The English Literacy Development of Bilingual Students Within a Transition Whole-Language Curriculum

Abstract

This research project investigated the English literacy development of bilingual (English/Spanish) students beginning their formal transition into English literacy in a whole-language classroom. The curriculum consisted of four components: theme-based literacy activities, teacherreading, free reading, and free writing. Instruction was meaning-focused, and written language conventions were demonstrated through the use of contextualized mediations. Literacy growth was measured through pre/post-reading miscue and retelling analysis, holistic and analytic writing analysis, and spelling assessments. Analysis of the reading miscue data indicated statistically significant improvements in the students' ability to produce more meaningful sentences. Additionally, retelling analysis showed significant gains in the overall number of retelling units and matches produced by the students. Analytic writing analysis showed improvement in capitalization and spelling, as well as the number of words produced in a story. Spelling improvement was also noted in an analysis of words produced in isolation. Holistic analysis of the students' written stories did not indicate significant improvement, nor did the analytic analysis show an increase in the numberof sentences or the conventional use of punctuation. Results suggest that literacy development may require differentiated mediation, i.e., some tasks may require more direct mediation than others.

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