Language Diversity, School Learning, and Closing Achievement Gaps A Workshop Summary (2010) / Chapter Skim
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3 Supporting Preschool Language for School Learning
3 Supporting Preschool Language for School Learning
Pages 27-48
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From page 27... ...
What interventions show signs of being effective in helping preschoolers develop aspects of language that predict reading comprehen sion and academic achievement? With respect to young Englishlanguage learners, the session focused on the relation between first and second language development in the preschool years, and linkages between first and secondlanguage development and children's early literacy skills.
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From page 28... ...
. In addition, recent data col lected by Dickinson and Ann Keiser at Vanderbilt University with 440 African American children in a Head Start program showed that standard measures of expressive and receptive vocabulary and broader language skills were all about one standard deviation below national norms for all children in the United States.
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From page 29... ...
New longitudinal research by Dickinson and Porche (not yet published) showed that language experi ences in preschool classrooms at age 4 predicted receptive vocabulary in kindergarten, which in turn predicted receptive vocabulary at the end of 4th grade, accounting for 60 percent of the variance in 4th grade vocab ulary scores.
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From page 30... ...
. Public preK programs with positive language outcomes tended to have several elements: teachers with relatively high salaries and more education, training and coaching support; betterthanaverage over sight and resources; and a strong curriculum designed to target language.
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From page 31... ...
Instead, the research on preschool ers has focused quite narrowly on children from lowincome, Spanish speaking backgrounds, and it primarily includes children who attended English immersion classes because that type of approach is the most widely available. Studies of preschoolers to date show that scores on measures of English vocabulary and English auditory comprehension for Spanishspeaking children who are duallanguage learners from low income households tend to fall one to two standard deviations below monolingual norms in both languages at the beginning of preschool (see Hammer, 2009)
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From page 32... ...
. Hammer reported on longitudinal research designed to examine this question for children from Spanishspeaking homes who attended an English immersion Head Start program for 2 years.
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From page 33... ...
Children's Spanish phonological awareness and letter knowledge increased through kindergarten but their Spanish letterword identification and reading comprehension were not as strong as their English abilities in these areas in the early elementary grades. Decreases in Spanish literacy skills continued as children progressed through 2nd grade, with children from homes in which English was spo ken scoring nearly three standard deviations below Spanish monolingual norms.
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From page 34... ...
than children in the control classrooms. The children in both experimental conditions experienced English vocabulary gains, but children in the transitional program had higher scores on English vocabulary definitions and print knowledge than did those in the English immersion group.
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From page 35... ...
Third, most of the research to date has confounded language status with SES and has focused mainly on lowSES bilinguals: more research is needed that disentangles language experiences and SES. Fourth, more second languages than Spanish need to be included in research studies to help interpret whether findings apply to the general experience of learning two languages or only to a particular language or population.
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From page 36... ...
have direct and indirect effects on reading and learning. Phonological awareness is one language skill known to have a direct effect on reading achievement, but the importance of other language skills to reading are sometimes underestimated because their influence is indirect.
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From page 37... ...
and metalinguistic skill, while other data suggest that a second language dampens vocabulary growth at least temporarily and under some conditions. One problem with interpreting the litera ture for preschoolers on this point is that SES has not been sufficiently controlled.
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From page 38... ...
For instance, does a 4yearold who attends a preschool pro gram in California with predominantly Spanish speakers have the same kind of language experience as a child in the Northeast who attends a Head Start program with children who represent 8 or 10 languages? Research does not currently capture such nuances so their implications for language learning and achievement are not known.
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From page 39... ...
These calls point to the need to be cautious about prematurely generalizing the findings available, taking care, for example, not to interpret studies focused on vocabulary as speaking to language abilities more generally, or inferring that results for decoding skills all refer to reading. Likewise it is impor tant not to generalize results from studies of children in poverty to all languageminority children or all dialect speakers, or to generalize results for sequential bilingual children to all bilingual children, or from Spanish duallanguage learners to duallanguage learners in all languages.
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From page 40... ...
It will also be critical to discover how multiple levels of language are interconnected. For instance, phonological awareness contributes to vocabulary learning, but does vocabulary learning undergird phonologi cal decoding?
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From page 41... ...
FIGURE 3-1 Determining the meaning of unknown vocabulary words using grammatical clues (Syntactic Bootstrapping)
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From page 42... ...
This example shows, de Villiers argued, that to better understand the relationship between oral parsing strategies and parsing strategies used in reading print, research is needed to determine how what is known about the development of children's grammatical competencies might be used to help guide reading instruction and other academic uses of language. De Villiers cautioned, however, that several questions remain about the learning conditions for complex language: • How much does sheer frequency of exposure help language learning?
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From page 43... ...
Certain practices in classrooms and schools, some of which occur disproportionately in lowincome preschools, may affect learning more than finding better ways to teach vocabulary, for instance. Finally, certain dialects or languages often are not seen as bringing "cultural capital" to school learning, and de Villiers expressed her agreement with other par ticipants that there could be benefits to raising the perceived value of the languages and language variations that children bring to school as part of creating environments that are supportive of learning.
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From page 44... ...
Hammer concurred, and reiterated that the growth rates for English vocabulary among bilingual children were not flat in her research: rather, bilingual children gained on monolingual peers, with children who were exposed to English before Head Start gaining the most (Hammer, 2009)
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From page 45... ...
It was designed to create contexts in which African American dialect users and English learners in the 4 to 10yearold range perform identically to Englishonly speakers of standard English, while correctly identifying children in all of these groups with diagnosable language disorders. The first measure assesses whether children learned a new verb from a sentence context, as illustrated in de Villiers' presenta tion.
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From page 46... ...
A better approach would be to dispel the misinformed notion that PPVT scores measure an ability level that is inherent in the person and cannot be changed. Biased tests can measure important aspects of orallanguage facility, such as the receptive vocabulary that predicts academic achievement, but they may have features that cause children to answer questions in ways that have nothing to do with the aspect of oral language that the measure was intended to assess.
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From page 47... ...
Misdiagnosis can lead to delivering the wrong kind of instruction, which can contribute to the observed achievement gaps. HirshPasek agreed and added that teachers use assessments to know what to target with instruction, and as a result, whatever is measured as an outcome shapes what gets taught.
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