Dual language and literacy development of Spanish-speaking preschool children

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Abstract

This article describes oral language and early literacy skills in Spanish and English for a sample of 319 bilingual children in Massachusetts and Maryland (ECS) and a comparison group of 144 monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Puerto Rico (PRC). Children were assessed as they entered and exited pre-kindergarten programs. Data collection included four subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery and a researcher-developed phonological awareness task. Results show that, on average, children in the ECS sample performed below average in both English and Spanish when compared to monolingual norms and, despite some early literacy and oral language gains during their pre-kindergarten year, continue to lag behind monolingual children of the same age. Children in the ECS sample performed better in the early literacy tasks than in the oral language tasks in both English and Spanish. On average, the PRC sample scored significantly better than the ECS sample in Spanish oral language skills, but lower in phonological awareness skills. Educational implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Introduction

The United States is on its way “to universal, voluntary, preschool attendance, not as a result of government mandate or expert recommendation, but as a consequence of parental demand and a myriad of private, state, and federal initiatives that are continuing to extend early education throughout the country” (Bowman, Donovan, & Burns, 2001, p. 29). An increasing number of the children entering early childhood education settings, such as preschool, Head Start, and child care centers, are English language learners (i.e., children who do not speak English as their first language). A large percentage of these children are exposed to Spanish at home. This reflects current demographic and immigration patterns and the fact that 12% of the U. S. population self-identifies as Latino (Suárez-Orozco & Páez, 2002).

This trend of increasing numbers of English language learners in early childhood education is exemplified by the population served by the Head Start program. Of the more than one million children who were enrolled in Head Start in 2001–02, one in four (264,000) spoke a language other than English at home (Edmondson, 2005). In 83 percent of these other-than-English speaking households, the home language was Spanish. The proportion of all Head Start children who hear Spanish at home has risen from 19% in 1998 to 22% in 2002 (Edmondson, 2005, Joseph and Cohen, 2000).

The increasing number of students in early childhood settings who come from homes where English is not the predominant language spoken present a challenge for educators who serve this population. The data reported in this article come from the Early Childhood Study of Language and Literacy Development of Spanish-speaking Children (ECS). This project was developed to answer some basic questions about this population of young English language learners. The purpose of the project is twofold: (a) to collect data longitudinally from pre-kindergarten to second grade for a group of young children from homes where Spanish is spoken, and (b) to identify factors related to the development of language and literacy skills in their two languages. In this article we report findings on the English and Spanish early literacy and oral language abilities of these children as they entered and exited pre-kindergarten programs.3

The focus on language and literacy skills is an important one given the growing consensus that early childhood is a critical time for language and literacy learning (Snow & Tabors, 1993). Research with monolingual children has shown that language experiences and early exposure to literacy are important precursors for children's language development and literacy acquisition (Snow et al., 1998, Dickinson and Tabors, 2001). The development of a group of literacy-related skills during the preschool years has been identified as important for later outcomes. We think of these skills as falling into two broad categories: (a) early literacy skills, expressed in phonological awareness, letter and word recognition, and writing and spelling skills; and (b) oral language abilities, expressed in vocabulary and language recall skills. Researchers who have studied precursors to literacy demonstrate that the skills in these two domains are foundational for monolingual children's ability to read and write (Dickinson and Snow, 1987, Lonigan, 2003, Storch and Whitehurst, 2002, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998).

This line of research has also demonstrated that there is considerable variability in emergent language and literacy skills, placing some children at risk for developing reading difficulties (Snow et al., 1998). Among the risk factors that have been identified, the effect of poverty on emergent literacy has been well documented. For example, research with monolingual Head Start children has shown that children from low-income families are at risk of later reading difficulties because of overall slower development of emergent literacy skills and the high degree of stability of these skills (Lonigan, 2003).

But what happens to young children who are learning two languages at the same time? It has been recognized that teaching children to read in a language in which they are not yet proficient may constitute an additional risk factor for reading difficulties (Snow et al., 1998). English language learners, including Spanish-speaking children, have been disproportionately represented among those who have difficulty in school with reading, mathematics and general educational attainment. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 2000 indicate that in the fourth, eighth and twelfth grade, Hispanic4 students did not perform as well as White students. For example, whereas 27 percent of White fourth graders performed below the basic ability level in reading achievement, this figure was 58 percent for Hispanics. Moreover, while the average scores for eighth-grade students on the reading assessment of NAEP were higher in 2003 than in 1992, the average scores for Hispanic fourth graders did not show a similar increase (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). The achievement gap between White students and Hispanic students at both fourth grade and eighth grade is not closing. This is an indication that a large proportion of students from Spanish-speaking homes are at risk for school failure.

In response to these concerns, current research with Spanish–English bilingual students has focused on vocabulary development (August et al., 2005, Cobo-Lewis et al., 2002, Ordóñez et al., 2002, Umbel et al., 1992), cross-linguistic transfer between English and Spanish (Dickinson et al., 2004, Gottardo, 2002, Lindsey et al., 2003), phonological processing and executive memory processes (Swanson, Sáez, Gerber, & Leafstedt, 2004), cross-language effects in predicting English reading skills (Manis, Lindsey, & Bailey, 2004), and the impact of sociocultural factors, including home literacy environments (Gouleta, 2004, Hammer et al., 2003).

While these studies are increasing our knowledge of English–Spanish bilingual students, the majority have been conducted with early elementary students. Only two studies have reported bilingual preschoolers' language and literacy experiences (Dickinson et al., 2004, Hammer et al., 2003). Hammer et al. (2003) investigated the home literacy experiences and emergent literacy skills of 43 Puerto Rican children recruited from Head Start programs. They divided the sample based on whether the children had learned Spanish and English from birth (simultaneous learners) or Spanish from birth and English at Head Start (sequential learners). Their findings showed no differences between these groups in English emergent reading abilities at ages 3 and 4. Research by Dickinson et al. (2004) focused on phonological awareness of 123 Spanish–English bilingual preschool children attending Head Start and found that their phonological skills were stable across the preschool year and showed transfer across languages. These findings about transfer are consistent with previous work with grade school bilingual children (see Cummins, 1991, for review).

Given the paucity of studies of young bilingual children, we still lack a clear picture of what constitutes typical language and early literacy development for these children during the preschool period (McCardle, Mele-McCarthy, & Leos, 2005).

In this article, we report on the findings from the data collection period in the Early Childhood Study when the children attended pre-kindergarten programs. We compare findings from bilingual children in this study with a comparison sample of Spanish speaking children in Puerto Rico.

We hypothesize that the sample of bilingual children will display below average English oral language and early literacy skills at Time 1 due to their lack of familiarity with English and their low-income status, but will make substantial gains during the pre-kindergarten year. We hypothesize that this sample will display higher Spanish oral language skills due to their home language experiences, but below average early literacy skills in Spanish at Time 1. We hypothesize that this sample will maintain or increase their Spanish oral language skills, but will not make gains in early literacy skills during the pre-kindergarten year as these skills are not supported, for the most part, in their classrooms.

We hypothesize that the comparison sample in Puerto Rico will display more advanced Spanish oral language and early literacy skills at both time periods, as they are being raised in monolingual Spanish-speaking environments and are attending Spanish-speaking classrooms.

We hypothesize that the Spanish-speaking children in the Puerto Rico sample will display a considerable advantage over the bilingual children's Spanish oral language and early literacy results. Given that these samples are similar in SES, differential results on these measures could be related to bilingual status.

Section snippets

Participants

The children in the Early Childhood Study were recruited by contacting parents in Head Start and public preschool programs in three communities in Massachusetts (Boston, Framingham, and Lawrence5

Results

The means, standard deviations, and ranges of the scores for the Phonological Awareness Task and each of the four subtests of the WLPB-R administered to the ECS and the PRC samples are presented in Table 2. The Phonological Awareness Task, Letter-Word Recognition, and Dictation are considered the early literacy tests. Picture Vocabulary and Memory for Sentences are considered the oral language tests. Results for Time 1 and Time 2 are presented in English and Spanish for the ECS sample and in

Discussion

The primary purpose of this data collection period of the Early Childhood Study of Language and Literacy Development of Spanish-speaking Children was to establish baseline information about these young children's oral language and early literacy skills as they entered pre-kindergarten programs and to examine what happened to their skills over the course of a pre-kindergarten year. The ECS sample provided this information for both Spanish and English, and the PRC sample for Spanish. Using the

Acknowledgement

This study is a sub-project of a program project titled Acquiring Literacy in English directed by the Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. The program project is funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the Office for Educational Research and Improvement, US Department of Education (Grant No. P01 HD39530).

Some of the analyses reported in this article were presented at the conference of the National Association for Bilingual Education, New Orleans,

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