No Half Measures: Reading Instruction for Young Second‐Language Learners

Abstract

Children experience important cognitive and affective gains through bilingualism when both languages are developed to the point where transfer can occur between them.T he timing of second-language reading instruction for young learners appears to be a subject fraught with little data and much conflicting popular opinion (Fitzgerald, 1995). In their report for the National Research Council, Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1998) made this observation: Surprisingly, given the many millions of initially non-English-speaking children who have acquired literacy in English in the United States, and given the many millions of dollars expended on efforts to evaluate bilingual education programs, straightforward, data-based answers to [specific questions regarding acquisition of second-language literacy] are not available. (p. 234)The Reading Teacher

Teacher beliefs regarding bilingualism in an English medium reading program

“…Despite this advocacy very few studies address the issue of bilingualism in a reading program for early literacy in English (Lenters 2004Á2005;Manyak 2010;Neufeld and Fitzgerald 2001). Using the idea of 'carnival' as a lively learning environment, Manyak advocated 'daily news' as a literacy activity for Latino English language learners.…”

“…Vaish used in the teaching of English reading and how this should be done. For instance Lenters (2004Á2005) offers ideas about how the L1 can be part of the English reading classroom, but does not discuss what percentage of teacher talk/student talk can be in the L1 for optimal L2 acquisition. Summarising this review, I find that though there is substantial literature on language teachers' beliefs in psychology, this field is nascent in sociolinguistics.…”

Using Interactive Writing Instruction with Kindergarten and First-Grade English Language Learners

“…Brittany was working within Cecilia's zone of proximal development. Young ELLs benefit from these kinds of interactions that honor their current linguistic resources, promote their oral language development, and facilitate meaningful interactions with print (Lenters 2004;Moll and González 1994).…”

Receptive Vocabulary and Cross-Language Transfer of Phonemic Awareness in Kindergarten Children

“…Given the mismatch between their native language (L1) and the language of instruction (L2), researchers have assumed (e.g., Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993) that Spanish meta-linguistic abilities transfer (i.e., crosslanguage transfer [CLT]) to English. If that is the case, CLT of phonemic awareness softens the consequences of the mismatch (Lenters, 2004). But what happens to CLT if meta-linguistic abilities in L1 are not fully developed?…”