Effects of Junior Kindergarten on Emerging Literacy in Children from Low-Income and Linguistic-Minority Families

Abstract

We study the benefits of junior kindergarten for linguistic-minority 4-year-olds compared to their linguistic-majority classmates from the same low-income neighborhoods. At the end of the school year, linguistic-minority children made significantly greater improvements in language skills than their host society classmates. At the mid-year point, junior kindergarten teachers made efforts to help linguistic-minority children overcome the challenges of the school environment of their new host society by adapting their pedagogical strategies to those showing difficulty in their receptive vocabulary skills. They also offered greater means of contact to parents of linguistic-minority children having difficulty attaining language proficiency than to parents of children showing better improvements. Parents of linguistic-minority students showing smaller gains were more likely to use a larger proportion of the communication methods offered by teachers and participate in the parent-school relationship for the well-being of their children. Long-term results suggest that linguistic-minority children continued to make significant improvements.

Does Preschool Enrichment of Precursors to Arithmetic Influence Intuitive Knowledge of Number in Low Income Children?

“…We resorted to using Analysis of Covariance using General Linear Modeling to test the effect of our experimental component (kindergarten and junior kindergarten enrichment of early precursors to primary school arithmetic) and its corresponding dosage variable. Up to one-third of both cohorts appeared to be linguistic minorities whose parents were born outside of Canada (Pagani & Jalbert, 2005). As such, we not only controlled for children's pre-test number knowledge on the NKT but also implemented controls for their linguistic skills on the PPVT (kindergarten analyses of cohort 1) or linguistic background status (junior kindergarten analyses of cohort 2).…”