The Role of Bilingual Supports in Dual Language Learners’ Development throughout Early Education

• In Event: Early Childhood Classroom Contextual Factors Essential in the Academic Success of Dual Language Learners

Abstract

Dual language learners (DLLs) – young children developing in two or more languages – compose a third of the U.S. preschool and early elementary student population (MPI Data Hub, 2020). It is therefore increasingly important that classroom supports for DLLs reflect the most promising, empirically-informed practices designed to promote DLLs’ development. Currently, the predominant approach to supporting DLLs’ classroom-based learning is English immersion, in which DLLs are educated entirely in English with virtually no supports for their home language. This approach not only neglects their potential to develop bilingual skills, but it also ignores the growing evidence base showing that bilingual supports – that is, supports in both the child’s home language(s) and English – are critical for DLLs’ learning across domains, including English language and math skills (Burchinal et al., 2012; Miller, 2017; Partika et al., 2021; White et al., 2019).

Although promising, the evidence on the effectiveness of bilingual supports for DLLs is limited in several ways. First, most prior studies are correlational and therefore vulnerable to bias that could arise if, for instance, bilingual supports are channeled to children who have other advantages or disadvantages that covary with their academic outcomes. Second, nearly all extant studies have focused exclusively on supports experienced in the preschool year, limiting our understanding of bilingual supports may matter throughout early education. The present study addresses these limitations using data drawn from the Tulsa School Experiences & Early Development Study, a longitudinal study of the educational experiences of children with economic disadvantage that includes a large sample of Spanish-speaking DLLs (N = 429) and a wider set of bilingual supports than typically measured. I exploit repeated measures of DLLs’ classroom bilingual supports and outcomes across five years of schooling (preschool-third grade) to identify within-child associations between bilingual supports and DLLs’ English language and math skills.

I first examined the effect of three individual bilingual supports – teachers’ use of Spanish, whether the lead teacher speaks fluent Spanish, and provision of Spanish materials – coded as separate binary variables for each study year. Children’s skills included direct assessments of English letter-word identification (Woodcock et al., 2001), expressive vocabulary, and phonological awareness (Semel et al., 2003), math problem-solving (Woodcock et al., 2001), and numeral comparison (Lyons et al., 2016). Within-child fixed effects models were estimated predicting each fall outcome, separately, from bilingual supports the previous year, controlling for a rich set of time-varying child, family, teacher, and classroom covariates collected via parent and teacher surveys, as well as classroom observations. Results provide promising evidence that bilingual supports can promote DLLs’ growth in both English and math (Table 1).

Next steps include taking a person-centered, rather than variable-centered, approach using latent class analysis (LCA) to identify classes of students by the bilingual supports they received each school year. Given the exploratory nature of LCA, class enumeration will be conducted, and relevant fit statistics will be examined to identify the number of classes that best fits the data. Latent classes will then be used to predict children’s English and math skills

Author

• Anne Partika, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author