jill's+thoughts

The book //Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth// was written to identify, assess, and synthesize reasearch on language-minority children and youth. There are many factors that influence second-language literacy development such as the age of the student at which skills are aquired, differences with oral proficiency, first-language oral proficiency, sociocultural variables, and school factors. Some limitations to this study were budget, time constraints, and lack of public availability to some of the research studies that were reveiwed. This study focused on language-minority children ages 3-18, but most of the children studied were in elementary school. Most of the students studied were in Kindergarten through 5th grade. Peer reviewed journals, technical reports, and dissertations were used to answer the research questions. Most studies had 20 samples or more and lasted at least one year. Most of the studies were done here in the United States, but some were conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Finland, and Israel. Some of the findings in this study showed that it is necessary to have good decoding skills to develop good word recognition skills and comprehension. Another important factor is that general language proficiency is important when it comes to proficient reading. Another finding was that many factors such as the learner's age, his/her levels of second-language oral proficiency, cognitive abilities, and previous learning all affect a child's literacy. Some sociocultural variables were examined in this study such as immigration status, interactional characteristics, family influences, district and state policies, and language status. This study found that schools underestimate and underutilize parents' interest, motivation, and potential contributions. Another finding was that children who had postitive literacy experiences at home were more likely to have successful literacy outcomes at school. High quality literacy instruction is important for language-minority students. Little research was found on quality instruction for language minority students. Reaseach was found on quality instruction for language-majority students. These studies found that instruction should focus on phonemic awareness, decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. These concepts are important for all learners, but some adjustments will have to be made for ELL students. More research is needed to learn about what ELL students need when it comes to learning a second language. Catherine Snow describes the understanding of some tasks as it relates to second-language literacy skills. She states that we need to understand the complexity of the reading process, individual differences, development of reading, and the context in which second-language learners develop reading skills. Snow states that ELL students seemed to be proficient in word recognition and spelling, but vocabulary, comprehension, and writing were more difficult tasks. More reseach will need to be done in order to see how we as teachers can better accommodate our ELL students in these areas. In my Kindergarten class, I have 19 English Language Learners and 1 English Only student. It is towards the end of the year now and I am very proud of their progress, but I think my ELL students could have benefited more from hearing their peers speak English in class. Also, if a Spanish speaking student knows their friend speaks Spanish,they are more likely to speak to them in Spanish. I think if my class were more mixed (ELL's and EO's) then the Spanish speaking students would be speaking more English to their friends, but since my class has mostly Spanish speaking students they tend to speak Spanish to each other. They receive instuctional in English, but their conversations with their friends are in Spanish. Writing can be very difficult for my ELL students. I think when they translate their sentences from Spanish to English they get mixed up and that's why their sentences sometimes don't make sense. To help them with this problem, we will say and then read our complete sentences in our journals. This does seem to help, but I can see that they need more practice speaking English so they can write proficient sentences in English.