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Promising effects of an intervention: Young children’s literacy gains and changes in their home literacy activities from a bilingual family literacy program in Canada

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Frontiers of Education in China

Abstract

The goal of this paper was to examine promising effects of a bilingual family literacy program: to track the changes of families’ literacy activities through a bilingual family literacy intervention, and to examine the children literacy gains in both Chinese and English across socioeconomic sub-groups. The intervention was an eight-week, two hours per week, literacy program in three Chinese communities in Toronto. Parents, with their children, participated in the program. The extremely high attendance rate provided evidence that families enjoyed the family literacy intervention and felt that the sessions were worthwhile. For their families’ literacy activities, the three sites followed the same trend: reaching the peak of activity at week four, slightly dropping down at weeks five and six, and then increasing to a second peak at week seven or week eight. Results also showed that across the three groups, children of mothers with lower education levels made fewer gains in their English expressive vocabularies and their Chinese expressive vocabularies, than children whose mothers had a higher level of education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Elementary Education and Reading, Buffalo State College of State University of New York, New York, NY, 14222, USA

    Jing Zhang

  2. Institute of Child Study, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Toronto, M5R 2X2, Canada

    Janette Pelletier

  3. Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Newfoundland, A1B 3X8, Canada

    Antoinette Doyle

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  1. Jing Zhang
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  2. Janette Pelletier
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  3. Antoinette Doyle
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Correspondence to Jing Zhang.

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Zhang, J., Pelletier, J. & Doyle, A. Promising effects of an intervention: Young children’s literacy gains and changes in their home literacy activities from a bilingual family literacy program in Canada. Front. Educ. China 5, 409–429 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11516-010-0108-9

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