Phonological Awareness and Beginning Reading in Spanish-Speaking ESL First Graders: Research into Practice

Abstract In the first study, 30 Spanish-speaking English-as-a-second language (ESL) first graders whose families were Latino immigrants and who received all their school instruction in English completed an assessment battery with both Spanish and English measures of phonological awareness, Verbal IQ (VIQ), oral language proficiency, and single-word reading (real words and pseudowords); they also named English alphabet letters. Phonological awareness in Spanish predicted (a) phonological awareness in English and (b) English word reading; thus, phonological awareness may transfer across first and second languages and across oral and written language. English VIQ and oral language proficiency predicted both English and Spanish word reading, but Spanish VIQ and oral language proficiency did not predict English word reading. In the second study, the 4 males and the 4 females with the lowest reading achievement participated in an instructional design experiment in which empirically supported instructional components for teaching beginning reading to monlingual English speakers were included. These components were phonological awareness training (in both Spanish and English), explicit instruction in alphabetic principle (in English), and repeated reading of engaging English text with comprehension monitoring (in English). Both individual students and the group as a whole increased in real-word reading and pseudoword reading beyond the level expected on the basis of their Spanish or English VIQ or oral proficiency. Implications of this research for school psychology practice are discussed, especially the importance of early reading intervention and progress monitoring for Spanish-speaking ESL first graders.

[1]  Georgia Earnest García.  Bilingual Children’s Reading , 2000 .

[2]  V. Berninger.  Preventing Reading Disabilities by Assessing and Remediating Phonemic Skills. , 1987 .

[3]  W. Nagy,et al.  Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness. , 1993 .

[4]  F. Vellutino,et al.  The Case for Early Intervention in Diagnosing Specific Reading Disability. , 1998 .

[5]  Jack M. Fletcher,et al.  The Role of Instruction in Learning To Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk Children. , 1998 .

[6]  P. David Pearson.  Handbook of reading research. , 1990 .

[7]  T. Roberts,et al.  Efficacy of Explicit English Instruction in Phonemic Awareness and the Alphabetic Principle for English Learners and English Proficient Kindergarten Children in Relationship to Oral Language Proficiency, Primary Language and Verbal Memory. , 1997 .

[8]  R. Wagner,et al.  The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. , 1987 .

[9]  James M. Royer,et al.  The Development and Cross-Language Transfer of Phonological Awareness , 1995 .

[10]  Marilyn Jager Adams,et al.  Beginning To Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. , 1991 .

[11]  J. Fitzgerald.  English-as-a-Second-Language Reading Instruction in the United States: A Research Review , 1995 .

[12]  T. Conway,et al.  Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction. , 1999 .

[13]  Sarah Hudelson,et al.  Kan Yu Ret an Rayt en Ingles: Children Become Literate in English as a Second Language , 1984 .

[14]  R. Abbott,et al.  Redefining learning disabilities: Moving beyond aptitude–achievement discrepancies to failure to respond to validated treatment protocols. , 1994 .

[15]  J. Cummins.  Interdependence of first-and second-language proficiency in , 1991 .

[16]  Abbie Brown,et al.  Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in c , 1992 .

[17]  D. Shankweiler,et al.  Explicit Syllable and Phoneme Segmentation in the Young Child , 1974 .

[18]  T. Oakland,et al.  Educational and psychological perspectives on Hispanic children from Hispanic journals: A view from Latin America , 1985 .

[19]  R D Abbott,et al.  A Connectionist Approach to Making the Predictability of English Orthography Explicit to At-Risk Beginning Readers: Evidence for Alternative, Effective Strategies , 2000, Developmental neuropsychology.

[20]  Jill Fitzgerald,et al.  About Hopes, Aspirations, and Uncertainty: First-Grade English-Language Learners' Emergent Reading , 1999 .

[21]  K. Hakuta,et al.  Bilingualism and education. , 1989 .

[22]  W. Lambert.  BILINGUALISM AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 1981 .

[23]  Frank R. Vellutino,et al.  Differentiating Between Difficult-to-Remediate and Readily Remediated Poor Readers , 2000, Journal of learning disabilities.

[24]  J. Cummins.  The Cross-Lingual Dimensions of Language Proficiency: Implications for Bilingual Education and the Optimal Age Issue. , 1980 .

[25]  Edward R. Sipay,et al.  Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers : Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as basic causes of specific Reading disability , 1996 .