Effectiveness of Content-Area Literacy Intervention on Academic Vocabulary for First-Grade English Learners and English-Proficient Students

• In Event: Toward an Asset-Oriented Approach in Exploring Vocabulary Performance Among Dual Language Learners in the United States

Abstract

Objectives: This study investigated the effects of content-area literacy intervention, Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), on general and domain-specific academic vocabulary for first-grade English learners (ELs) and English-proficient students (EPs). Using a randomized controlled trial design, we addressed the following research questions (RQs):

RQ1: Do the intervention effects on academic vocabulary differ by ELs and EPs?
RQ2: Does student reading motivation mediate the intervention effects for ELs and EPs?

Theoretical framework: Integrating domain-specific content into early-grade literacy instruction is essential to preparing children to read complex texts with high knowledge demands in later grades (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Although researchers have developed and evaluated the efficacy of content-literacy interventions (e.g., Connor et al., 2017; Guthrie et al., 2004), they are exclusively focused on upper elementary and middle-grade monolingual students (Douglas & Albro, 2014).
The MORE intervention was designed to improve first graders’ content knowledge without adverse consequences for foundational word-reading skills. The intervention had components including conceptually related science texts with repeated exposures to semantically associated vocabulary and concept mapping to make connections among words. Developing content knowledge can support incidental acquisition of academic words and allow readers to attend meanings of words to make inferences and construct a coherent mental representation of text (Cervetti, Wright, & Hwang, 2016). In addition, the MORE intervention emphasizes learning goals that foster students’ motivation to learn from texts, which may promote word consciousness and word knowledge depth.

Data Sources: First-grade ELs (n = 136) and EPs (n = 526) were recruited from 10 schools and randomly assigned to either MORE (n = 444) or business-as-usual (BAU; n = 218) condition. The Measure of Academic Progress assessment was used to assess students’ general academic vocabulary and researcher-developed semantic association task was used to assess science-specific academic vocabulary. The Me and My Reading Profile (Marinak et al., 2015) was adopted as a self-report measure of reading motivation.

Methods: Hierarchical linear modeling and mediation analyses were employed to address RQ1 and RQ2, respectively.

Results: The MORE intervention effects on general academic vocabulary did not vary by language status; that is, ELs and EPs in MORE condition significantly outperformed their BAU counterparts (see Table 4). Likewise, the intervention effects on science-specific academic vocabulary did not differ by ELs and EPs as all MORE students had higher scores than BAU students (RQ1). In addition, while the intervention directly affected academic vocabulary for EPs, the intervention indirectly influenced academic vocabulary for ELs via reading motivation (RQ2).

Scientific significance: This study contributes to the literature by indicating that critical components of upper-grade content-literacy instruction can work effectively for first-grade students. For ELs, particularly, high-quality content-literacy intervention can affect their reading motivation, which, in turn, can foster general and science-specific academic vocabulary knowledge depth. Young children can build knowledge through reading informational texts and repeated exposure to academic vocabulary in semantically meaningful contexts and then simultaneously leverage content knowledge for reading motivation and academic vocabulary development.

Authors

• Jackie Eunjung Relyea, North Carolina State University

• James S. Kim, Harvard University