Contextual effects of bilingual programs on beginning reading.

This study of 1,338 Spanish-speaking 1st graders examined contextual effects of bilingual programs on reading comprehension and the effect of language of instruction within these contexts. The study included 128 classrooms in 32 schools located in border Texas and in urban Texas and California. These classrooms used either English immersion or Spanish maintenance bilingual programs. Detailed observations of teachers' instructional language were made, sampled within the year. The analyses allowed classroom-level differences to be separated from student-level differences, and for Spanish and English passage comprehension to be considered simultaneously. While mean differences between programs were reduced for English passage comprehension, maintenance programs still outperformed immersion programs in Spanish. Results also indicated large program and locale covariance differences at the classroom level, implying important differences in how these programs operate in these locales. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual phonological awareness: Multilevel construct validation among Spanish-speaking kindergarteners in transitional bilingual education classrooms.

The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks was examined with a sample of 812 kindergarten children from 71 transitional bilingual education program classrooms located in 3 different types of geographic regions in California and Texas. Tasks of PA, including blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme elision, were measured in Spanish and in English and analyzed via multilevel confirmatory factor analysis at the task level. Results showed that the PA tasks defined a unitary construct at both the student and classroom levels in each language. English and Spanish PA factors were related to each other (.93 and .83 at the student and classroom levels, respectively) as well as to word reading, both within languages (correlations estimated between .74 and .93) and across languages (correlations estimated between .47 and .79). Although the PA constructs were statistically separable in each language, the high correlation between Spanish and English PA indicates considerable overlap in these abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pictures and words: Spanish and English vocabulary in classrooms.

The current study evaluated the relation between Spanish and English vocabulary. Whereas previously reported correlations have revealed strong differences among types of vocabulary measures used and the ages of the students tested, no prior study had used a multilevel model to control for classroom-level differences. The current study used multiple measures of vocabulary—picture vocabulary and narrative production tasks—in multilevel models of 1,300 Spanish-speaking students in 247 kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms in English immersion and bilingual transitional programs. The current results highlight the need to separate classroom effects from student effects, since for vocabulary measures, student-level correlations were strongly biased toward zero when classroom-level correlations were opposite in direction from student-level correlations. Most important, the current results support a strong distinction between types of vocabulary measure (e.g., picture vs. narrative) and suggest sizable influence of instruction for questions of bilingual performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)