Diversity among Spanish-speaking English language learners: profiles of early literacy skills in kindergarten

This study explored heterogeneity in literacy development among 2,300 Hispanic children receiving English as a Second Language (ESL) services at the start of kindergarten. Two research questions guided this work: (1) Do Spanish-speaking English language learners receiving ESL services in the fall of kindergarten demonstrate homogeneous early literacy skills, or are there distinct patterns of achievement across measures of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and orthography? and (2) if there are distinct profiles, to what extent do they predict literacy achievement at the end of kindergarten and the beginning of first grade? Using cluster analysis, the authors identified four distinct literacy profiles derived from fall kindergarten measures of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and phonetic spelling. These profiles were found to be associated with literacy outcomes in spring of kindergarten and fall of first grade. The two profiles that were associated with greater success on later measures of concept of word in text, letter sound knowledge, word reading, and spelling were the two that included stronger performance on orthographic skills (i.e., alphabet knowledge and phonetic spelling). These findings demonstrated that there is heterogeneity among Hispanic ESL students at kindergarten entry and suggested that literacy instruction must be differentiated from the very beginning in order to meet students’ individual needs. The findings also suggested that orthographic skills should be assessed and taught early on. While phonological awareness may be a necessary precursor to reading, phonological awareness in the absence of orthographic skills may not be sufficient.     

Literacy skills in children with cochlear implants: the importance of early oral language and joint storybook reading

The goal of this study was to longitudinally examine relationships between early factors (child and mother) that may influence children's phonological awareness and reading skills 3 years later in a group of young children with cochlear implants (N = 16). Mothers and children were videotaped during two storybook interactions, and children's oral language skills were assessed using the "Reynell Developmental Language Scales, third edition." Three years later, phonological awareness, reading skills, and language skills were assessed using the "Phonological Awareness Test," the "Woodcock-Johnson-III Diagnostic Reading Battery," and the "Oral Written Language Scales." Variables included in the data analyses were child (age, age at implant, and language skills) and mother factors (facilitative language techniques) and children's phonological awareness and reading standard scores. Results indicate that children's early expressive oral language skills and mothers' use of a higher level facilitative language technique (open-ended question) during storybook reading, although related, each contributed uniquely to children's literacy skills. Individual analyses revealed that the children with expressive standard scores below 70 at Time 1 also performed below average (<85) on phonological awareness and total reading tasks 3 years later. Guidelines for professionals are provided to support literacy skills in young children with cochlear implants.     

综英课整体语言教学的实践与探索

整体语言教学法作为一种教学模式和一场教育运动深刻地影响了外语教学。它的特点是语言是一个整体;语言教学应以学生为中心,学生是教学的主体;语言知识和技能应通过自然的语言环境加以培养;语言教学和文化教学密切相关。综英课整体语言教学的实践与探索表明英语教学不能只培养学生的语音、语法、口语、词汇知识以及遣词造句的语言能力,而更应该注重培养学生的语言运用能力。整体语言教学法能较全面提高学生的英语语言交际能力、思维能力和理解能力。     

Parent–child reading in English as a second language: Effects on language and literacy development of Chinese kindergarteners

This study investigated the effects of dialogic parent–child reading in English on 51 Hong Kong kindergarteners learning English as a second language. Children were pre‐tested on nonverbal IQ, reading interest and receptive vocabulary, word reading and phonological awareness in both Chinese and English. They were then assigned randomly to one of three conditions involving different levels of parent–child interactions: dialogic reading (DR), typical reading (TR) or control. Though inter‐group comparisons showed nonsignificant interaction effects across time among the three groups, intra‐group gains across the 12‐week intervention suggested that parent–child reading could enhance English word reading skills, while dialogic reading could promote phonological awareness in both Chinese and English. These results highlight the potential benefits of English parent–child reading and dialogic reading on children learning English as a second language, and the possibility of linguistic transfer from parent–child reading in English as a second language to Chinese as a first language.     

Longitudinal prediction and prevention of early reading difficulty

The results of many studies suggest that early reading problems are associated with deficiencies in certain spoken language skills. Children who encounter reading difficulty tend to be deficient in the perception of spoken words, the ability to retain linguistic material in temporary memory, and the ability to comprehend certain spoken sentences, as well as in their awareness about the phonological structure of spoken words. This paper summarizes these findings and provides an explanation in terms of the requirements of skilled reading. It further reviews the results of two longitudinal studies which show that inferior performance in kindergarten tests of language skills may presage future reading problems in the first grade. Based on these studies, procedures are suggested for kindergarten screening and for some ways of aiding children who, by virtue of inferior performance on the screening tests, might be considered at risk for early reading difficulties. Presented at the 33rd Annual Conference of The Orton Dyslexia Society, San Diego, California, November 1983. This paper was prepared while the author was a Fulbright Fellow at the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. Much of the research herein described was supported by NICHD Grant HD-01994 and BRS Grant 05596 to Haskins Laboratories, Inc.     

Reading behavior in dyslexia: Is there a distinctive pattern?

Summary Our findings do not support the belief that a subclass of those specifically backward in reading, the dyslexics, can be differentiated from other poor readers on the basis of a high rate of reversal errors. Although some dyslexics showed orientational and directional biases which are absent in most poor readers, neither those children classified as dyslexics nor other poor readers typically displayed a high proportion of reversals as compared with other errors. Moreover, the difficulties manifested in the common error pattern are chiefly outside the domain of visual perception. They are language-related and are not specific to the visual perception of language. The difficulties of poor readers appear to reflect the inaccessibility of the phonetic segmentation of spoken language, inability to adopt an efficient coding strategy for operations involving short-term memory, and failure to grasp the complex nature of the spelling system of English. Since the difficulties of learning to read interact with the structural peculiarities of particular languages and the way those structures are manifested in the writing system, we must suppose that important work remains to be done in cross-language comparisons of children’s reading errors. How these linguistic factors may influence the reading behavior of dyslexics is likely to be a productive question for future investigation. Much of the authors’ research on reading acquisition was supported by a grant to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant #HD 01994). This article was adapted from a paper presented at the Symposium on Pathologies of Language Development of the Fourth Biennial Congress of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development held at the University of Pavia, Italy, September 19–23, 1977.     

Child Miscues and Parental Feedback During Shared Alphabet Book Reading and Relations With Child Literacy Skills

We studied 52 parent–child dyads reading an alphabet book to examine the nature of children's miscues and parents' feedback, and whether miscues and feedback were related to each other and to preliteracy skills. Letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and expressive vocabulary were assessed in 5-year-old nonreaders who were also audiotaped reading an alphabet book at home with their parent. Results indicate that after controlling for vocabulary, children with higher phonological awareness more often labeled objects with a name beginning with the page's target letter. Parents provided substantial sustaining feedback after miscues, as though using alphabet books as a way of fostering their child's literacy. Findings highlight the need to consider both the child's skill-base and parent–child interactions to understand the role of alphabet books in literacy development.     

Developing Cultural Awareness in English Writing

Language and culture have an intimate relationship,and cultural awareness plays an important role in language learning,involving aural comprehension,speaking,reading,writing and translation.This paper mainly discusses cultural awareness in English writing.     

The effect of text genre on parent use of joint book reading strategies to promote phonological awareness

This study compared the rates of different types of joint book reading behaviors of parents of preschool children with and without language impairments using two different text genres. Participants included 72 preschool children between the ages of 51 and 70 months. Fifty-five children were typically developing and 17 were diagnosed with language impairments. Parent–child dyads were videotaped during periods of joint book reading using two different types of text (one alphabet-rhyming and one narrative). Results indicated parents rarely used reading behaviors known to enhance their preschoolers’ phonological awareness. However, when used, there was a significant difference between the two types of texts. The alphabet book elicited a higher rate of phonological awareness and print concept behaviors, while the narrative book resulted in parents using more content behaviors. In addition, the parents of typically developing children used more phonological awareness behaviors than the parents of children with language impairments.     

中西文化对比在英语学习中的作用

语言与文化是相辅相成的。为了克服语言学习中的文化障碍,文化对比是外语学习中不可或缺的环节。在英语学习的听、说、读、写各个方面注重文化背景知识的比较和学习,真正了解不同民族间的文化差异,才能在奠定良好的语言基础的同时,增强文化意识,从而为跨文化交际打下稳固的基础。     

Relations between early reading and writing skills among Spanish-speaking language minority children

Although there is a growing body of literature on the development of reading skills of Spanish-speaking language minority children, little research has focused on the development of writing skills in this population. This study evaluated whether children’s Spanish early reading skills (i.e., print knowledge, phonological awareness, oral language) were related to their Spanish and English early writing skills using a sample of 554 children whose home language was Spanish. Multivariate regression analyses with simultaneous outcomes (Spanish and English invented spelling skills) were conducted to evaluate whether children’s early reading and writing skills were related across languages. Results indicated that children’s print knowledge and phonological awareness skills, but not oral language skills, were significantly related to their Spanish and English invented spelling skills. Spanish early literacy skills were not differentially related to Spanish and English reading and writing skills. The magnitude of the relations between print knowledge and oral language skills and children’s invented spelling skills varied as a function of child age; however, the magnitude of the relation between phonological awareness and invented spelling skills did not differ as a function of child age. Furthermore, results suggested that language minority children’s early reading and writing skills are related but distinct constructs and that children may be able to apply information gained from learning to read and write in their first language when learning to write in their second language.     

Explicit Instruction in Decoding Benefits Children High in Phonemic Awareness and Alphabet Knowledge

This article reports a study of 32 children who had been trained to a high level in phonemic awareness and alphabet knowledge over a 12-week period at preschool. During their first 6 weeks in kindergarten, these phonemically aware children were taught to read 10 real words, using either decoding and encoding techniques or a whole word method. At posttesting the children taught by the decoding and encoding method were superior in reading and writing both novel real words and pseudowords, compared to the whole word group. The results support the contention that explicit instruction in decoding is helpful even when children have high levels of phonemic awareness.     

The montessori preschool: Preparation for writing and reading

Dr. Maria Montessori was a perceptive observer of the learning processes of children, and nowhere is this revealed more clearly than in her approach to language. She viewed reading as the ultimate abstraction of language rather than a specific skill to be taught. Decoding is the skill to be taught. The concept of indirect and direct preparation for learning is of major importance in the rich heritage she gave us. She saw the existence of an epigenesis of intellectual functioning, which implies that the experiential roots of a given schema, or learned behavior, will lie in antecedent activities that may be quite different in structure from the schema to be learned. She used this principle effectively. This article discusses how Montessori’s method and materials address the indirect and direct preparation for learning written language.     

Reading,syntactic, and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-English Canadian children

The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of language, memory, and reading skills of bilingual students and to determine the relationship between reading problems in English and reading problems in Portuguese. The study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 37 bilingual Portuguese-Canadian children, aged 9–12 years. English was their main instructional language and Portuguese was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program at school where they were taught to read and write Portuguese. The children were administered word and pseudoword reading, language, and working memory tasks in English and Portuguese. The majority of the children (67%) showed at least average proficiency in both languages. The children who had low reading scores in English also had significantly lower scores on the Portuguese tasks. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudoword reading, working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The Portuguese-Canadian children who were normally achieving readers did not differ from a comparison group of monolingual English speaking normally achieving readers except that the bilingual children had significantly lower scores on the English syntactic awareness task. The bilingual reading disabled children had similar scores to the monolingual reading disabled children on word reading and working memory but lower scores on the syntactic awareness task. However, the bilingual reading disabled children had significantlyhigher scores than the monolingual English speaking reading disabled children on the English pseudoword reading test and the English spelling task, perhaps reflecting a positive transfer from the more regular grapheme phoneme conversion rules of Portuguese. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of reading skills. In both English and Portuguese, reading difficulties appear to be strongly related to deficits in phonological processing.     

二语习得中的语感能力与语言学能

语感是一种语言能力,它包括语义感、语法感及语音感。二语习得中语感的获得是逐步形成的,是语言认知的最后阶段。然而,不同的学习者在学习外语的速度与效果上存在一定的差异,造成语感的强弱之分。其主要原因之一是学习者个体差异所导致的语言学能的差异。     

Teaching reading in an inner city school through a multisensory teaching approach

The purpose of the present study was to examine the efficacy of the multisensory teaching approach to improve reading skills at the first-grade level. The control group was taught by the Houghton-Mifflin Basal Reading Program while the treatment group was taught by the Language Basics: Elementary, which incorporates the Orton-Gillingham-based Alphabetic Phonics Method. The results showed that the treatment group made statistically significant gains in phonological awareness, decoding, and reading comprehension while the control group made gains only on reading comprehension.     

交际能力与大学英语教学

语言是进行文化交流和人际交往的重要工具,语言教学的目的就是培养学生的交流、交际能力.因此,语言学习与培养学生的交流、交际能力应当是同步进行的,对非英语专业的学生来说尤其如此.而在实际的教学中,学生往往注重语法规则和句子结构,而忽略了交流、交际能力的养成.这样势必使学生成为一个"fluent fool".因此,应高度重视培养学生的交流、交际能力,本文阐述了交际能力和大学英语教学之间的关系,并对培养学生交流、交际能力的方法和途径进行了探讨.     

How Do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn to Read?

Reading requires two related, but separable, capabilities: (1) familiarity with a language, and (2) understanding the mapping between that language and the printed word (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000; Hoover & Gough, 1990). Children who are profoundly deaf are disadvantaged on both counts. Not surprisingly, then, reading is difficult for profoundly deaf children. But some deaf children do manage to read fluently. How? Are they simply the smartest of the crop, or do they have some strategy, or circumstance, that facilitates linking the written code with language? A priori one might guess that knowing American Sign Language (ASL) would interfere with learning to read English simply because ASL does not map in any systematic way onto English. However, recent research has suggested that individuals with good signing skills are not worse, and may even be better, readers than individuals with poor signing skills (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000). Thus, knowing a language (even if it is not the language captured in print) appears to facilitate learning to read. Nonetheless, skill in signing does not guarantee skill in reading—reading must be taught. The next frontier for reading research in deaf education is to understand how deaf readers map their knowledge of sign language onto print, and how instruction can best be used to turn signers into readers.     

Morphological awareness and learning to read Chinese

This study investigated the nature of morphological awareness and its relation to learning to read Chinese characters among 46 Chinese-speaking preschool children. The children took a morphological awareness task, which varied in semantic transparency and morpheme position. Children’s vocabulary knowledge and extant character reading ability were measured. Additionally, a character learning task was administered. Results showed that children’s performances on morphological awareness were affected by semantic transparency but not by morpheme position. Morphological awareness was related to vocabulary knowledge when partialling out character reading ability but not to character reading ability after partialling out vocabulary knowledge. The results of the character learning task further revealed that morphological awareness was related to character identification in the words that were just taught but not to character identification in the words that were not taught or in pseudowords. The relation between morphological awareness and character identification ceased to be significant when partialling out the variance in children’s prior knowledge of the characters to be learnt. Taken together, the findings suggested that vocabulary knowledge may play a more important role than reading ability in the initial development of morphological awareness and that the facilitative effect of morphological knowledge in reading does not seem to be significant in the very initial stages of reading acquisition.     

Implicit phonological awareness and early reading development in prelingually deaf children

This article reports on a longitudinal study of reading progress in a group of five-year-old deaf children and a group of hearing controls. All children were prereaders at the beginning of the study and the IQ of the two groups were matched. The deaf children varied considerably on a number of measures, including implicit phonological awareness, oral ability, and familiarity with British Sign Language and fingerspelling. Overall, the deaf children made significantly less reading progress than their hearing peers over the first year of schooling, and they also scored significantly lower on the test of rime and onset awareness. However, considerable variation in the reading progress of the deaf children was positively correlated with oral skills, rime/onset awareness, and language comprehension. Language comprehension, itself, was positively correlated with signing and fingerspelling. The deaf children were assessed again one year later, when learning to read continued to be very delayed, and the pattern of correlation was essentially the same. The implications of these findings for the education of deaf children are discussed.