Dual language learners, or DLLs, are children who are developing proficiency in two languages simultaneously, typically a home language and English. According to demographic data cited by the researchers, this population in the United States is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly linguistically diverse. Yet the vast majority of intervention studies have focused almost exclusively on Spanish-English bilingual children. That narrow focus has left educators with little rigorous evidence to guide their work with children from other linguistic communities, including the growing number of South Asian language speakers in American preschools.

The research team, led by Ekta Ghosh of the University of Denver together with Rashida Banerjee, Caroline James, and Dina Malala, set out to address this gap directly. Their question was deceptively straightforward: does dialogic reading work for Bengali-speaking preschool DLLs who are at risk of developmental delay? The answer, based on their single-case research design, appears to be a cautious but encouraging yes. Across all three participants, the intervention produced measurable improvements in both English and Bengali vocabulary, in alphabetic knowledge, and in behavioral engagement during literacy activities.

Dialogic reading itself is not a new idea. First developed by researchers Whitehurst and colleagues in the 1990s, the technique transforms shared book reading from a passive experience into an active dialogue. Rather than simply reading the words on the page aloud, the adult prompts the child with questions, expands on the child’s responses, provides feedback, and gradually shifts more of the storytelling responsibility to the child. The method follows a progression from simple completion and recall prompts to open-ended questions and wh-questions, encouraging children to become active narrators of the story rather than passive listeners.

The theoretical appeal of dialogic reading for dual language learners lies in its flexibility. Because the technique relies on conversation rather than scripted instruction, it can be adapted to a child’s existing language resources. Children can respond in either language, and adults can scaffold meaning across both. This aligns with broader theoretical frameworks in bilingual education, including the concept of translanguaging, which treats a child’s full linguistic repertoire as a resource for learning rather than a barrier to it. It also connects to decades of evidence that a strong home language foundation supports, rather than hinders, second language acquisition.

Methodologically, the study employed a single-case research design, an approach well suited to intervention research with small, specific populations. Single-case designs involve repeated, systematic measurement of each participant’s performance during a baseline phase and an intervention phase, allowing researchers to demonstrate experimental control at the level of the individual child. The approach follows established design standards articulated by Kratochwill and colleagues, and it is particularly valuable when random assignment to large treatment and control groups is impractical, as is often the case with linguistically specific populations of young children.

The participants were three Bengali-speaking preschoolers, aged 36 to 60 months, who were developing proficiency in both English and their home language and who had been identified as at risk of developmental delay. The researchers measured a battery of outcomes, including expressive and receptive vocabulary in both languages, lowercase and uppercase letter identification, letter-sound knowledge, and sight word recognition. They also tracked behavioral engagement, observing how actively each child participated in literacy activities. Screening with the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Fifth Edition, helped document the children’s language profiles at the outset.

The results, presented in detailed graphs tracking each child’s performance across baseline and intervention sessions, showed improvements on every outcome measure for every participant. Vocabulary responses increased, letter identification and letter-sound knowledge improved, and the children showed higher levels of positive engagement alongside reductions in off-task and disengaged behaviors during the intervention phase. The engagement findings are particularly noteworthy, because behavioral engagement is both a consequence of effective instruction and a driver of future learning. Children who are absorbed in a book activity practice more language, attend more closely, and build stronger associations with literacy itself.

Why does this matter beyond the classroom? Early language and literacy skills are among the strongest predictors of later academic achievement, and national assessment data have long shown persistent reading performance gaps. Children who enter school with underdeveloped vocabulary and emergent literacy skills face an uphill climb that tends to widen over time. For dual language learners at risk of developmental delay, the stakes are even higher, since early delays can compound across domains. Interventions that are inexpensive, scalable, and adaptable to diverse home languages, as dialogic reading is, therefore carry enormous practical significance for early childhood educators and families alike.

The study also contributes to a growing international evidence base. Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found that shared picture book reading interventions support child language development broadly, and randomized trials in Scandinavia have examined dialogic reading with additional language learners in preschool settings. Other recent work has tested culturally adapted, caregiver-mediated versions of early literacy interventions within community organizations serving Latino families. What the new study adds is evidence from a linguistic community that has been nearly invisible in this literature, extending the reach of the technique beyond the Spanish-English populations that have dominated United States research.

The authors are careful to frame their findings as preliminary. With three participants and a single-case design, the study cannot establish how large the effects are on average or how they generalize to other children and settings. Single-case research answers questions about whether an intervention can work for individuals under specified conditions, not whether it will work everywhere. The researchers themselves describe the results as preliminary evidence supporting culturally responsive early literacy practices for preschool DLLs from underrepresented linguistic communities, a formulation that invites replication rather than claiming definitive proof.

Even so, the implications for practice are concrete. Preschool teachers, paraprofessionals, and families can be trained to implement dialogic reading with relatively modest resources, and prior studies have shown that even paraprofessionals can deliver the technique effectively when properly coached. The key ingredients are prompting, expansion, feedback, and repetition, all delivered within the warmth of a shared reading experience. For educators serving children from South Asian language backgrounds, the study suggests that these techniques can honor the home language while building English skills, rather than forcing a choice between the two.

There is also a broader equity argument embedded in this research. As the United States becomes what demographers have called superdiverse, with young dual language learners speaking an ever-widening array of home languages, intervention research that samples only one or two linguistic groups risks leaving entire communities without evidence-based guidance. Studies like this one, small in scale but methodologically rigorous, begin to correct that imbalance. They demonstrate that the tools of early literacy science can travel across languages and cultures when researchers take the trouble to test them there.

The road ahead involves larger studies, longer follow-up periods to test whether gains persist, and exploration of how dialogic reading interacts with classroom curricula and family practices. But the core message of the study is already resonant: a conversation over a picture book, conducted with intention and skill, can help a bilingual preschooler at risk of delay find their words in two languages. In a field often dominated by debates over technology and curriculum, that is a refreshingly human finding, and one that any parent or teacher can put into practice at bedtime tonight.

Subject of Research: Dialogic reading intervention for Bengali-speaking preschool dual language learners at risk of developmental delay

Article Title: Transforming Language and Literacy: The Impact of Dialogic Reading Intervention on Young Dual Language Learners

Article References: Ghosh, E., Banerjee, R., James, C., & Malala, D. (2026). Transforming Language and Literacy: The Impact of Dialogic Reading Intervention on Young Dual Language Learners. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02333-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02333-2

Keywords: dual language learners, dialogic reading, early literacy, vocabulary development, Bengali-speaking children, preschool education, single-case design, developmental delay, emergent literacy, culturally responsive practice, behavioral engagement, bilingualism

The study was led by Jun Wang of The Ohio State University, working with Eun Hye Hur of Johns Hopkins University and Lieny Jeon of the University of Virginia, and appeared as an open-access article on July 4, 2026. The team recruited nineteen teachers and six parents of three- to six-year-old children from three early care and education programs in two mid-Atlantic states, focusing on families who spoke Spanish, French, Chinese, or Korean at home. Those are the four largest non-English home languages in one of the two states, and Migration Policy Institute data cited by the authors show that roughly half of the children in the Spanish-, Chinese-, and Korean-speaking subgroups speak English less than “very well.” Recruitment materials, consent forms, and surveys were professionally translated into all four languages, including both Chinese scripts. Participants completed background questionnaires and semi-structured interviews — conducted by video, phone, or in person, running between 13 and 35 minutes — which the researchers then analyzed through a multi-phase inductive thematic analysis, building codes from the data itself rather than testing predetermined categories.

Social competence makes a deceptively slippery research target. The authors framed it with the model promoted by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, which breaks the construct into five interlocking domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Operationally, that spans a child’s ability to recognize and regulate emotions, read other people’s intentions, make friends, ask for help, and behave appropriately in groups. Decades of evidence tie these capacities to academic achievement, mental health, and long-term outcomes, which is why the preschool years — when children first negotiate sustained peer groups — are considered a critical window. The methodological snag is that children this young cannot produce valid self-reports, so researchers depend on adult ratings. Those ratings are notoriously unstable: prior studies consistently find only poor to moderate agreement between parents and teachers evaluating the same children, raising the uncomfortable possibility that such scores sometimes describe the rater as much as the rated child.

To explain the mismatch, the researchers leaned on two theoretical pillars. The first is “situational specificity,” the well-documented phenomenon in which children behave differently depending on who is watching; laboratory work has shown preschoolers acting one way with a parent and quite differently with an unfamiliar examiner. The second is the Culture, Context, and Behavior Model advanced by psychologist David Matsumoto, which holds that behavior emerges from the interaction between an individual’s dispositions and the demands of a particular cultural environment. Applied to dual language learners, the model predicts that a child moving between a home governed by one language and cultural script and a classroom governed by another may genuinely display different social behavior in each — not because of inconsistency or deficit, but because each setting carries distinct norms about initiative, deference, and emotional expression. Teachers noted that classrooms typically provide structured, consistent guidance, while homes vary widely in caregiving style and expectations.

Language added a second layer. Teachers and parents repeatedly observed that children with limited English initially participated less in peer play and gravitated toward teachers instead of classmates, a pattern previously documented in English-dominant preschool classrooms. Many appeared to be moving through what specialists call the “silent period,” a phase of second-language acquisition in which a child stays comparatively quiet while absorbing and processing the new language before producing it. The teachers here refused to read that silence as social failure; they described it as concentrated observation. “English is not their first language, so they have to catch up with the English,” one teacher said of her quietest students, framing them as learners who are constantly taking in routines and relationships. Another put it more vividly: “When they get comfortable, then they could just step into this new world.” As English proficiency grew, teachers reported, engagement with peers and adults visibly rose — suggesting that expressive language in the classroom’s dominant language helps set the ceiling on a child’s social participation.

Where the adults agreed, they agreed emphatically. Nearly all participants ranked social and emotional development above early academics such as numeracy and letter recognition for four- and five-year-olds. “If you have a strong base socially, you could always build on academics,” one teacher said; a parent shrugged off early drilling with the observation that children “will learn that eventually.” Mapping the interviews onto the five CASEL domains, the researchers found both groups converging on the same core sub-skills: empathy and perspective-taking under social awareness, and help-seeking, friendship-building, and boundary-setting under relationship skills. The texture differed, though. Parents spoke most about perspective-taking — “understanding other perspectives, which is very difficult at his age,” one mother reflected, “it’s very helpful once he gets that skill” — while teachers gravitated toward empathy talk in the moment, coaching children with lines like “if we know how we hurt friends, we would not hurt them.” Perseverance also surfaced in the interviews, emphasized by three participants — two of whom had multilingual backgrounds and relatively high individualism scores.

The divergence surfaced in vocabulary and conceptual machinery. Teachers routinely invoked technical constructs — attention span, executive functioning, self-regulation sequences — that never appeared in parents’ answers, and several described stepwise strategies absorbed from formal training, such as the sequence one teacher summarized as “recognize, experience, self-control, and have a conversation.” To probe the roots of such differences, the team administered the Auckland Individualism-Collectivism Scale, a 26-item questionnaire rated on a six-point scale that has been validated across cultural contexts and translated into more than a dozen languages. Crucially, it measures individualism and collectivism as two independent dimensions — spanning domains such as advice-seeking, harmony, competition, uniqueness, and responsibility — rather than as opposite ends of a single pole. On average, the teachers scored higher on collectivism and slightly lower on individualism than the parents did. Most of the twelve surveyed teachers identified as non-Hispanic Asian, and only two reported using English exclusively in their classrooms — an unusually bilingual workforce by U.S. standards.

The most theoretically provocative result was what failed to line up. Several participants came from societies conventionally described in the research literature as collectivistic — East Asian and Latin American contexts associated with group harmony, respectfulness, and social order — yet they reported relatively high individualism scores. Their interviews explained why: migration as adults, professional environments, higher education, and years of immersion in a new culture all reshape a person’s cultural orientation, making nationality a poor proxy for how someone actually weighs autonomy against interdependence. Notably, the few participants who ranked early academics on par with social-emotional growth had all immigrated to the United States as adults from societies that prize academic achievement. One parent made her reasoning explicit: “It will vary by culture,” she said, arguing that children’s expected behavior depends on what they are “expected to do in certain situations” within a given cultural context. A teacher described the same tension from the classroom side: “Here, especially in this culture, we talk a lot about independence… learn how to do it yourself… What do you think? What’s your idea?” The pattern supports recent critiques warning that individualism and collectivism are not bipolar opposites and can coexist within a single person.

On the practical front, both groups converged on a single strategy: alignment between home and school. Teachers worried that inconsistent messages from home could “reset” a child’s behavioral progress, so they invested in communication — monthly newsletters describing character-building activities, early conversations to learn each family’s context, and invitations for parents to contribute keywords, songs, and stories in their home languages. Parents described intensive communication during transitions and crises that faded into background trust once children settled. One mother recalled a cascade of upheavals — “change of language, change of friends, change of preschool, country” — and said that when she worried her daughter was isolating herself, the teacher responded by weaving Spanish-language activities into the classroom day. Home-language support emerged as the study’s most consistently endorsed tool, building children’s comfort and confidence while letting teachers connect with families who are not fluent in English — a pressing need in a field where federal data cited in the paper show that 91 percent of center-based and 81 percent of home-based educators speak only English with the children they serve.

The study also exposed an uneven support landscape. Center-based programs offered curricular resources, colleagues, and interpreters — one teacher whose center employed Spanish-speaking staff noted that “interpreters… helped” children feel more comfortable — while family child care providers often worked alone. “I don’t think I have much support. I’ll do my own research… I have to do extra homework,” one home-based teacher said, a sentence the authors read as a policy signal that family providers need structured professional development. Teachers also turned their attention to the other half of the multilingual classroom: monolingual English speakers. Several argued that inclusion runs in both directions and that typically developing monolingual children also need help engaging positively with linguistic and cultural diversity, so that dual language learners encounter a responsive peer environment rather than an indifferent one. The authors’ recommendations follow directly: embed culturally affirming pedagogy and knowledge of dual language development into teacher preparation and ongoing training, coach new teachers in evidence-based parent communication, expand home-language support — including emerging generative-AI translation tools for under-resourced programs — and treat social competence as something co-constructed by families, teachers, and peers rather than captured by any single decontextualized rating scale. For children who begin life with two languages, the difference between reading early silence as deficit and reading it as learning may echo through classrooms for years.