BE022854: Literacy Characteristics of Hispanic Adolescent Immigrants with Limited Prior Education. Reading Symposium [Section] 9.

Notes:

10 p.

Abstract:

This paper reports on Project Accelerated Literacy (PAL), a study designed to identify effective approaches to develop literacy in under-schooled adolescent English language learners. The study investigates the English literacy development of approximately 80 recent teenaged immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries with low levels of literacy in Spanish. Two different instructional conditions are compared: English literacy instruction with native language support (referred to as the bilingual condition) and all-English literacy instruction (referred to as the monolingual condition). The study also analyzes the relationship of each condition to referrals for special education over a three-year period (1997-2000). In the first year, participating teachers completed two graduate level courses at the George Washington University (GWU) as preparation for implementing the literacy curricula in the second year. This process was repeated in the second year with a new cohort of teachers, who currently implement the curricula. During the implementation years, teachers are enrolled in a six-credit-hour graduate course at GWU and they meet for a biweekly seminar. The two cohorts of students (Years 2 and 3) will be combined for data analysis purposes to increase the size of study participants, which is necessary because of the high rate of attrition of this student population. (Author)