Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children
Preschool classrooms are growing more multilingual. Many young children in early education settings can be found speaking English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and other languages. Some are born in the United States. Many others come to the country from Mexico and Asia, the Middle East and Central and South America.
From 1990 to 2008, the number of young children with immigrant parents doubled, according to a report from the Urban Institute.
As they grow, dual language learners face academic risks. They can have lower scores on cognitive and language assessments. And they can fall behind in their academic work before the end of elementary school, according to a report from the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition.
Individual children’s outcomes are commonly assessed, but there are fewer assessments of educational settings – even though children’s progress is “inextricably linked” with their daily learning environments, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Nonie Lesaux writes in “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” a Strategies for Children report
What’s also needed, Lesaux notes, is “a better understanding of the quality of the learning environments and relationships we provide for our children, and the impact on their outcomes.” (more…)
Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.
