Quantity and quality of home language use as well as home literacy resources are positively related to vocabulary knowledge among children growing up monolingually (De Temple & Snow, 2003; Juel, 1988; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Stanovich, 1986). While the presence of interactive features associated with good vocabulary outcomes have been reported in Latino families (Jiménez, Filippini, & Gerber, 2006; Teale, 1986) no prospective studies relating those features to vocabulary outcomes in either Spanish or English have been carried out with Latino children. In particular, it is unclear whether interactions facilitate vocabulary across languages, or only for the language in which they occur. In this study, home factors (immigration history, home language use, home literacy resources) and the interactive language of 50 mother—child dyads sharing a picture-book were analyzed as predictors of the children’s vocabulary outcomes. The children were aged 4—5 and all were attending a Head Start program at the time of the study. Frequency of reading to the child by an adult other than the

Whether the simple view of reading (SVR) as incorporated in the componential model of reading (CMR) is applicable to other orthographies than English was explored in this study. Spanish, with transparent orthography and Chinese, with opaque orthography were selected because of their diverse characteristics. The first part reports a study of students from grades 2 and 3, whose home language and medium of instruction was Spanish, and were administered tests of decoding, listening, and reading comprehension. A comparison group of 49 children from Grade 2, 54 children from Grade 3, and 55 children from Grade 4, whose home language and instruction was English, were also administered tests of decoding, listening, and reading comprehension. Multiple regression analysis showed that approximately 60% of the variance in reading comprehension of Spanish participants and 50% of the variance in reading comprehension of English participants were explained by decoding and listening comprehension. Furthermore, the performance of third grade Spanish participants resembled that of fourth grade English-speaking participants. In the second study, 102 Chinese students from Grade 2 and 106 students from Grade 4 were administered tasks of Chinese character recognition, reading fluency, listening, and reading comprehension. Multiple regression analyses showed character recognition and listening comprehension accounted for 25% and 42% of the variance in Chinese reading comprehension at Grades 2 and 4 respectively. These results indicate that the simple view of reading is applicable to writing systems other than that of English.

The influence of home and community factors in predicting ethnic or heritage language vocabulary were examined among 282 Singaporean children whose ethnic languages (or mother tongues) were Chinese, Malay, or Tamil, and who were also learning English. The results indicated that (1) parents speaking ethnic language to children had a strong positive effect on children’s ethnic language vocabulary, whereas parents speaking only English had a negative effect; (2) language community had an effect on children’s ethnic language vocabulary, which may reflect community support for the language among the broader community; (3) family income worked differently depending on the language community; and (4) watching television in English mostly/only had a negative effect on children’s ethnic language vocabulary. These findings lend support to other studies among language-minority children indicating that maintaining an ethnic or heritage language requires home support when schooling is through a societally dominant language.

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The expressed values of European American and Latino children, their parents, and their teachers reveal the multifaceted nature of individualistic and collectivistic conceptions of relationships and the varied ways in which cultural value conflict may be manqested in children's daily developmental settings.