General articlePhonological Awareness and Beginning Reading in Spanish-Speaking ESL First Graders: Research into Practice
Section snippets
First study: best predictors of beginning reading in spanish-speaking esl students
Given that a child's first language may influence the child's second oral and written language in an additive or subtractive fashion, it is important for school psychologists to have empirical evidence for which assessment measures are the best predictors of oral and written second language development in Spanish-speaking ESL students. Two of the best predictors of beginning reading in monolingual English-speaking beginning readers are letter knowledge and phonological awareness (National
Second study: early intervention as a diagnostic tool
School psychologists who are knowledgeable about empirically supported best practices in early reading instruction for monolingual English-speaking children may be the most able to help the Spanish-speaking ESL beginning readers by translating assessment results into effective intervention. A growing body of research provides empirical support for the effectiveness of early intervention in preventing reading disabilities (e.g., Berninger et al. 2000, Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider,
Research questions
Four research questions are addressed in the research reported in this article. First, is phonological awareness important in the beginning stages of learning to read English when the student's first language is Spanish? Second, can the prior findings of cross-language transfer from phonological awareness in the first language to reading (Durgunoglu et al., 1993) or phonological awareness in the second language (Ciscero & Royer, 1995) be replicated in another sample of Spanish-speaking ESL
Participants
Although there is an influx of immigrants to the metropolitan region where the study took place, no individual school had a critical mass of any one language minority; therefore, each of the schools working with our center had only a few Spanish-speaking ESL first graders. Thus, it was necessary to draw children from different schools and classrooms. First-grade teachers in 10 schools and 15 classrooms in three school districts (urban, suburban, and semirural) that were participating in other
Participants
The 4 lowest achieving males and 4 lowest achieving females participated in a one-to-one tutorial. Their mean word reading achievement prior to the tutorial was nearly two standard deviations below the mean in real-word and pseudoword reading; see Table 4. This study used an instructional design experiment (Brown, 1992) that provided empirically supported instructional components to achieve the desired outcome of improved word reading (see the introduction).
Procedures
Each child received twelve 30-min
General discussion
Cummins (1980) found that pull-out bilingual programs focus on the more visible manifestations of language, which do not carry over to areas other than basic communication. He referred to this level of language proficiency as “basic interpersonal communications skills” (BICS). Within the highly structured milieu of an elementary school, students can appear to have more developed language ability when, in reality, they are functioning within the BICS level of ability. Cummins (1981) questioned
Conclusion
This research focused on only one ESL student group: those who speak Spanish as a first language, are instructed in school in English, are beginning readers in first grade, and live in families that have recently immigrated to the United States. Clearly, more research is needed with different language-speaking ESL groups and with other groups of Spanish-speaking ESL students. However, the two studies reported here do provide some insight into how school psychologists might serve ESL students
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a minority fellowship to the first author as a supplement to a Multidisciplinary Learning Disability Center Grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P 50 33812-03 and -04) for which the last author is Principal Investigator and the fourth author is the statistician. The second author, who was a graduate research assistant, and third author, who was the research coordinator for the Center, developed the Spanish version of the
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The first two authors, bilingual school psychologists and native speakers of both Spanish and English, contributed equally to this research, which was conducted while they were interns in school psychology at the University of Washington; thus, order of authorship is arbitrary. They are continuing their work with Spanish-speaking ESL students in schools in Arizona and California, respectively.