Do Early Literacy Skills in Children's First Language Promote Development of Skills in Their Second Language? An Experimental Evaluation of Transfer

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the cross-language transfer of the emergent literacy skills of preschoolers who were Spanish-speaking language minority children in the context of an experimental intervention study. Ninety-four children were randomly assigned to either a control condition (High/Scope preschool curriculum) or to receive small-group pull-out instruction (Literacy Express Preschool Curriculum) in English or initially in Spanish and transitioning to English. We examined whether children's initial skills in one language moderated the impact of the intervention on those same skills in the other language at posttest. Results demonstrated that, for children in the English-only intervention condition, initial Spanish receptive vocabulary and elision skills moderated the impact of the intervention on English receptive vocabulary and elision skills at posttest, respectively. For children in the transitional intervention condition, initial English definitional vocabulary and elision skills moderated the impact of the intervention on Spanish definitional vocabulary and elision skills at posttest, respectively. Results for the vocabulary interactions, as well as the elision interaction for the English-only intervention group comparisons, supported the notion of transfer of specific linguistic information across languages. Results for elision interaction for the transitional intervention group comparisons supported language-independent transfer. Implications for the theory of cross-language transfer of emergent literacy skills are discussed.

Keywords: English language learners; emergent literacy; language minority; transfer.

Figure 1

Adjusted Posttest Scores for English Receptive Vocabulary (Figure 1a) and English Elision (Figure 1b) Outcomes for Children with Varying Levels of Initial Skill on Spanish Receptive Vocabulary (S-Rvoc; Figure 1a) and Spanish Elision (S-Elision; Figure 1b) Measure for English-only Intervention Condition Comparison.

Figure 2

Adjusted Posttest Scores for English Blending Outcomes for Children with Varying Levels of Initial Skill on English Blending Measure (E-Blending) for Transitional Intervention Condition Comparison.

Figure 3. Adjusted Posttest Scores for Spanish Definitional Vocabulary (Figure 3a) and Elision (Figure 3b) Outcomes for Children with Varying Levels of Initial Skill on English Definitional Vocabulary (E-DV; Figure 3a) and Elision (E-Elision; Figure 3b) for Transitional Intervention Condition Comparison

Figure 4

Adjusted Posttest Scores for Spanish Elision Outcomes for Children with Varying Levels of Initial Skill on Spanish Elision Measure (S-Elision) for Transitional Intervention Condition Comparison.