Supporting Children Who Are English Language Learners Succeed in Their Early Literacy Development.
Gail Gillon
PMID 37279700WHAT IT FOUND
Children learning English as an extra language in New Zealand classes using the Better Start Literacy Approach grew phonics and listening skills at the same rate as matched peers.
Early gaps narrowed, but the study did not compare this approach with usual teaching.
Key findings
01After 10 weeks of class teaching with the Better Start Literacy Approach, children learning English as an extra language showed growth in phoneme awareness and phonic knowledge, and their growth did not differ from matched peers who were not identified as English language learners.
02After 20 weeks, children learning English as an extra language showed greater growth in oral comprehension than matched peers, and the baseline gap in oral comprehension was no longer significant.
03During Tier 2 small group teaching, children learning English as an extra language showed greater growth on phoneme-grapheme matching Set 2 between the 10-week and 20-week assessments than matched peers.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
This was a secondary analysis of anonymised implementation data, not a randomised trial, and it did not compare children in Better Start Literacy Approach classes with children in classes that did not use the approach. English language learner status was recorded by class teachers or school administrators, and the researchers did not collect information about each child's home language, how long they had been learning English, or preschool language experiences. The 20-week oral language sample was selected for assessment because children showed slower progress or had received Tier 2 support; it was not all children in the cohort, with 329 English language learners and 315 non-English language learners. Asian and Pacific ethnicities were grouped together, so findings cannot be interpreted for specific languages or cultural groups. The nonword spelling difference was statistically significant but had a very low effect size and was described as only one grapheme difference. The data come from New Zealand English-medium junior school classes, so they may not apply directly to other education systems.
Declared interests
The author states that she helped develop the Better Start Literacy Approach, is Founding Director of the Child Well-being Research Institute at the University of Canterbury, is Co-Director for the Better Start National Science Challenge, receives royalties from The Guilford Press for an authored book on phonological awareness, and has roles in speech-language therapy associations. The New Zealand Ministry of Education funds national implementation of the approach.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the results as proof that the Better Start Literacy Approach, or any one part of it, caused the growth. The study compared children learning English as an extra language with matched peers inside the same multi-component approach, and it did not compare those classes with classes that did not use the approach. The approach included class teaching, small-group teaching, professional learning, coaching, family engagement, monitoring assessments, culturally responsive guidance, and decodable texts, and the contribution of any single component cannot be separated.