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Early Childhood Education

University of Nebraska - Lincoln

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Early Language And Literacy Skills Of Spanish-Speaking Dual Language Learners, Alejandro Rodriguez, Marc Goodrich, Maggie Harms, Lisa Fitton Apr 2020

Early Language And Literacy Skills Of Spanish-Speaking Dual Language Learners, Alejandro Rodriguez, Marc Goodrich, Maggie Harms, Lisa Fitton

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The purpose of this study is to examine the early language measures that are the best predictors of English reading achievement and to determine whether assessing DLLs’ Spanish language skills contributes to the prediction of English reading achievement. Preschool and kindergarten often represent DLLs’ first significant exposure to English, and development of English language proficiency is strongly linked to English reading achievement (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). Because DLLs may not be exposed to English consistently prior to preschool or kindergarten, they often enter kindergarten with lower levels of English proficiency than their monolingual peers. This makes it difficult to identify …


Analyses Of Parental Interaction Behaviors And Young Children's Language Skills, Brenna Schulte, Rachel Beeney, Sydney Harrington, Ana Perez-Senic, Alondra Magallanes, Evelyn Estrada, Christine Marvin, Lisa Knoche, Courtney Boise Apr 2020

Analyses Of Parental Interaction Behaviors And Young Children's Language Skills, Brenna Schulte, Rachel Beeney, Sydney Harrington, Ana Perez-Senic, Alondra Magallanes, Evelyn Estrada, Christine Marvin, Lisa Knoche, Courtney Boise

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The Preschool Language Scale-5 (PLS) and samples of spontaneous speech from 20-30-minute play interactions between toddlers and parents, were used to examine children’s emerging language abilities. The speech samples were used to compute children’s rate of words, utterances and different words per minute, and mean length of utterances for a full transcript or simply the three longest utterances. Parents’ comments and directives were noted in five-minutes of toy play with their children. The proportion of parental comments to directives was found to be significantly related to all spontaneous speech measures, but not PLS scores. Spanish-speaking parents were found to have …