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A study of school and community literacy programs and their combined influences on long-term reading success of mainland Portuguese children
Abstract
In Southern New England as well as throughout the United States, middle school and high school aged language minority students are often found to be poor readers and writers of English despite their having received extensive English as a Second Language instruction in the primary grades. By and large, these are children who did not have the opportunity to fully develop literacy in their strongest language due to the school's policy that they be exposed to English as soon and as much as possible. Such a dilemma produces two negative possibilities to the secondary student which often contributes to a decision to drop out of school: the students' taking less demanding courses in which they do not wish to be enrolled, or the students' being enrolled in the program of their choice and finding the level of scholarship which is required to be overwhelming. This study measures the effects of varying degrees of native language literacy development on the mainland Portuguese immigrant child's later reading success in English as measured at the secondary school level. Specifically, it examines the impact of four to six years of participation in a community-operated, Portuguese language after-school program (in grades two through seven) on junior and senior high school English reading achievement as measured on the MAT6. The study also examines the relationship between participation in both this program and the primary grade (K-2) public school transitional bilingual education program in terms of later reading achievement in English. The results of the study indicate that a student's chances to be a good reader in English increased proportionally with the degree of development he/she had attained in literacy in the native language. The most successful group consisted of students who had been enrolled in both the bilingual education program and the after-school, Escola Portuguesa program. Conclusions. That public schools consider either providing late-exit bilingual education programs instead of early-exit programs currently in use, or that they work to help community groups to design and implement their own structured, after-school programs whereby native literacy can develop beyond the level which is provided in the early-exit, TBE model.
Subject Area
Elementary education|Multicultural Education
Recommended Citation
Santos, Charles W, "A study of school and community literacy programs and their combined influences on long-term reading success of mainland Portuguese children" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9329663.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9329663