1-136 - Assessing School Readiness Skills of Spanish-speaking Dual Language Learners: Moving Beyond Standard English Achievement Measures

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

It is well-documented that at kindergarten entry, Spanish-speaking Dual Language Learner (DLL) children trail their monolingual English-speaking peers in important English language skills such as syntactic knowledge, phonological awareness, emergent literacy, and in particular, vocabulary (Hoff, 2013; Mancilla-Martinez & Lesaux, 2011; Páez et al., 2007). Further, persistent reading achievement gaps between DLLs and monolingual-English speakers (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2013) suggest this trend continues in K-12 schooling.
Much of the literature on this achievement gap is based on research using standard English language achievement measures, primarily because these measures are widely available and have extensive reliability. However, these achievement tests may underestimate the true skills of Spanish-speaking DLL children.
The purpose of this symposium is to move beyond these traditionally used English language assessment measures, and instead attempt to understand the school readiness skills of Spanish-speaking DLL preschoolers with a more comprehensive set of outcomes in a strength-based approach. We do so in a unique set of three papers. Paper 1 investigated the Spanish vocabulary development of DLLs on Spanish language outcomes rather than English ones. Paper 2 examined the relationship between home language and executive function, whose benefits on academic performance are not necessarily predicated on English abilities. Paper 3 conducted qualitative observations to explore the ways in which teachers use Spanish in a real-world context to more fully document language interactions actually occurring in classrooms.
We hope this symposium will push the field to consider Spanish-speaking DLL children’s development more broadly and in a more comprehensive manner.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chair

• Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Preschoolers’ Spanish Vocabulary Development in the Context of Spanish Instruction - Presenting Author: Jennifer Wallace Jacoby, Mount Holyoke College; Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, Vanderbilt University

• How SES and Home Language Environments Contribute to the EF and School Readiness of Hispanic Children at Kindergarten Entry - Presenting Author: Christa Mulker Greenfader, University of California, Irvine

• Spanish Use in Head Start: Qualitative Evidence from Four Classrooms - Presenting Author: Elizabeth B Miller, New York University