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ABSTRACT
Bilingualism has been systematically associated with better self-regulatory skills (), however, this advantage does not seem to automatically transfer for most dual language learners. This suggests that there are other contextual factors that are necessary to trigger this advantage. This study examines the role of teacher–child interactions in the development of Spanish-speaking bilingual preschoolers’ self-regulation in an English-speaking context, and how this relation differs between bilingual and English-speaking monolingual children. Our study analyzed a sample of 1656 preschoolers in the U. S. and yielded two salient results (1) Bilingual children demonstrated greater gains in self-regulatory skills than their monolingual peers when in classrooms with high-quality teacher–child interactions. (2) Vocabulary in bilingual children moderated the relation between teacher–child interactions and teacher-reported self-regulation for bilingual children, with bilinguals who had greater vocabulary knowledge benefiting more from classroom interactions. These outcomes hold significant implications for policy makers, given the evolving sociodemographic profile of classrooms globally.
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Notes on contributors
Carolina Melo
Dr. Carolina Melo is Associate professor at the School of Education at Universidad de los Andes, Library Dean, and a researcher at the Center for Research and Innovation in Reading (CIIL). She is also a consultant for the World Bank. Her research focuses on measurement and improvement of children's reading skills, and teacher quality. Together with Dr. Orellana, they were the recipient of the Chilean Innovation Award (AVONNI) in 2020 for the creation of Dialect, a reading diagnostic tool. In 2023, Dr. Melo was selected as one of the 100 female leaders of the country by M.E El Mercurio for her contributions in the Education field.
Robert Pianta
Robert Pianta is the Batten Bicentennial Professor of Early Childhood Education, professor of psychology, and founding director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia. Pianta's research and policy interests focus on the intersection of education and human development. In particular, his work has advanced the conceptualization and measurement of teacher-student relationships and documents their contributions to students' learning and development. Pianta has led research and development on measurement tools and interventions that help teachers interact with students more effectively and that are used widely in the United States and around the world.
Jamie DeCoster
Dr. Jamie DeCoster is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Virginia with 25 years of experience working as a statistician and methodologist. He has been an author on over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, and his work has been cited over 20,000 times. He regularly publishes articles in high-impact journals, including first-author publications in Personality and Social Psychology Review (IF = 7.571), Psychological Methods (IF = 7.338), and American Psychologist (IF = 6.681). He has been a co-investigator on grants from the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and several private foundations. Dr. DeCoster has consulted and collaborated with researchers from many different fields, providing him with a broad range of statistical and methodological experiences. Dr. DeCoster's personal research focuses on discovering ways to make the methods practiced by scientists more accurate, flexible, and efficient.
Pelusa Orellana
Pelusa Orellana is a professor of literacy at the School of Education at Universidad de los Andes, Chile. She is also the academic director of CIIL (Center for Research and Innovation in Reading) and has several publications in peer-reviewed journals. In 2012 she and Dr. Carolina Melo created Dialect, a Spanish reading diagnostic platform that was awarded the Chilean National Innovation Award in Education in 2020.