PREDICTING ENGLISH LITERACY IN SPANISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN

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DESCRIPTION: (Adapted from applicant's description) It is important to study the precursors of literacy development in Spanish-speaking children, as this population is at-risk for school drop-out and associated behavioral and mental health problems that are consequent upon failure to develop adequate literacy. A two-year longitudinal study of literacy development in Spanish-speaking children will be conducted. The primary aim is to determine whether literacy difficulties in English among Spanish-speaking children in the second and third grades can be predicted from a cognitive test battery given in Spanish at the beginning of kindergarten and in English at the end of first grade. A secondary aim is to explore the predictors of Spanish literacy skills when the children reach the end of 1st grade. The kindergarten battery has already been administered, and the first grade battery will be given prior to the proposed period of funding. The proposal calls for testing in the 2nd and 3rd grade years. The children are participating in a unique program in which they are given structured multi-sensory literacy training in Spanish during the first two years of formal schooling, while simultaneously learning oral skills in English. During 1st grade, the children begin a structured multi-sensory literacy program in English that is closely parallel to the Spanish literacy program, and continue the English literacy program into the second and third grades. The study sample consists of 330 kindergartners who were given a battery of predictive tasks in Spanish in fall, 1998, and spring, 1999. Preliminary results indicate that the children's literacy skills are age-appropriate at the end of kindergarten, and correlated with the predictive battery given at the outset of kindergarten. The children will be tested again in the spring of their first grade year on English versions of the same predictive tasks, as well as Spanish literacy tests. They will also be tested at the end of their 2nd and 3rd grade years on an extensive battery of literacy tests. The predictive battery is based on research in English which highlights phonological awareness, phonological decoding, print awareness, expressive vocabulary, verbal memory, and letter knowledge as predictors of early reading development. Since there are no predictive studies in Spanish, the study will develop some measures based on translations and adaptations of English language measures. However, the majority of the tests are from the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery. This battery includes measures of language and literacy skills in both English and Spanish that were normed on native speakers and calibrated to allow meaningful comparisons across languages. Analyses will focus on the question of whether predictors of reading and writing in English are the same for the bilingual sample as in previous studies of monolingual English speaking children. Comparisons of the best predictors of Spanish and English literacy will also be made. The co-variation of the test measures with teacher-rated language preferences, sociodemographic and socioeconomic variables will be explored.