Emergent Bilinguals Research Articles

Cognitive processes that underlie mathematically gifted emergent bilinguals

The purpose of this study was to determine those cognitive measures that increase the likelihood of identifying mathematically gifted students who are emerging bilinguals. Elementary school children (Grades 1, 2, and 3) were administered a battery of math, vocabulary, reading, and cognitive measures (short-term memory, inhibition, and working memory in their first language (L1: Spanish) and second language (L2: English). Multilevel polytomous logistic modeling compared mathematically gifted children with children who were average math achievers or low math achievers. The results indicated that cognitive parameters that included estimation and working memory in the L2 and problem-solving in the L1 were unique predictors that significantly influenced whether a child was categorized as gifted relative to average achievers. Relative to average achievers, L2 parameters (magnitude judgment) and English reading were significantly related to the identification of children with low math computation. The results are discussed in terms of a multidimensional model that taps domain-specific skills and general cognitive processes that increase the ability to correctly identify children who score in the gifted range in both their L1 and L2.

Building Vocabulary Bridges: Exploring Pre-Service Primary School Teachers’ Dispositions on L2 Vocabulary Instruction for Emergent Bilinguals through Interactive Book Reading

A strong vocabulary is crucial for language acquisition and can profoundly influence academic and societal success. Interactive book reading (IBR) offers an effective approach for vocabulary instruction as it provides a dynamic and engaging word-learning context. However, as children progress from preschool to primary grades, the emphasis on IBR declines, despite the persistent need for comprehensive literacy education, particularly for emergent bilinguals. This study aims to uncover the reasons underlying the diminishing use of IBR and focuses on the dispositions (i.e., knowledge and beliefs) of pre-service teachers regarding L2 vocabulary instruction during IBR with emergent bilinguals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 36 pre-service teachers in Flanders. Thematic analysis revealed a foundational knowledge base for vocabulary instruction during IBR, with most beliefs aligning with scientific evidence. Nevertheless, some beliefs contradicted research findings, particularly concerning the deliberate use of IBR to achieve specific learning objectives, harnessing students’ home languages and fully realizing IBR’s potential for optimal vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, preconditions at the class, school, educational policy and parental levels emerged as crucial factors for effectively implementing vocabulary instruction during IBR. These findings serve as pivotal starting points for further refining pre-service teacher education and developing in-service professional development in Flanders.

Teacher–researcher collaborative development of critical (trans)languaging awareness through leveraging linguistic strengths

Abstract This study explores the collaborative process that two Korean–English and one Spanish–English bilingual Early Head Start family childcare educators, two instructional coaches, and the author engaged in as they co-created intentional bilingual pedagogical approaches to support young emergent bilinguals and co-develop critical (trans)languaging awareness. Data included participant and non-participant observations; field notes; debriefing sessions between the teachers and the author, and instructional coaches and the author; informal interviews with teachers; and two Saturday meet-ups with all participants and the author. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify salient themes in the creation and implementation of practices and pedagogies that leveraged both teachers’ and children’s languaging practices as we deepened our critical language awareness. The design-based collaborative approach that involved co-learning, co-planning, and co-shifting supported our focus on critical language use, trial of different (trans)languaging practices that transgressed English hegemony, and decision-making around how to best leverage everyone’s linguistic strengths in support of children’s developing bilingualism.

Midwestern In‐service Teachers' Raciolinguistic Mindset and Pedagogies for Emergent Bilingual Learners: Whose Equity and Excellence Are We Seeking For?

AbstractThis mixed methods study examined how a National Professional Development Grant project's first cohort (2018–2020) in the Midwest impacted mostly White and monolingual inservice teachers who work with emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Two research questions (RQs) guided this study: RQ1: What were the inservice teachers English language ideologies and their confidence in teaching EBLs after they completed professional development on racially, linguistically, and culturally (RLC) responsive teaching mindsets and pedagogies? and RQ2: How did the inservice teachers respond to prompts about raciolinguistic ideologies and EBLs' use of Standard American English? Quantitative t‐tests and factor analyses on pre‐post teacher surveys were conducted to investigate RQ1. Qualitative open and axial analyses on teachers' reflections to prompts about language ideologies were completed for RQ2. Quantitative results revealed that a majority of the participating teachers reported improved confidence in developing RLC responsive teaching strategies for EBLs. At the same time, their reflections showed that they persisted in their deeply‐rooted raciolinguistic ideologies about English, even though they intended to acknowledge and appreciate EBLs' use of language varieties.

Teacher candidates’ language beliefs and their self-efficacy to teach emergent bilinguals

ABSTRACT This study examined pre-service teachers’ perceptions towards translanguaging, their language ideologies and self-efficacy to educate emergent bilinguals in a teacher education program in North America. Previous research links teachers’ translanguaging beliefs to language ideologies, which can shape classroom culture and language norms and language use. However, scant research addresses how pre-service teachers’ perceptions on translanguaging and language ideologies influence their self-efficacy in educating emergent bilinguals. Framed by translanguaging theory and language ideologies, the study analysed survey data among 124 pre-service teachers enrolled in English as Second Language/bilingual education coursework. Multiple linear regression results revealed three significant predictors for self-efficacy: translanguaging perceptions, language use in student-teaching, and ethnicity. Implications for transforming asset-based language practices in teacher education are discussed.

Students’ 2018 PISA reading self-concept: Identifying predictors and examining model generalizability for emergent bilinguals

Decades of research have indicated that reading self-concept is an important predictor of reading achievement. During this period, the population of emergent bilinguals has continued to increase within United States' schools. However, the existing literature has tended to examine native English speakers' and emergent bilinguals' reading self-concept in the aggregate, thereby potentially obfuscating the unique pathways through which reading self-concept predicts reading achievement. Furthermore, due to the overreliance of native English speakers in samples relating to theory development, researchers attempting to examine predictors of reading achievement may a priori select variables that are more aligned with native English speakers' experiences. To address this issue, we adopted Elastic Net, which is a theoretically agnostic methodology and machine learning approach to variable selection to identify the proximal and distal predictors of reading self-concept for the entire population; in our study, participants from the United States who participated in PISA 2018 served as the baseline group to determine significant predictors of reading self-concept with the intent of identifying potential new directions for future researchers. Based on Elastic Net analysis, 20 variables at the student level, three variables at the teacher level, and 12 variables at the school level were identified as the most salient predictors of reading self-concept. We then utilized a multilevel modeling approach to test model generalizability of the identified predictors of reading self-concept for emergent bilinguals and native English speakers. We disaggregated and compared findings for both emergent bilinguals and native English speakers. Our results indicate that although some predictors were important for both groups (e.g., perceived information and communications technologies competence), other predictors were not (e.g., competitiveness). Suggestions for future directions and implications of the present study are examined.

Language Proficiency and the Relation to Word–Problem Performance in Emergent Bilingual Students with Mathematics Difficulties

As students enter the upper elementary grades, word problems become a main component of mathematics instruction, increasing in complexity as students advance through the curriculum. For students identified as emergent bilinguals with mathematics difficulty (MD), the linguistic complexity inherent in word problems may serve as a barrier to word–problem proficiency. The current study investigated the potential relation between academic English proficiency and word–problem outcomes for emergent bilinguals with MD. After analyzing data from 241 third–grade students, results indicated students who participated in an evidence–based word–problem intervention outperformed students who did not receive the intervention. Moreover, students’ academic English–language proficiency scores in the domains of reading and writing positively correlated with higher scores on a measure of word–problem solving.

Looking Closely at Words and Worlds: Emergent Bilinguals Making Meaning through Drawing and Talking

Sharing young emergent bilinguals’ artwork and voices, this article highlights drawing and talking as valuable practices to recognize capacities and create belonging in literacy classrooms.

Awards: 2023 Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction

Sharing young emergent bilinguals’ artwork and voices, this article highlights drawing and talking as valuable practices to recognize capacities and create belonging in literacy classrooms.

Awards: Awakening Poets: The Heart of Georgia Heard

Sharing young emergent bilinguals’ artwork and voices, this article highlights drawing and talking as valuable practices to recognize capacities and create belonging in literacy classrooms.

Code-switching as a Learning Strategy for EFL Learners

Learning English as a foreign language (EFL) has great relevance for many people around the world due to globalization, technology, personal or professional goals and preferences. Likewise, English has been documented as one of the languages that has more non-native speakers than native speakers around the world (Shin, 2013). Code-switching is considered a linguistic variation and it has become a widely researched circumstance that is commonly reflected by bilingual, multilingual, and multicultural practices. This research has the objective to give an account of how English as a foreign language learner use code-switching as a learning strategy to achieve academic goals. A qualitative methodology and a descriptive approach were used to analyze data and to infer the following linguistic practices: a) code-switching use by emergent bilinguals as a learning strategy to acquire a foreign language and b) code-switching use affects emergent bilinguals´ language development. The research´s findings can be summarized stating that code-switching practices help students develop foreign language awareness by analyzing linguistic elements to express meaningful ideas taking it into practice. Concluding from extensive research, code-switching can be a helpful learning strategy for foreign language learners to achieve English within a communicative process allowing learners to be able to express and communicate a message proficiently.

Effects of family and neighborhood vulnerability on dual language learner and monolingual children’s preschool outcomes

IntroductionResearch has documented that home and neighborhood contexts of children from low-income families are associated with lower cognitive and social–emotional skills than their higher-income peers. Even though over a third of young children growing up in poverty are dual language learners (DLLs), little research has examined how contextual effects differ between DLL and monolingual children. The current study examines how these two contexts, neighborhood vulnerability and family socioeconomic risk, impact executive function (EF) and social–emotional skills in DLL and monolingual preschoolers.MethodsA secondary analysis was completed on data from two Head Start programs. A series of cross-classified models with interactions were conducted to examine the moderating role of DLL status on associations between neighborhood vulnerability and family risk and preschoolers’ EF and social-emotional skills.ResultsProficient bilingual children’s EF skills were not impacted by neighborhood risks, suggesting that proficient bilingual children may have more opportunities to grow their EF skills when switching between English and Spanish regardless of neighborhood context. An unexpected result occurred for emergent bilingual children who were reported to demonstrate fewer behavior problems regardless of family risk, highlighting the importance of ensuring all DLL families have access to resources to promote their children’s social–emotional skills; and teachers have the proper training to support the behaviors of children in their classroom with varying levels of English proficiency.DiscussionAlthough speaking two languages may be a protective factor for young DLLs growing up in poverty, little research has examined how contextual effects differ between DLL and monolingual children. The current study contributes by examining how DLL status, especially two different DLL statuses (i.e., Proficient Bilinguals and Emergent Bilinguals), may vary as a buffer in moderating the negative associations between collective neighborhood vulnerability, individual family risk, and children’s EF and social–emotional skills.

Investigating the Reading Profiles of Middle School Emergent Bilinguals with Significant Reading Comprehension Difficulties

ABSTRACT Purpose This study investigated the reading profiles of middle school Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals (EBs) with significantly below grade level reading comprehension and whether these profiles varied in their reading comprehension performance over time. Method Latent profile analyses were used to classify Grade 6 and 7 Hispanic EBs (n = 340; 39% female) into subgroups based on their word reading and vocabulary knowledge. Growth models were then fit within each profile to evaluate reading comprehension performance over time. Results Analyses revealed four latent profiles emerged: (a) very low word reading and low vocabulary (10%), (b) low word reading and low vocabulary (71%), (c) average word reading and low vocabulary (16%), and (d) high word reading and low vocabulary (3%). Subgroups varied in their reading comprehension initially and over one year. Students in the subgroup marked by very low word reading and low vocabulary showed the lowest reading comprehension performance initially; however, they also showed the greatest growth over one year. Conclusion These findings suggest that there is heterogeneity in the reading skill profiles of Spanish-speaking EBs with reading comprehension difficulties. They also underscore the prevalence of word reading difficulties among these students. These may be important factors to consider when developing interventions to prevent and remediate these difficulties.

Cream Skimming in an Early College High School: A First-Year Principal’s Dilemma in a High-Performing Campus

Schools of choice need to provide equitable access and opportunities to all students, including students with disabilities and emergent bilinguals. In the context of Early College High Schools, principals and school districts should be partners in ensuring admissions processes are non-discriminatory. In this fictional case, a new principal in a high-performing early college high school becomes concerned that the school has been denying or not actively recruiting students with disabilities and emergent bilingual students. However, when she raises her concern with her supervisors and predecessor, she gets no support. The teaching notes of this case review the literature on ethical leadership, school administration dilemmas, and bounded ethicality.

The impact of lexical specificity training on at-risk emergent bilinguals

AbstractEmergent bilinguals (EBs) who are exposed to societal language at school but use another language at home may experience difficulties in mastering the societal language, especially those at risk for language and reading disabilities. Learning phonologically specific new words that discriminate between phonemes may foster phonological awareness and word reading. This study examined the effectiveness of a lexical specificity intervention program that targeted phoneme discrimination in EBs at risk for reading disabilities. EBs who scored below the 25th percentile on the screening measures were selected and randomly assigned to one of two conditions: at-risk intervention or at-risk control. Of the 76 EBs in the at-risk group, 40 were randomly assigned to receive the intervention. A group of 51 typically developing EBs who did not meet the risk criteria were selected as typical controls. The pre- and post-tests include phoneme discrimination, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, fluency, and decoding. The at-risk intervention group showed improvement on the phoneme discrimination task after the intervention and outperformed the at-risk control group but not the typical control group. In addition, growth was observed during both the training and testing sessions of the intervention. The lexical specificity intervention could be a good resource to enhance a key precursor to literacy development for at-risk EBs.

Sociodemographic disparities in ADHD diagnosis and treatment among U.S. elementary schoolchildren

We examined whether some groups of U.S. elementary schoolchildren are less likely to be diagnosed and treated for ADHD in analyses of a population-based cohort (N = 10,920). We predicted ADHD diagnosis using measures of race and ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, birthweight, individually assessed academic, behavioral, and executive functioning, family language use, mental health, health insurance coverage, marital status, school composition, and geographic region. We predicted prescription medication use among those diagnosed with ADHD. We stratified additional analyses by biological sex. Black children (aOR, 0.60), girls (aOR, 0.55), and emergent bilinguals (aOR, 0.29) were less likely to have an ADHD diagnosis than observationally similar White children, boys, or those from English-speaking households. Black children's under-diagnosis occurred among boys. Emergent bilingual children's under-diagnosis occurred among both boys and girls. Girls (aOR, 0.52) and emergent bilinguals (aOR, 0.24) with ADHD were less likely to use prescription medication. Sociodemographic disparities in ADHD diagnosis and treatment occur among U.S. elementary schoolchildren. Measured confounds including independently assessed ADHD symptomatology and impairment do not explain the disparities. The findings empirically support cultural, linguistic, and biological sensitivity in the ADHD diagnostic and treatment procedures in use for the U.S. pediatric population.

Multilingual Learning Inside/Outside the Classroom: Insights from Intra‐Active Events

AbstractAs K‐5 dual language programs gain popularity in the United States, language teaching, however, often still prioritizes discrete and decontextualized learning that is not built on students’ interests and experiences or their multilingual and multimodal resources. This article reports on a classroom‐based ethnographic case study and illustrates how emergent bilinguals in a fifth grade dual language class engaged in a variety of multimodal experiences to understand local history through their first and second languages, community‐based inquiries, and writing. Drawing on translanguaging and new materialist understandings of language and literacy, the authors describe intra‐active events generated through museum activities and discussions in English and Chinese that allowed students to assemble whole‐body experiences and discussions in their journal writing about a day in the 18th century. The study shows how translanguaging can foster students’ engagement in learning as assemblages of their multilingual, multimodal, and multisensory experiences and support their writing processes and products, not only in a second language, but all language and literacy classrooms.

English as a Second Language Teachers’ Perspectives on Interprofessional Collaboration with School Counselors: Supporting Emergent Bilingual Students

ABSTRACT Understanding emergent bilingual (EB) students’ needs is important for school-based professionals supporting students’ academic and social-emotional development. English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers often have the most contact with EB students; however, research on interprofessional collaboration between school counselors (SCs) and ESL teachers is limited. The aim of this study was to increase the knowledge about how collaboration between SCs and ESL teachers can be understood and further developed based on the perspectives of ESL teachers. In total, twenty-eight ESL teachers participated in one of four focus groups sharing their perspectives on EB students’ challenges and strengths and their experiences collaborating with SCs. Through qualitative content analysis, three themes: ecological challenges, ecological supports, and interprofessional collaboration emerged across 12 categories. Examples of interprofessional collaboration with SCs such as designing curriculum lessons to support academic and social-emotional needs were shared. Implications and training recommendations for interprofessional collaboration are discussed.

What do classroom teachers of varying backgrounds know about English spelling?

The ability to encode (spell) is an integral writing skill needed to communicate effectively. The ability to spell, also, enhances decoding as spelling and decoding are reciprocal skills that rely on knowledge of the same subskills. Spelling can also be particularly difficult for students with literacy and phonological-processing difficulties such as dyslexia. Because of the multiple benefits of knowing how to spell correctly, it is important for teachers to know the structure of the English language, so they can explicitly teach spelling. Through the administration of a survey, this study assessed 324 U.S. teachers' knowledge of English spelling patterns (Part 1). In addition, the inclusion of survey items intended to measure teachers' awareness of how children's spelling can be influenced by either African American English or the overlap between Spanish and English in emergent bilinguals. African American English and Spanish were chosen due to the underperformance of many African American and Hispanic/Latinx students on national and state reading assessments. Part 2 of the survey assessed teachers' self-efficacy in teaching spelling, while Part 3 assessed teachers' philosophy about spelling and teaching spelling. The Rasch analyses revealed that teachers whose primary area of teaching was reading outperformed those whose primary area of teaching was not reading. Additionally, teachers who taught Emergent Bilinguals outperformed those who did not on the constructs measuring words with possible influences of Spanish language on the spelling of English words. Several spelling patterns posed problems for all groups of teachers, while others were the least difficult for teachers. Practical and research implications are addressed.

Spanish-English dual language learners' bilingual profiles: Executive function and developmental outcomes

The current study took a strengths-based person-centered approach in examining academic and social-emotional outcomes of Spanish-English Dual Language Learning (DLL) children enrolled in Head Start. The study sample includes a total of 392 Hispanic Spanish-English DLLs (49% girls) between the ages of three and five. Latent profile analyses revealed that four groups of differing levels of bilingual proficiency existed (i.e., Emergent Bilingual, English Dominant, Spanish Dominant, and Proficient Bilingual). Overall, groups with higher language proficiency scored higher on executive functioning (EF), academic, and social-emotional outcomes. There were no differences between English and Spanish Dominant children's performance. Academic and social-emotional scores differed by profile through EF.Findings demonstrate the importance of supporting both languages as proficiency and EF were related and associated with other outcomes. Finally, given the associations found in the current study, EF appears to be a critical skill for young DLL children's academic and social-emotional development.