Sociocultural Variation in Literacy Achievement

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe the variations in literacy achievement among native and non-native upper primary school children (grades three to six) in the Netherlands. Various measures of word decoding, reading literacy and writing skill were collected from 1091 native Dutch children, 753 children with a former Dutch colonial background and 580 children with a Mediterranean background. The results showed the non-native children to lag behind their native peers on all of the tasks, although the differences on the decoding and writing tasks were fairly small. The Mediterranean children scored significantly lower than the ex-colonial children on all of the reading literacy tasks but equally high on the decoding and writing tasks. For both the native and non-native children, the same underlying factor structure was found to characterise their literacy achievement. Grade and ethnic status consistently predicted the factor scores for Word Decoding, Reading Literacy and Text Writing. In addition, socio-economic status (SES) predicted Reading Literacy and the variable sex predicted Writing Skills.

Language and preliteracy skills in bilinguals and monolinguals at preschool age: effects of exposure to richly inflected speech from birth

“…As pointed out by Swain (1985) young language learners need opportunities to speak and to be understood by others speaking the languages they hear. Some evidence exists that frequency of social interactions, shared engagements with caregivers at home and day care, and joint activities with siblings and peers promote bilingual development (Pearson, 2007;Tabors & Snow, 2001;Verhoeven, 2006). Language-specific relations between frequency of joint picture-book reading and vocabulary size have been found already among 2-yearold Spanish-English bilinguals, even after controlling for amount of exposure (Patterson, 2002).…”

“…Some studies have demonstrated that the organization of semantic knowledge is a stronger precursor of literacy skills than vocabulary size (Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002). Monolingual children can define words to some extent by 5 years of age and proficiency in this skill develops fast because children are typically requested to give word definitions beyond school entry (Kurland & Snow, 1997; for bilinguals, see Snow, Cancino, de Temple, & Schley, 1991;Verhoeven, 2006).…”

Organización discursiva de dos géneros en estudiantes de tres niveles de escolaridad y diferentes grupos sociales

“…Estas diferencias pueden explicarse, por una parte, a partir del contexto sociocultural de los estudiantes del GSM, provenientes de familias con una escolaridad en ocasiones incompleta y sin estudios universitarios, lo que incide en los desempeños lingüísticos y en el dominio de los géneros discursivos de los estudiantes (Ball, 2006;Verhoeven & Vermeer, 2006). Por otro lado, la probabilidad de que estos estudiantes tengan menos práctica de escritura escolar sistemática hace que avancen menos con las historias y que no modifiquen sustancialmente su desempeño con los artículos.…”

Concept of initial literacy in preschool children

“…С тим у вези, испитивање Верховена и Вермера (Verhoeven & Vermeer, 2006) показало је да се развојни процес описмењавања разликује у зави-сности од пола детета, припадности одреёеном друштвеном и економском сталежу и односа који родитељи развијају са дететом. Иако не постоји много студија која се баве и потврёују став да постоји одреёена разлика измеёу усвајања писмености код мушке и женске деце, нашироко се чини интересантном позната чињеница да женска деца проговоре пре него мушка.…”