Stanford study shows differences in learning to read in Spanish compared with English

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.