Diversity and Complexity of Young Bilingual Children’s Daily Experiences
A special issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X). This special issue belongs to the section "Educational Psychology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 November 2026 | Viewed by 29
Special Issue Editors
Interests: dual language development; bilingualism; bilingual early childhood education; early language and cognitive development and school readiness skills; effects of home language and literacy environment; early care and education experiences; socioeconomic status; culture on development; early childhood teachers’ and parents’ beliefs, knowledge, and practices; parent-child and teacher-child interactions; AI in early childhood teacher education
Interests: early language and literacy development, bilingualism, and school readiness; parenting practices; parent-child interaction; parental beliefs and knowledge; language and literacy environments in home and classroom settings; the role of socioeconomic and cultural contexts
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Many children around the world are raised with exposure to multiple languages early in life. In the U.S., for example, one in three children are learning a home language other than English. It is widely acknowledged that strong bilingualism confers cognitive, academic, social–emotional, and economic benefits. Yet, how to foster and achieve successful bilingualism remains a big question for families, educators, and practitioners. Besides the relative percentage of exposure to each language, a growing body of research has shown that the different types of experiences children have with each language in various contexts such as home, (pre)school, neighborhood, and community play a critical role in their bilingual development.
This Special Issue invites contributions that highlight the diversity and complexity of young bilingual children’s everyday language experiences across diverse contexts (e.g., home, classroom, neighborhood). These experiences may include interactions with family members, teachers, and peers, traditional learning activities such as book reading, storytelling, and singing songs, family routines such as watching TV/videos and mealtime conversations, as well as newer forms of language experiences such as reading e-books, video chatting, and using learning apps. These experiences may vary in frequency and the level and quality of adult engagement, both within a language and across languages, and may reinforce or complement one another across multiple interacting contexts. Furthermore, the complex patterns of these experiences may be attributed to macro-level social and cultural factors and micro-level characteristics such as children’s and adults’ demographic backgrounds, beliefs, and preferences. As a result, children’s daily language experiences may exhibit varying associations with their outcomes within and across languages.
We welcome studies that adopt a variety of approaches to investigating these experiences, including surveys, interviews, observations, daylong recordings, and qualitative methods, either longitudinally or across age groups.
With this Special Issue, we hope to showcase studies that focus on children from diverse sociocultural backgrounds and utilize different methodologies to shed light on the complexity of bilingual experiences and potential mechanisms of bilingual development.
Abstract Deadline: 1 March 2026.
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 15 March 2026.
Dr. Lulu Song
Dr. Rufan Luo
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- bilingual development
- bilingual education
- bilingualism
- multilingualism
- dual-language learners
- language and literacy experiences
- language-learning environments
- diversity
- home
- classroom/(pre)school
- neighborhood
- parent–child interactions
- classroom interactions
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