The relationship between English Language Learners' (ELL) academic achievement and teacher education programs that prepare preservice teachers for working with those students has largely been ignored in the literature to date. This article reports findings from a study of how graduates from one elementary teacher education program, in which the…

Three analyses of Spanish-English cognates were conducted, with the purpose of identifying features that might facilitate or inhibit bilingual students' cognate recognition and cross-language transfer of vocabulary knowledge. Results revealed that both the General Service List and the Academic Word List (AWL) contain a substantial number of…

This article presents the outcomes of a biliteracy project designed, following an action-learning methodology, to supplement the district-mandated literacy programs with afterschool reading cooperatives where 100 families whose children were enrolled in an elementary school located in the Imperial Valley, California, and teachers dialogically read…

This study examined young Heritage Language (HL) learners' home literacy environment and its impact on HL word-knowledge development, focusing on a group of Chinese-English bilingual children learning to read in Chinese as a Heritage Language in the United States. A home literacy survey revealed that parents mostly used HL to talk to children,…

Recent research in teacher education has placed much attention on teachers' knowledge in subject matter and instructional practices and not enough on their attitudes and perspectives that contribute significantly to the pedagogy to which they adhere. In other words, teachers' prior knowledge and life experiences strongly influence the way they…

Many middle school teachers lack adequate criteria to critically select materials that represent a variety of L2 teaching models. This study analyzes the illustrated and written content of 33 ELL textbooks to determine the range of L2 teaching models represented. The researchers asked to what extent do middle school ELL texts depict frequency and…

Newcomers are a special subgroup of the student population designated as English Language Learners (ELLs). The research project described in this article investigates how a teacher integrated language and content in a single subject area, social studies, in a high school newcomer classroom. Three extended lessons were presented to newcomer…

In this article we report findings from research through the Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners (CREATE), a National Research and Development Center. In our study we examined the efficacy of a model of instruction for English learners, the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP)…

This study examined the English Learner (EL) teacher knowledge base from three perspectives: (a) competencies the current literature recommends that "all teachers" need know and use for teaching English learners in their content classes, (b) competencies the current literature recommends "secondary teachers" of English learners need to know and…

This retrospective interview study investigated the role of parental support in the writing growth of eight first-generation Latino college students in the years prior to admission to a 4-year university. All of the students came from low-income households in urban settings and spoke zero English at the time they entered kindergarten. Participants…

CThe article is a study of Latino immigrant parents' agency toward primary language (L1) instruction in the face of restrictionist language policy. Certain attitudes and characteristics were associated with advocacy for Spanish L1 instruction. Interviews conducted in an urban California school district among parents with different background…

The purpose of this study was to describe how bilingual, Mexican American third graders engaged with culturally relevant picture books during whole-group book discussions and then to further examine how culture (specifically) was reflected in efferent and aesthetic responses. Engagement was defined as the nature in which the readers interpreted…

Drawing on data from a 3-year qualitative study on the transition of immigrant youth, we seek to understand the connections among district programming and policy, teacher perspectives, and the ways in which students experience initial schooling. Specifically, this article examines the following research questions: How does district leadership…

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom…

This article explores early bilingual script writing as an act of identity. Using multiple theoretical perspectives related to social semiotics and social constructivist perspectives on identity and writing, the research presented in this article is based on a case study of an early biliterate learner of Japanese and English from the ages of 3-7.…