Claude Goldenberg and his colleagues have a paper in press with American Education Research Journal detailing the results of a comparative study of Spanish reading acquisition in the U.S. and in Mexico. In the U.S., the English approach to teaching initial reading via phonemic awareness is also applied to early Spanish reading instruction. Such is not the case in Mexico, where the syllable is typically the unit of initial instruction. Findings showed that children in Mexico performed significantly below their U.S.-based peers in phonemic awareness in kindergarten (because it wasn't taught), but by second grade the Mexican students either matched or surpassed their peers in the U.S. These findings suggest that applying English approaches to Spanish reading does not make a great deal of sense (at least when it comes to teaching kids to read words) given the orthographic differences between the two languages. The paper is freely available here.
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7/3/2017 07:33:01 am
English language is not easy for us and but it is language of international countries. So many course is also give the training of English. It is not impossible and in life we need only focus to get the sucess.
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I am a professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, and director of the Curriculum & Instruction doctoral program. I have served as an associate editor at Child Development, Applied Psycholinguistics, and an editor at Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. I was a bilingual teacher in Detroit, MI and have worked in district, state, and nonprofit settings. I work with bilingual learners from multilingual homes in K-8 settings, thinking about language use and development, cross-linguistic relations, instructional interventions, and teacher practice. I've published a bunch of articles and book chapters, and have developed language and reading curricula. I always work in close collaboration with teachers to facilitate the translation of research to practice.