Introduction

How Infants and Young Children Learn

How to Support Your Child's Language Development

Getting Your Child Ready to Read

How to Keep Your Child Healthy and Safe

What You Need to Know if Your Child Has Special Needs

Federally Funded Research on Spanish-English Biliteracy

Federally Funded Research on Spanish-English Biliteracy

The seven research grants that were funded are described below:

1. Oracy/Literacy Development in Spanish-Speaking Children
   Directed by Dr. David Francis; this grant was awarded to the University of Houston, Houston, TX
   
   This large five-year program of research consists of five integrated projects studying children, using both cross- sectional and longitudinal designs. The researchers are studying 1,600 children cross-sectionally and nearly 1,500 children in more than 144 classrooms in kindergarten through third grade longitudinally over a four-year period. The children are in four different sites in rural and urban Texas and urban California. The researchers are examining instructional methods in four different program models: language immersion, early and late exit, and dual language. As part of this work, the researchers are developing new tests in Spanish and adapting existing tests in English. They will not only test the children but will also observe teaching methods in the classrooms. One project will employ both qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the context in which English-language learners develop: the home, school and community. In 2001, this research team also won an additional grant to study language and brain imaging (magnetoencephalography) in some of these same children. This additional project will provide an expanded assessment of the children's language functioning and will study brain-related changes associated with the simultaneous development of two languages.
   
   

2. Acquiring Literacy in English
   Directed by Dr. Diane August; this grant was awarded to the Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC
   
   This large five-year program of research consists of three projects. One will study 300 four-year-old Spanish-English bilingual children and 100 four-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children, and a small group of each will be more intensively studied. The researchers are developing new tests to use in their research and are conducting a longitudinal study of the relationship between growth in language skills in the two languages to try to describe and predict the relationship between the home and school environments. They want to understand how the process of learning to read and write differs for monolingual and bilingual children. The second project will explore the role of the mother tongue in the development of English reading ability in Spanish-speaking children by studying fourth and fifth grade students' performance in Spanish reading, English reading, and "metalinguistic" awareness of phonology and morphology (the conscious knowledge about each language's sound system and word structure). This project will also study how teachers instruct these children and will develop materials that teachers can use in the classroom. The third project is a longitudinal study of spelling in Spanish-English bilingual children from grades 3-6. This study will try to explain high levels of transfer from Spanish spelling to English spelling and determine the relationships between English spelling skills and English reading ability in bilingual children.
   
   

3. Bilingual Preschoolers: Precursors to Literacy
   Directed by Dr. Carol Hammer; this grant was awarded to Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
   
   This five-year project is a longitudinal study of the language acquisition, literacy development, and home environment of 100 Head Start children of Puerto Rican descent from age 4-6 years. Fifty of the children are acquiring Spanish and English sequentially, and 50 are acquiring the two languages simultaneously. The researchers will also do a more in-depth study of 24 of these children. The researchers want to identify patterns of bilingual language acquisition that will result in better reading and writing abilities and identify specific factors that can be used to create special techniques for helping children at risk for difficulties in developing literacy skills.
   
   

4. Bilingual Early Language and Literacy Support
   Directed by Dr. Mark Innocenti; this grant was awarded to Utah State University, Logan, UT
   
   This five-year project is a multisite longitudinal study that will examine language and emergent literacy outcomes in programs that offer both early English immersion and home language and literacy support. The project will include 192 Spanish-speaking mother-child pairs from the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population in Utah, half from each of two different preschool settings. The pairs will be followed beginning at age 1, 2, or 3 years and will be followed until entry into kindergarten, using many different measures, to learn about the effects of early immersion in English language, language in the home environment, and a specific intervention program aimed at helping children get ready to learn to read.
   
   

5. Predicting English Literacy in Spanish-Speaking Children
   Directed by Dr. Frank Manis; this grant was awarded to the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
   
   For this two-year project, the research investigator is using a battery of tests that he has already developed in Spanish and administered to 330 kindergartners in fall 1998 and spring 1999. In this new project, he is continuing the research by retesting these same children at the end of kindergarten. He also tested them at the end of first grade in both Spanish and English and at the ends of second and third grades in English. Analyses will focus on whether predictors of reading and writing in English are the same for bilingual children as for previous studies of English monolingual children. He will be comparing the best predictors of both Spanish and English literacy.
   
   

6. Latino Children as Family Translators: Links to Literacy
   Directed by Dr. Marjorie Orellana; grant awarded to Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
   
   In this two-year project, the researcher is studying fifth- and sixth-grade Latino children who act as English translators for Spanish-speaking family members. She is exploring how this activity affects the literacy development of those children. Specifically, the study will examine strategies used when translating in daily life situations to determine which of them also are or could be used in reading and writing tasks in school. It is possible that some of these strategies might be used with other English-language learners to maximize success in the acquisition of English literacy and more generally in mastering academic tasks.
   
   

7. Predictors of Reading in Spanish-Speaking Children
   Proposed by Dr. Alexandra Gottarda and Directed by Dr. Michael Wolfe; this grant was awarded to Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI.
   
   The researchers for this two-year study use a longitudinal design to study two cohorts of Spanish-speaking children, one from preschool into first grade and one from kindergarten into second grade. They use tests of phonological awareness (the sound system of the language), pseudoword repetition (ability to repeat non-words that fit the sound system of the language but are not real words), rapid naming of objects and numbers, syntactic (grammatical) processing, letter naming, and spelling processing. They hope to learn what factors predict English reading-skill development in Spanish-speaking children.