Closing the Gap: Addressing the Vocabulary Needs of English-Language Learners in Bilingual and Mainstream Classrooms

Abstract

Gaps in reading performance between Anglo and Latino children are associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge. An intervention was designed to enhance fifth graders' academic vocabulary. The meanings of academically useful words were taught together with strategies for using information from context, from morphology, from knowledge about multiple meanings, and from cognates to infer word meaning. Among the principles underlying the intervention were that new words should be encountered in meaningful text, that native Spanish speakers should have access to the text's meaning through Spanish, that words should be encountered in varying contexts, and that word knowledge involves spelling, pronunciation, morphology, and syntax as well as depth of meaning. Fifth graders in the intervention group showed greater growth than the comparison group on knowledge of the words taught, on depth of vocabulary knowledge, on understanding multiple meanings, and on reading comprehension. The intervention effects were as large for the English-language learners (ELLs) as for the English-only speakers (EOs), though the ELLs scored lower on all pre- and posttest measures. The results show the feasibility of improving comprehension outcomes for students in mixed ELL-EO classes, by teaching word analysis and vocabulary learning strategies.

Generating Knowledge of Academic Language Among Urban Middle School Students

“…A similarly structured intervention, the Vocabulary Improvement Program (Carlo et al, 2004), obtained an effect size of .50. The Stahl and Fairbanks (1986) metaanalysis of vocabulary curricula reviewed studies with effect sizes ranging as high as 2 under short-term laboratory-teaching conditions and as low as 0 under more authentic educational conditions.…”

Desarrollo de la lectoescritura en español en alumnos bilingües

“…Estos programas generalmente presentan una combinación de aprendizaje incidental y de instrucción directa que incorpora a la enseñanza de palabras individuales, la enseñanza de estrategias de aprendizaje léxico para la inferencia del significado de las palabras desconocidas, y que proporciona múltiples oportunidades para el descubrimiento de nuevas palabras en textos reales (Baumann, Edwards, Font, Tereshinski, Kame'enui y Olejnik 2002;Beck, McKeown y Omanson 1987;Carlo et al 2004). …”

“…Tal y como observamos en el apartado sobre conocimiento del vocabulario, el grupo experimental mostró ganancias mayores en la comprensión de lectura que el grupo de control. Por otra parte, dado que la instrucción se centró en el desarrollo del vocabulario y no en las habilidades de comprensión lectora, el hecho de que hubiera cualquier mejora en la comprensión de lectura es ya notable y corrobora los resultados de estudios anteriores que han mostrado que la enseñanza de vocabulario tiene un impacto positivo en la capacidad de comprensión de lectora (por ejemplo, Carlo et al 2004;McKeown et al 1983;Beck et al 1987). Cuando los resultados se desagregaron adicionalmente por la lengua materna de los participantes, se encontró que las puntuaciones medias de comprensión lectora de los hablantes nativos de español eran más altas que las de los hablantes nativos de inglés, tanto para el grupo experimental como el de control (véase la Tabla 6).…”

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations

“…These tools draw on research in education, which found that text adaptation can improve the reading comprehension skills for learners of English (Yano et al, 1994;Carlo et al, 2004). The language learning technology often consists of methods for text simplification and adaptation, which is performed either at syntactic (Carroll et al, 1999;Siddharthan et al, 2004) or lexical level (Carroll et al, 1998;Devlin et al, 2000;Burstein et al, 2007).…”