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This study examined the extent to which kindergarten Spanish reading affected English reading growth trajectories through fourth grade among nationally representative Spanish‐speaking bilingual students (N = 312) in the United States and whether the association varied by students' English oral proficiency. Multilevel growth curve analyses revealed that stronger early Spanish reading was related to greater English reading growth. Within the stronger Spanish reading group, students with lower English oral proficiency initially began behind their counterparts but caught up with and surpassed them later. Within the weaker Spanish reading group, the difference between lower and higher English oral proficiency groups increased over time. Findings suggest that initially well‐developed Spanish reading competence plays a greater role in English reading development than English oral proficiency.

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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.students who participated in a sustained content literacy intervention from first to second grade made larger improvements on both general reading comprehension and science content reading comprehension outcomes.

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The purpose of the present study was to examine possible shifts in the presence of academic vocabulary across the past six decades for a continually best‐selling first‐grade core reading program. The authors examined seven program years dating from 1962 to 2013 and computationally determined four categories of academic vocabulary (science, mathematics, social studies, and general academic) in each program. The primary research question was, Did the volume of academic words in a program year rise with advancing years? A secondary supplementary question was, Did the propensity toward academic affinity of a program considered as a whole rise with advancing years? The authors employed two types of academic word measures: (1) A word was deemed to be academic or not, and if it was academic, it was assigned to one of the four academic categories, and then academic words were counted; and (2) a novel measure, academic affinity, was a continuous measure of the probability that a word was academic (in each of the four academic vocabulary categories). The authors conducted Poisson regression modeling and hierarchical generalized linear modeling. The main conclusions were that later first‐grade core reading program years included a moderately higher volume of science, social studies, and total academic words as compared with earlier years and that the science, social studies, and general academic affinity of the program as a whole was statistically higher in later years, but in practical terms, the change was not remarkable.

The purpose of the present study was to explore the dimensionality of the English home language and literacy environment (HLLE) construct in multilingual home settings for fourth‐ and fifth‐grade emergent bilinguals. The authors also evaluated a framework of mediating mechanisms underlying the effects of emergent bilinguals’ English HLLE on English reading comprehension by testing the mediation role of morphological awareness and vocabulary. Confirmatory factor analytic results showed that home language use and home literacy environment are two distinct but internally related subdomains embedded within the general HLLE construct. This finding confirms the complex and multifaceted nature of HLLE as depicted in the literature. Moreover, findings from sequential mediation analyses indicated that HLLE had no significant direct effect on English reading comprehension but made a substantial contribution to morphological awareness, which in turn influenced vocabulary and further enhanced reading comprehension. The present study contributes to the current literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the pathways through which emergent bilinguals’ HLLE leads to reading comprehension.

Over the course of a year, student authors in the Juntos NC Writing Project participated in the Literary and Community Initiative to write, publish, and share their lived experiences and identities as Latinx immigrants and first‐generation high school students in North Carolina. Throughout the publication process of their collaborative bilingual book titled The Voices of Our People: Nuestras Verdades, student authors actively engaged in pursuing advocacy and activism in three ways: (1) community space as an intentional space for advocacy, (2) writing as a vehicle for collective advocacy, and (3) publishing and sharing as an opportunity for youth activism. The participants’ words and actions demonstrated how youth in community organizations can use literacy practices to collectively advocate for their community and become activists who write about and vocalize immigrant youth’s strengths and needs.