Measuring the Specific Instructional Practices Experienced by Dual Language Learners in Preschool Classrooms

• In Event: 1-187 - Bilingual Education Program Models & Classroom Practices for DLLs: Processes and outcomes from preschool through elementary school

Integrative Statement

A large and growing share of children under the age of 5 in the United States have a home language that is not English, and many of these children are served in early care and education programs (ECE) (Espinosa et al., 2017). A consensus in the field indicates that basic high-quality ECE instruction must be enhanced to meet the unique linguistic and developmental needs of DLLs (e.g, Castro et al., 2011]). To facilitate the learning and development of DLLs, teachers should provide linguistic scaffolding, namely, adjust the level and mode of their communication (e.g., verbal, gestural) to enhance DLL children understanding of the content of instruction and effectively support and promote higher-order thinking. An impediment to developing a greater understanding and improving the quality of practices designed to meet the needs of DLLs is the fact that most measures of ECE quality were developed for use in settings with English-only instruction and monolingual populations. Thus, I have developed a new classroom observational approach to address this limitation. The goals of the current study are: (1) to evaluate the factor structure using exploratory factor analysis (EFA); and (2) to investigate the relationship of the measure with children’s language and executive function (EF) outcomes.

The New York City sample includes 155 children (56% female) from 38 classrooms. Thirty-three percent of children were Mexican, 30% Dominican, 10% Puerto-Rican, 10% South-American, and 5% Central-American, and 12% Mixed. Sixty-five percent spoke predominately Spanish at home.

The DLL specific observational tool consisted of 16 items using a four-point scale. Observers watched four children per classroom, in turn, in a series of alternating 5-min cycles, for an average of 24 observations (six per child). Observations continued throughout all activity settings: at each cycle, observers recorded relevant setting information, such as the type of activity (e.g., whole group) and number of adults and children present in the room. Language and EF tasks included the Bilingual Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (B-ROWPVT), the Bilingual Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (B-EOWPVT), and the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment – Assessor Report (PSRA-AR).

Due to reduced variation in the items from the observational tool, the 4-point response scale was transformed onto a binary scale for the EFA analysis. Next, data from each of the five-min observation cycles were averaged to obtain final item scores for each child. EFA analysis suggested a two-factor structure – representing Didactic, Language Modeling (e.g., teacher’s use of simultaneous interpretation) and Elaborative & Responsive Language (e.g., expanding children’s language) (see Table 1). MLM models that account for clustering at the classroom level, controlling for key covariates, revealed that teacher’s use of didactic & language modeling was positively associated with DLL children’s expressive vocabulary, but negatively associated with their positive engagement (see Table 2). Elaborative and responsive language was positively associated with children’s positive engagement and attention regulation skills. Further analyses will include a more in-depth evaluation of the individual items; including using item-response theory and growth curve modeling, (preliminary results indicate that there is across cycle differences).

Author

• Natalia Rojas, New York University
  Presenting Author