Early Childhood English Skills Vital to Academic Success

NCES: Early Childhood English Skills Vital to Academic Success

A report found that differences in language proficiency had a marked impact on achievement scores in for children in 8th grade.

Lack of English proficiency during early schooling can have a lasting impact on student achievement, the National Center for Education Statics has found. In its report, titled Reading, Mathematics and Science Achievement of Language-Minority Students in Grade 8, the NCES data showed no difference in achievement between native English speakers and those who showed good English proficiency in kindergarten.

Contrary to expectations, the home language played almost no role in levels of student achievement, while how well a child could speak English in the early grades had an outsized impact on later math and language showing, as judged by the standardized test scores.

A consistent pattern of scale score differences was evident for all subjects: students whose primary home language was English and English Proficient students had higher overall mean eighth-grade (spring 2007) scores than did ELLs. Specifically, on a scale of 0 to 212, the reading scores for students whose primary home language was English and those for English Proficient students (169 points each) were higher than the scores for both groups of ELLs (152 and 140 points, respectively, for those who were proficient by the spring of kindergarten and those who were not). On a scale of 0 to 174, the mathematics scores for students whose primary home language was English and those for English Proficient students (141 points each) were higher than the scores for both groups of ELL students (129 and 126 points, respectively, for those who were proficient by the spring of kindergarten and those who were not).

The NCES looked at the 8th grade achievement scores for a nationally representative sample of students who were previously evaluated when they attended kindergarten during the 1998-1999 school year. The students were organized into four distinct groups based on their background and English language skills and their 2007 academic results were analyzed and studied.

Although all students who spoke English well when entering kindergarten or those who improved while in kindergarten scored better than their non-proficient peers, the effect was even more pronounced in those of non-Hispanic background. Based on the data, they significantly outscored their Hispanic classmates with similar English proficiency in every subject. Additionally, students whose mothers were least educated were at a particular disadvantage when it came to academic attainment. They scored lower than almost all other groups, even when the variable language skills were accounted for.

Comments

MR Canon

May 26, 2012 at 10:00 am

Several years ago a family came to Dallas from Belgium at the beginning of summer to stay for two years. They had two girls, ages six and four. After playing with the neighborhood children and friends from church, the six year old was speaking English fluently when she entered school in September, and the four year old was fluent in another 3 months. I was disappointed to find that preschool teachers in our school district were speaking to Hispanic kindergartners in Spanish more than English. The children, who were going to be first graders in a few months, were not really learning English at school.

My conclusion is that it may be more beneficial to teach foreign parents to speak English than to remove young children all day from their most important primary teachers – their mothers, and from normal association with children in the neighborhood. According to Dr. Benjamin Bloom, who recanted his stand on preschool education before he died, children can learn what they need even from very inexperienced mothers who respond to their questions. Dr. Barbara Tizard from the UK, of course, conducted the seminal preschool study published by Harvard U Press showing how intellectual leaps simply did not did not happen at preschool, but many occurred in the home in normal conversations with their mothers where children could receive an answer to their curiosity instantly.

To put to rest the worry a foreign student’s lack of proficiency in English will slow his academic performance, they need to know that our school district has had numerous foreign students who spoke no English when they arrived in the Dallas area, and most have excelled. Many were in middle school when they arrived from their respective countries. Almost all of them not only learned to speak beautiful English, but also have became honor students who regularly give valedictory and salutatory speeches upon graduation from high school.

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