Teachers and Language Outcomes of Young Bilinguals: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Purpose The present scoping review seeks to fill an important need in the bilingual research and education community by analyzing the recent research literature on how teacher factors potentially influence young bilingual children's language outcomes. The research aims are twofold: synthesize the research findings on teacher factors that influence bilinguals' language development, and identify gaps in the literature to determine future research directions. Method The search parameters used in this review included peer-reviewed journal articles from 2000 to 2019 in order to synthesize the most recent empirical work on this topic, a focus on typically developing bilinguals from the age of 3 to 8 years, and research designs that included case studies, descriptive, cross-sectional, quasi-experimental, experimental, longitudinal, mixed methods, and qualitative methods. Results A search of major databases for studies on young bilinguals and teachers between 2000 and 2019 combined with multiple levels of screening and review yielded 21 peer-reviewed articles. Four major themes emerged: (a) teacher characteristics, (b) teacher quality, (c) teacher talk, and (d) teacher emotional support. Conclusions Overall, the results of this synthesis suggest that teachers do in fact influence the language development of young bilinguals. Teacher talk and teacher quality were found to be the two themes that were of most interest in the research community, and the results generally supported the positive effect of teacher quality and teacher talk on language outcomes among bilinguals, with some variability. This review has important implications for teacher training and education in an effort to better serve the growing population of bilingual children.

Exploring the Effects of Teachers’ Practices in the Early Childhood Literacy Classroom Environment on Children’s Acquisition of Literacy Skills

“…The use of appropriate and various educational materials in the literacy classroom environment, as well as teachers' practices and collaboration with children's parents in the learning process, will encourage and improve children's acquisition of literacy skills in early childhood grades. This result is consistent with prior studies on the effective literacy learning of young children [61][62][63][64]. As indicated by [3,15,65,66], the availability of educational material and the number of students in the literacy classroom environment, in addition to the good use of classroom furniture and literacy learning materials, help strengthen social relationships among students and teachers.…”

Teachers’ Language Use in Multilingual Head Start Classrooms: Implications for Dual Language Learners

“…Dual language learners (DLLs), or young children under the age of 8 who are learning two or more languages at home and school [ 1 ], are particularly sensitive to language influences by teachers [ 2 , 3 ]. Indeed, recent research has reported positive associations between the quality of teachers’ talk and the language outcomes of dual language-learning children [ 4 ]. Young DLLs constitute one of the fastest-growing populations, making up nearly one-third of all young children between the ages of 0 and 8 in the U.S. [ 1 ].…”

A Systematic Review of Teacher Talk and Its Effects on English Language Learning Outcomes

“…, the quantitative method is the most commonly employed, excluding the two review articles(Ramí rez, Huang, Palomin, & McCarty, 2021;Khong et al, 2019). Indeed, 15 out of the 23 primary research articles on teacher talk use quantitative approaches (Al-Adeimi & O'Connor, 2021;Alamos & Williford, 2020;Chan, 2020;Chen et al, 2020;Duncan & Lederberg, 2018;Grøver, Lawrence & Rydland, 2018;Heller & Grøver, 2022;Hollo, Staubitz & Chow, 2020;Howe, Hennessy, Mercer, Vrikki, & Wheatley, 2019;Hu, Chiu, Yelland, & Liang, 2023;Meneses, Uccelli, & Valeri, 2023;Studhalter et al, 2021;Topalov & Radić-Bojanić, 2019; Torres, Whitehead & McLellan, 2018;Zucker, Bowles, Pentimonti & Tambyraja, 2021).…”