Poster #73 - Measurement and Implications of Student-Teacher Language Match for Multilingual Children

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Nationally, the number of children in American schools who speak a first language (L1) other than English and receive English language services has grown over 25% (from 3.8 million to 5.1 million) from 2000 to 2019 (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2021). According to NCES, 80.6% of the schools participating in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS, 2010-11) containing kindergarten classes reported serving students with an L1 other than English. Many students who speak an L1 other than English also come from racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse backgrounds (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). For such students, acquiring English takes place concurrently with their cognitive and socioemotional learning in school. These students appear to have different developmental trajectories compared to their monolingual English-speaking peers and may experience negative academic outcomes (Hoff, 2013). As these young multilingual students start school, teachers become an important resource for them to develop cognitive, academic, and social skills. Student-teacher match in sociodemographic characteristics has positive effects on teachers’ beliefs, expectations and student-teacher closeness among ethnic minority students (Yiu, 2013; Gershenson et al., 2016). In terms of student achievement, while large-scale analysis indicates that having a teacher of the same race/ethnicity leads to a small, positive effect on achievement (Egalite et al., 2015), a previous study drawing from earlier waves of the ECLS-K data collection (Jennings & DiPrete, 2010) found null effects of co-racial/co-ethnic teacher assignment among Latinx students in both academic achievement and social and behavioral development. However, the role of teachers’ matching language background and classroom language practices (dependent on the linguistic composition of the classroom) has not been fully investigated. By incorporating linguistic characteristics and practices into the investigation of student-teacher match, the study aims to contribute to how “match” is operationally defined in the context of education of multilingual learners.

Using a large and nationally representative sample of children (ECLS-K, 2011), this study examines teacher-level factors that may influence the cognitive and socioemotional outcomes of multilingual students from kindergarten to the Spring of first grade. Specifically, the study’s inquiry is two-fold, concerning both accessibility and impact on student outcomes. In terms of accessibility, we ask what proportion of multilingual students are taught by teachers who share their home language background and who are prepared with pedagogy to match their language learning needs (e.g., use of high-quality language practices for instruction). Further, we investigate how teacher-level language background match and high-quality language practices predict students’ cognitive and socioemotional outcomes by the end of first grade.

Preliminary analysis suggests that 49.65% of teachers of first-grade multilingual students who speak Spanish at home reported using Spanish for academic instruction at kindergarten; 33.38% of these teachers also reported using books or other reading materials in Spanish in their classrooms. Further analysis will investigate the impact of combinations of linguistically- and culturally-relevant matching teacher characteristics and classroom linguistic composition on students’ cognitive and socioemotional development.

Authors

• Yingzhi Dong, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Alison Louise Bailey, UCLA