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BILITERACY FOR BILINGUAL CHILDREN BY

GRADE 1: THE SED CENTER PRESCHOOL


READING PROJECT, PHASE 1
BY: ROBERT LADO
IRMA HANSON
TIMOTHY DEMILLIO

Due

to socio-economic
status,
educational
attainment and all, it is
largely on the basis of
learning to have English
skills. It is already predetermined from Grade 1
for those who have
deficiency of this wont
succeed at all.

THE CHALLENGE

In

the US, SpanishSpeaking


school
age
children score far below
the national average in
reading.

Reading Retardation among Hispanic


bilinguals is preventable because:
Spanish

provides
an
easier access to reading
than English since it has
fewer
spelling
irregularities
Learning
to
read
a
language they know is
easier than learning to
read English, which they
know less well or not at all
(Modiano 1973)
The transfer of reading
skills from Spanish to
English is almost total,
and as a result the time it

Background of the Study


Some who oppose the teaching of reading before Grade 1

appeal to Piaget s developmental stages for their argument.


They believe that learning to read requires concrete
operational thinking which, according to Piaget, develop after
the age of six years.
According to Lado (1976), he view reading as language
processing and learning to read as another dimension of
language acquisition.
The researchers view is that learning to read represents
symbolic learning, and according to Piaget, symbolic thinking
develops maximally between the ages of two and six years
old.
Their view of learning to read through the native language
before Grade 1 is not only not in conflict with Piagets
developmental stages, it actually takes advantage of them.

The Goal of the SED Center


Preschool Reading Project
To give pre-school Hispanic children reading experience

in meaningful play situations through the native


language first and later through English.
Possible to control input in early reading more easily
than in language acquisition, they selected the
experiences according to their linguistic knowledge and
insights to provide a graded sequence that does not
overload the acquisition capacity of the children.

The Setting in SED Center PreSchool


It involves 50 children ages three to five years from low-

income bilingual families in Washington D.C. enrolled at the


center
The original five-year-old children have gone to first grade
in other schools after one year of reading experience.
The original four-year-olds are now five years old and will
leave at the end of their second year of reading.
The original three-year-olds will have a third year of reading
in the basic design, which assigns the first year of reading
in the basic design , which assigns the first year and a half
to Spanish and the second year and a half to English.
To understand these, each child is normally introduced first
to the Spanish Phase and upon successful completion of
that Phase, English is the introduced.

The Method
The program is divided into

two phases:
Phase 1 concerned with
teaching the children to read
Spanish,
their
native
language.
Phase
2 consists of
teaching the preschoolers to
read in English once the
Spanish reading experience is
completed.
It

involves play activity,


reading
Spanish
and
in
English has become an
enjoyable experience.

Sequence of Curriculum
Children learn by progressive familiarization
with the units and skills of reading of
reading through four basic steps:
1. Naming
2. Matching
3. Recognition
4. Reading

Interim Evaluation
SED Center Preschool Reading Project completed
its first year in August 1979
1. All of the 50 three, four and five-year-old
children learn to read (decode and comprehend)
some Spanish phase of the program.
2. Voluntary attendance was high
3. Parents reported they were encourages by the
results in the childrens reading program.
4. An informal telephone survey suggested that
childrens progress correlated highly with parent
home-use of the reading material

Significance of the Study


Dr.

Theodore Andersson, author of Bilingual


Schooling in the United States and a consultant to
the project, wrote the Right to Read (July 1979) of
the projects first year and its theoritical
significance:

There are in the literature many individual cases of


very young children learning to read one and even
two languages, usually with the encouragement of
their parents; but group learning such as this is
quite exceptional, especially when it is combined
with freedom by the individual child to progress at
his own rate.

Result of the Study


Another

group of three-year-olds but a


slight turnover in the four and five-year-old
groups undergone the same phase.
The four and five- year-old children who
have participated from the time the project
began
are
reading
Spanish
at
a
performance level equivalent to late first or
early second grade Spanish readers, and
have begun the English phase.
37 four and five-year-olds, including new
enrolees, 15 have passed the midpoint of
the English phase and 8 are presently
reading first grade materials in both

Implications
They expect 9 children graduating at that

time to be biliterate after two years in


preschool reading. Those nine children
represent 70% of the five-year-olds who
have attended the project from the
beginning.

Indications and
Recommendations
The concept of preschool biliteracy should be

considered by those school systems which are aware


that far too many Hispanic preschoolers are
tomorrows elementary school remedial
Though the number of children participated in this

project is small but the success means that children


otherwise treated as having language handicap in
first grade will probably be treated as having
language advantage
That advantage potentially exists for every youg

Spanish-speaker in the United States

THANK YOU!

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