Explore the vast range of titles available.

Increasingly, reading research has begun to address how students’ linguistic environments may explain their reading achievement. In this exploratory analysis, we investigated how the rates of specific instructional talk moves predicted student reading comprehension achievement. Transcripts from third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms (teacher n = 31; student n = 236), were coded for nine talk moves established in the literature as involved in literacy and learning outcomes. Two-level hierarchical linear modeling was used to identify sources of linguistic comprehension, a necessary component of student reading comprehension. Controlling for students’ decoding and fluency, semantic-syntactic knowledge, and initial reading comprehension, we found two talk moves significantly predicted reading comprehension. Teacher explanations [γ07(20.89); p ≤ 0.05] and simple follow-up moves [γ06(10.44); p ≤ 0.05] provided students with explicit instruction and exposure to academic language and the positive reinforcement to encourage student attention to the learning tasks and thus potentially more language exposure. In this sample, these moves provide further support for the simple view of reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990) that suggests that fostering student linguistic comprehension is pedagogically important for student reading at these levels.

The present study investigated the role of vocabulary depth in reading comprehension among a diverse sample of monolingual and bilingual children in grades 2–4. Vocabulary depth was defined as including morphological awareness, awareness of semantic relations, and syntactic awareness. Two hundred ninety-four children from 3 schools in a Mid-Atlantic district and 3 schools in a Northeastern school district participated in the study and were assessed at the beginning and end of one school year on a wide variety of language and literacy measures. Bilingual children were assessed in English and Spanish. A latent difference score model that assessed change in a latent indicator of English reading comprehension from Time 1 (Fall) to Time 2 (Spring) was tested with results showing that vocabulary depth measures made significant contributions to initial status, but not change, in reading comprehension over and above between-subjects factors (grade, ethnicity, language status) and baseline control within-subject factors (word identification and vocabulary breadth). There was no added contribution of Spanish language measures to English reading comprehension among the bilingual students.

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between language variables and writing outcomes with linguistically diverse students in grades 3–5. The participants were 197 children from three schools in one district in the mid-Atlantic United States. We assessed students’ vocabulary knowledge and morphological and syntactical skill as well as narrative writing ability in the spring of the academic year. The importance of language skills was investigated in two separate sets of models predicting contextual conventions and story composition. Controlling for grade level, language status, and transcription skills, syntactical skill was related to contextual conventions. Additionally, the relationship between syntactical skill and contextual conventions differed for ELs and non-ELs such that at higher levels of syntactic skill non-ELs showed better performance in contextual conventions. There was also a relationship between vocabulary breadth and story composition. Controlling for vocabulary breadth, ELs performed better than non-ELs on the story composition task.

The present study investigated language skills and reading comprehension with English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children in grades 2–5. Of the 377 children in the sample, 207 were English monolingual and 170 were Spanish–English bilingual. Data were collected within a cohort-sequential design for two academic years in the fall and spring of each year. Growth modeling was used to estimate initial status on measures of vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, morphological awareness, and syntactic skill. A latent variable was created to capture the construct of reading comprehension, and growth modeling was used to estimate growth and ending status in latent reading comprehension. Analyses controlling for initial status in word recognition investigated relationships between initial status in language skills and growth and ending status in reading comprehension. Results showed that initial status on vocabulary breadth was related to growth in reading comprehension and initial status in vocabulary depth and syntactic skill were related to ending status in reading comprehension. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy are operationalized, which further limits how children can bring their unique communicative practices into schools and classrooms. In response, the authors describe pursuing language as a state of being responsive in our language and literacy instruction, with the goal of developing literacy skills through culturally affirming and anti-oppressive practices. They operationalize this pursuit of language in classroom contexts by delineating a framework of critical metalinguistic engagement. The article begins with a theory of languaging and goes on to unpack critical metalinguistic engagement by each of its component parts-critical, metalinguistic, and engagement-and concludes with an argument for being intentional about pursing language through relationships and dispositions that affirm language diversity in educational practice and research.

Translanguaging pedagogy is gaining widespread recognition as an approach that recognizes and builds on multilingual students’ linguistic resources. Research on translanguaging pedagogy has predominantly focused on classroom language practices, while studies on the design and enactment of translanguaged instruction are limited. This pilot study contributes to the knowledge base on translanguaged instruction through the design, implementation, and examination of students’ engagement with the content taught in a set of translanguaged lessons. These lessons were based on a language-based English reading curriculum for Spanish-English bilingual upper elementary students. Our approach to translanguaging pedagogy was characterized by a) use of bilingual texts; b) flexible language use; and c) bilingual language instruction. This article focuses on the lessons that addressed morphology and syntax instruction. Within an ethnomethodological approach, the discourse and interactions during the morphology and syntax instruction components of the lesson-cycles were examined to understand how students engaged with the language structures taught, and how translanguaging manifested in their talk about language. Our analyses revealed translanguaging as enabling students to perform linguistic analyses in which they: (a) established connections between English and Spanish morphemes; b) compared English and Spanish morphology and syntax; and c) explored alternative syntactic structures. As such, translanguaged instruction supported students’ metalinguistic awareness and cognitive engagement, and enabled them to position themselves as expert linguists. This study provides evidence about the affordances of translanguaged literacy instruction, which is needed to continue stimulating the ideological shift from monolingual to multilingual perspectives in the education of bilingual students.

Given the increase of bilingual students in the K-12 public school system, understanding reading comprehension performance, especially among this population, has been a major focal point in the research literature. This study explores the nature of reading comprehension among a sample of 123 Spanish–English bilingual elementary students. We add to the existing knowledge base regarding reading comprehension in two significant ways: (1) augmenting the Simple View of Reading by testing the role of both vocabulary depth contribution and dual-linguistic ability in English reading comprehension; and (2) questioning the manner through which reading comprehension is understood through measurement and conceptualization. Specifically, we build a comprehensive model of reading comprehension that tests the effects for vocabulary depth, Spanish oral language, and biliteracy. In line with previous research that suggests different reading measures tap different abilities, we test our model for three different measures of reading comprehension: a cloze exercise, a passage and multiple choice based test, and a timed silent sentence reading judgment task. Our findings converge with previous research on the role of vocabulary depth in reading comprehension and also challenge prior work which has compared different reading measures. Implications for theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding reading comprehension, specifically among Spanish–English bilingual students, are discussed.

Students are expected to comprehend and produce increasingly complex texts in upper elementary school, and academic language and literacy skills are considered critical to meeting these expectations. Notions of academic language are also controversial and require careful deliberation when applied to traditionally minoritized populations, including bilingual learners who negotiate more than one language in their daily lives and have varied linguistic repertoires. In the present study, the authors report on a quasi-experimental field trial of a theoretically grounded and language-based reading intervention framed around language components (semantics, syntax, and morphology), language functions, discussion, and reading comprehension. A sample of 239 Portuguese–English and Spanish–English bilingual students in grades 4 and 5 worked in small instructional groups to explore language, apply reading strategies, and discuss and write about big ideas in text. Half of the students were assigned to the intervention group (n = 119) and the other half (n = 120) to a business-as-usual control group. Classroom teachers (n = 12) and specialists (n = 10) implemented the intervention with small groups of four to six students. Results showed practically meaningful effects of the intervention on standardized measures of both academic language (Hedges’s g = 0.248) and reading comprehension (Hedges’s g = 0.166), with implications for theory, research, and classroom practice.

The authors describe a 3‐year project to design and test a multilingual literacy curriculum that centers language and student voice in the service of literacy development for multilingual learners. In the first 2 years, researchers, teachers, and students worked together to develop the curriculum using design‐based, case study methods. In the third year, teachers participated in a quasi‐experimental implementation of the curriculum that showed positive effects on students’ language, reading, and writing outcomes. This longitudinal work reflects four broad principles for multilingual literacy instruction: (1) focus on language and metalinguistic awareness; (2) enact dialogic approaches to engage students; (3) use multimodal texts and scaffolds to support comprehension and expression; and (4) take a multilingual perspective. The authors provide an overview of the curriculum design process and the quasi‐experimental field trial. Then, each principle is theoretically and empirically unpacked, and instructionally described using qualitative data collected over the full 3 years.