Acquiring Literacy in English:
Crosslinguistic, Intralinguistic, and Developmental Factors
Research and Assessment Core
| Principal Investigator: | Dorry Kenyon, Center for Applied Linguistics |
| Co-Investigators: | Valerie Malabonga, Center for Applied Linguistics |
| Catherine Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
Purpose
Findings
Further Information
PURPOSE
The Research and Assessment Core provided support for the three subprojects individually, as well as cross-project comparative data and analysis.
Subproject Support
The Core assisted the subprojects of the research program by providing expertise in the development and adaptation of assessments and other instruments and addressing issues in using such instruments with Spanish speakers learning English. The Core also investigated the reliability and validity of these instruments. Furthermore, the Core developed the guidelines and procedures for external researchers to apply when using the researcher-developed tests, thereby further validating them.
Table 1 lists the assessments that were developed for each of the subprojects.
Table 1. Researcher-Developed Assessments by Subproject
Collaborators |
Instruments |
|---|---|
All subprojects |
|
Subproject 1 |
|
Subproject 2 |
|
Subproject 3 |
|
Contextualized Performance Levels
The Core provided comparative data on the levels of performance achieved by monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking children that helped contextualize the performance of bilingual children participating in the larger study. The comparative data was used to develop benchmarks or Contextualized PerformanceLevels on key assessments developed by the researchers.
Cross-Project Analyses
The Core conducted cross-subproject analyses to determine the role of home and school language and literacy in the development of word- and text- level reading skills of the bilingual children who were the subjects of the study.
FINDINGS
Subproject Support
Validation of the researcher-developed tests continued as external researchers used them and submitted their data.
Contextualized Performance Levels
The comparative data collected by the Core showed that the performance of the bilingual children in the study was very similar to that of comparable monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking children.
Cross-Project Analyses
Analysis conducted by the Core produced two major findings.
- The effects of family socioeconomic status and home language use on word-level reading decrease with age. These home variables play a larger role for kindergartners than for third and fifth graders.
- Oral vocabulary, above and beyond socioeconomic status, home language use, home literacy practices, and school language use, plays an important role in word-level reading for children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade, and in text-level reading for third- and fifth- grade children.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Read Research and Assessment Core summary [PDF, 283 KB] 
View list of resulting publications
Read descriptions of instruments developed:
- Parent Interview Response Sheet
- Book Task (English and Spanish)
- Cognate Awareness Test (English)
- Developmental Contrastive Spelling Test (English and Spanish)
- Developmental Contrastive Decoding Test (English)
- Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension (DARC)
- Extract the Base Test (English and Spanish)
- Narrative Production Task (English and Spanish)
- Phonological Awareness Task (English and Spanish)
- Phonological Transfer Test
- Spelling Transfer Test
- Test of Phonological Processing in Spanish (TOPPS)