rooted in monolingual ideologies and linguistic hegemony as we raise our bilingual children. We also found how inquiring collectively into our experiences has helped us cultivate critical consciousness and build transnational solidarity. Through our stories, we emphasized the urgency of challenging inequities and pervasive monolingual ideologies within U.S. schools, as well as the necessity of creating a space for immigrant mothers to inquire into their experiences and to support each other.

Understanding the Work of Professional Learning Communities for English Language Learner Teachers: Possibilities and Limitations From Two Urban High Schools

The collaboration and learning of high school English language learner (ELL) teachers is an overlooked aspect of policy and research regarding the opportunities and outcomes of emergent bilingual (EB) students. In order to better understand the work of ELL teachers, this study examined their participation in an important setting: the professional learning community (PLC), a space with potential for promoting more equitable student outcomes. Analysis of ELL teachers’ participation in PLCs at two urban high schools, and the topics addressed in PLC meetings, provides implications for teacher and student learning, and reinforces the significance of ELL teacher expertise.

Effective vocabulary interventions for young emergent bilinguals: A best‐evidence synthesis

AbstractThis best‐evidence synthesis appraises the design and outcome characteristics of vocabulary intervention studies conducted with preschool through 6th grade emergent bilingual (EB) children and spotlights rigorously designed studies for which effects could be better attributed to instructional features. Twenty‐nine selected studies were analysed for the design characteristics of attrition, random assignment, and baseline equivalence as well as the outcome characteristics of reliability and outcome alignment. Following suggestions from the What Works Clearinghouse (2020) guidelines, levels of evidence for effectiveness were determined for each treatment‐comparison group contrast. Studies meeting effectiveness standards were further analysed to determine intervention impacts (i.e., effect size) on EBs' English word learning. Analyses revealed that 17 studies (59% of the sample) were experimental and employed random assignment whereas baseline equivalence was established for most of the 12 quasi‐experimental studies (41% of the sample). Attrition did not plague the majority of vocabulary intervention studies. The outcome measures of all but one study showed satisfactory reliability indices, 85% of which showed alignment across treatment and comparison groups. Thirty‐six measures (65% of measures) across 21 reviewed studies (72% of studies) met acceptable levels of evidence of effectiveness. Most studies employed standardised vocabulary measures to assess EBs' growth in breadth rather than depth of vocabulary knowledge. The significance of outcome measures with large, medium and small posttest effect sizes are discussed relative to their oral/written, receptive/expressive, definitional/contextual and depth/breadth vocabulary characteristics. Implications address significant knowledge gaps regarding EBs' English vocabulary intervention and highlight issues and recommendations.

Supplemental Material for Mathematical Problem Solving in Emergent Bilingual Children: Is Growth Related to the Navigation Between Two Working Memory Systems?

Supplemental Material for Mathematical Problem Solving in Emergent Bilingual Children: Is Growth Related to the Navigation Between Two Working Memory Systems?

“My Goal Is to Talk Like a Native”: Emergent Bilingual Students’ Use of Language Learning Strategies

This paper investigates emergent bilingual students’ (Finnish and Swedish) use of language learning strategies (LLS). The focus is on the frequency of LLS use, the difference between Swedish and Finnish speaking students’ use of LLS and the effect on use of LLS to improve the students’ weaker language. The data consisted of students’ self-reports concerning the use of LLS and their proficiency in their L2 on a seven-point Likert scale online survey. The survey also included an opportunity to comment on the answers. The data were gathered in 2019/2020. The instrument was influenced by the SILL (Strategy Inventory for Language Learning) (Oxford 1990) but adapted to the current research context on the basis of the researchers’ expertise and previous interviews with students. The measured and analysed LLS were metacognitive, social, cognitive and compensation strategies. The response rate was approximately 30% (N=184). The results indicated clear differences between Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking students regarding the use of different types of LLS. Finnish speaking students made significantly more use of metacognitive strategies while Swedish-speaking students made significantly more use of compensation strategies. Regarding the students’ use of social strategies, it was obvious that some Finnish-speaking students associate the use of Swedish in real-life communication situations with stress and anxiety. Moreover, the students’ use of LLS significantly predicts their progress in the weaker language. We suggest that the students should be offered language strategy instruction for them to understand and more effectively apply language learning strategies, to improve their weaker language at all levels.

Cross-linguistic influence of early Spanish reading on English reading trajectories among Spanish–English emergent bilinguals: A latent class growth analysis.

Cross-linguistic influence of early Spanish reading on English reading trajectories among Spanish–English emergent bilinguals: A latent class growth analysis.

An Extensive Reading Intervention for Emergent Bilingual Students With Significant Reading Difficulties in Middle School

This U.S. study evaluated the effects of a reading intervention for emergent bilingual students with significant reading difficulties in Grades 6 and 7 within a multisite randomized controlled trial. Emergent bilinguals were randomized to a researcher-provided intervention ( n = 171) or business-as-usual comparison condition ( n = 169). Results on a measure of word reading indicated significant differences favoring treatment after Year 1; however, there were no significant differences between groups on standardized measures of reading comprehension. Initial English vocabulary knowledge moderated reading comprehension scores at the beginning of the second year of intervention, indicating that students’ response to instruction varied as a function of their initial English language proficiency. The discussion focuses on interpreting these findings with an emphasis on improving the effectiveness of interventions for secondary grade emergent bilinguals with significant reading difficulties.

Examining the generalisability of the simple view of reading comprehension for emergent bilinguals

AbstractReading comprehension depends on oral language competence and word reading ability, as per the simple view of reading. While this theory has been studied in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic contexts, its applicability in different educational settings characterized by multilingualism, a lack of explicit reading instruction, and the challenges of poverty (as in South Africa) remains under‐explored. We use secondary data from approximately 263 emergent bilinguals (approximately one‐quarter isiZulu‐English, three quarters Siswati‐English) from the Second Early Grade Reading Study intervention. Participants completed tests of word reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension in both of their school languages. Using within‐language path models, we examine the effects of word reading fluency and vocabulary on reading comprehension and explore whether these relations differ by first language group or intervention group. Thus, we tease out the role of the language and educational context in influencing the skills related to reading comprehension in first language and English additional language.