Working with Latino Preschoolers: The Literacy and Language Goals of Teachers and Mothers

• In Event: Defending Childhood: Toward a Broader View of Early Education

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes
This presentation highlights issues that teachers who work with children who are learning English as a second language face by discussing the findings of a study that explored teachers’ and Mexican immigrant mothers’ literacy goals for a group of Head Start, ELL children.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
A “cultural models” approach (Gee, 1999, 2005) was used to better understand the contrasting and somewhat contradictory language and literacy goals of the preschool teacher and the children’s mothers. Gee categorizes cultural models as a type of taken-for-granted mental scripts that help people in meaning-making activities. He suggests that cultural models consist of the cultural and social resources that color a person’s perception as to what constitutes “normal,” “natural,” or “appropriate.”
Once we ascertained the mothers and teacher’s cultural models, we examined them using Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural framework as our lens. This framework proposes that children’s past knowledge must be incorporated in any teaching/learning process.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The findings shared in this presentation are part of a larger qualitative study (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) that explored the literacy development of Mexican-American, Spanish-dominant children at home and school. The coded data were crafted into vignettes that reveal the way the teacher conceptualized language development in her classroom.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Classroom observations over the course of one year were conducted in one teacher’s classroom in a Head Start program in an urban, predominantly Latino immigrant community in Arizona . The teacher has worked in the early education field for more than sixteen years and with Latino families for twelve of those years. Interviews were conducted with this teacher and with five Mexican immigrant mothers of the children in the class.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
This study brings to light large discontinuities in the language socialization practices and cultural expectations that young Mexican-American ELLs experience between their school and their homes. At school, the students were exposed to an environment that did not recognize the literacy learning that occurred in their Spanish-speaking homes, and focused instead on teaching them exclusively in English. At home, however, the children’s interactions with their families reinforced their Spanish-speaking skills and Mexican culture, which helped them to gain literacy knowledge. Current English-only, state policies led the teacher to adopt a deficit cultural model (Banks, 1994), emphasizing English skills above and beyond any other ability (Alba & Nee, 2003).
6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This study highlights the multifaceted set of issues (political, lingual, cultural and pedagogical) related to the language and literacy education of young Spanish-speaking children who are learning English as a second language in U. S. schools. Demonstrating how teachers are often misinformed and ill-equipped to work with linguistically diverse children, particularly on issues of language and literacy, it makes evident the urgent need to prepare teachers to better meet the challenges of teaching a linguistically and culturally diverse student body.

Authors

• Delis Cuellar, University of Oregon

• Eugene E. Garcia, Arizona State University