Effects of a paired bilingual reading program and an English-only program on the reading performance of English learners in Grades 1–3☆
Section snippets
1. Introduction
The student population of English learners (ELs) 1
Participants
Participants in this study were 214 first-grade Spanish-speaking ELs enrolled in 12 Oregon elementary schools during the 2005–06 school year. We followed these students for three years (i.e., until the end of the 2007–2008 school year). All 12 schools met the criteria to participate in the Reading First initiative. These criteria included (a) having more than 21% of third-grade students, and more than 15 students total, score below the state reading proficiency standard; (b) having at least 50%
Results
Results of our analysis are presented in two sections. First, we compare the growth rates on oral reading fluency in English from first to third grades between ELs in the paired bilingual group and ELs in the English-only group. Second, we compare the general reading outcomes of ELs in the paired bilingual group with those of ELs in the English-only group, taking into account student-level of oral reading fluency performance.
Table 4 presents the descriptive statistics of reading fluency and
Discussion
Overall, results indicate that the paired bilingual reading approach appeared to work as well as, or better than, the English-only reading approach in terms of reading development and outcomes. Differences in results, however, varied based on (a) the reading outcome examined, (b) grade, and (c) student level of oral reading fluency performance.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Dr. Claude Goldenberg for his thoughtful comments of an earlier draft of this manuscript.
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This work was supported by an Oregon Reading First subcontract from the Oregon Department of Education to the University of Oregon (8948). The original Oregon Reading First award was granted by the U.S. Department of Education to the Oregon Department of Education (S357A0020038).