Effective English Language Development Intervention
to Support Kindergarten DLLs
Kelly L. Edyburn, Sruthi Swami, Ari Goldstein, and Matt Quirk
Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Pilot Study
Description
An intensive after-school English language development intervention was piloted at a
public elementary school in central California in the 2014-2015 school year. The
intervention was targeted to Latino/a kindergarten students from Spanish-speaking
homes who entered school with the lowest levels of school readiness (as measured by
the Kindergarten Student Entrance Profile [KSEP]) and English language proficiency
(as measured by California English Language Development Test [CELDT]). A certified
lead teacher and two trained undergraduate research assistants facilitated the
intervention for 45 minutes every day after school using the Language for Learning
curriculum, which builds students’ oral English skills through stories and vocabulary
building exercises. Control students were randomly selected from a group of students
in the previous year’s kindergarten cohort who were matched to the treatment group on
demographic variables, kindergarten readiness scores, and initial English language
proficiency scores.
(Williams, 2014)
Background
•  Spanish-speaking Latino/a students currently comprise the vast majority (about
80%) of the 4.4 million dual language learners in U.S. public schools (Batalova
& McHugh, 2010; Kena et al., 2013), and this population continues to grow
(Hussar & Bailey, 2013)
•  Latino/a DLLs also continue to enter school with lower readiness than their
white monolingual peers, which means that ethnic disparities in academic
achievement begin as early as kindergarten (Bumgarner & Brooks-Gunn, 2015;
Castro, García, & Markos, 2013; Entwisle & Alexander, 1992; Halle, Hair,
Wandner, McNamara, & Chien, 2012; Hong & You, 2012; Quirk, NylundGibson, & Furlong, 2013)
•  Kindergarten school readiness is highly predictive of later academic
achievement (Duncan et al., 2007; Quirk et al., 2013; Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta,
2001; Winsler, Kim, & Richard, 2014); however, previous research has
identified a subset of Latino/a DLL students who enter kindergarten with low
readiness and manage to “catch up” to the students who had high levels of
readiness at kindergarten entry (Lilles, Furlong, & Quirk, in press)
•  In one study (Lilles, Furlong, & Quirk, in press), by the end of Grade 2, these
“academically resilient” students were unexpectedly achieving at or above
grade level on California Standards Tests, and perhaps unsurprisingly, one of
the key factors that distinguished these unexpected achievers from other
students who entered kindergarten with low readiness and followed a more
typical path of low achievement was the development of reading fluency skill in
English (see Figure 1)
•  Many other recent studies have reached similar conclusions regarding the role
of language and literacy development as predictors for later academic success
(August & Shanahan, 2006; Dunn Davison, Hammer, & Lawrence, 2011; Halle
et al., 2012)
•  These findings highlight the importance and urgency of promoting early
language and literacy development among young Spanish-speaking
Latino/a students
120
Proficient
111
Risk-catching up
100
102
Words per minute
Risk-lagging
80
82
72
57
51
40
20
75
66
60
43
26
12
50
73
73
47
37
16
30
21
22
Grade 1
T2
T3
T4
T5
T6
25
Analyses
•  Independent-samples t-tests were conducted and effect sizes were calculated to
compare average differences between the ELD and control groups on various report
card variables
•  Paired-samples t-tests were conducted to compare within-group growth on the
California English Language Development Test from kindergarten to Grade 1
Results
•  The ELD group outperformed the control group on three report card indicators, with
small to moderate effect sizes (see Table 1)
•  The ELD group’s growth on the CELDT from kindergarten to Grade 1 was
statistically significant and the large effect size suggested high practical significance
(see Table 2)
Table 1
Independent-Samples T-Test Results for Report Card Indicators by Group
ELD
Variables of Interest
Control
M
SD
M
SD
t
Cohen's d
Letter Knowledge (Winter)
20.30
16.84
13.46
11.25
1.11
0.51
Letter Sounds (Spring)
28.40
4.25
27.73
3.35
0.41
0.18
High Frequency Word Knowledge (Spring) 25.10
7.58
23.00
6.37
0.69
Note. All independent-samples t-tests were statistically nonsignificant, but it is possible that
the t-test analyses did not detect significant results due to the fact that the groups involved
were very small.
0.34
Table 2
52
30
19
92
98
61
38
0
T1
83
88
89
116
110
Participants
•  The ELD group had 11 students: 5 males and 6 females
•  The control group had 11 students: 9 males and 2 females
•  All students in both groups were Latino/a and came from Spanish-speaking homes
•  One student in the ELD group had an Individualized Education Plan (IEP)
47
40
Kindergarten
Grade 1
M
SD
M
SD
t
Cohen's d
256
81.9
382.13
59.87
3.55**
1.76
Grade 2
T7
T8
T9
T10
T11
Reading probes
Figure 1. Reading fluency trajectories across Grades 1 and 2. (Reprinted from Lilles,
Furlong, & Quirk, in press)
T12
ELD Group
Note. **p < .01.
•  Despite the magnitude and sustained growth of this population, there is relatively
little research on effective early interventions to develop the language skills of young
Latino/a DLLs
•  Future research should address the significant barriers to best serving DLLs,
including lack of empirically-validated interventions or approaches to choose from,
challenges to implementation and fidelity, policy/staffing/resource limitations on
bilingual education
•  Best practices in instruction of DLLs
•  Success for All curriculum
(Cheung & Slavin, 2012)
•  Building Language for
Literacy curriculum
(Gonzalez et al., 2011)
•  Direct vocabulary
instruction (Cheung &
Slavin, 2012)
•  Dual immersion approach,
which builds students’
skills in both languages via
common underlying
proficiency (Collins, 2012;
Cummins, 1989)
(Riemersma & Jonkman, 2012)
Implications for DLL Assessment
•  Schools often do not systematically collect data on the language development of
young DLLs apart from mandated yearly tests of progress
•  When schools do collect language data, they may favor quick probes (e.g., the
report card indicators in the present pilot study), which likely do not capture the
full scope of a DLL student’s linguistic abilities or provide teachers with
meaningful skill areas to develop
•  Schools or districts may adopt a single standardized assessment to use with their
DLLs — commonly used assessments include A Developmental English
Proficiency Test (ADEPT), Language Assessment Scales (LAS), Bilingual Verbal
Ability Tests (BVAT), Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey (WMLS), and Idea
Proficiency Test (IPT)
•  Many of these major assessments have significant limitations, including being
time- and resource-intensive, requiring bilingual examiners, lacking empirical
validity and reliability, not measuring the full scope of language proficiency, and
being normed on monolingual samples
•  No language proficiency assessment has been normed exclusively on a bilingual
sample (Collins, 2012)
•  Best practices in DLL assessment
•  Conduct direct assessment with students; do not rely exclusively on parent report
for language proficiency
•  Assess both English and the home languages
•  Use standardized assessments of language ability with monolingual norms to
gauge DLLs’ language abilities relative to the expectations of the academic
context
•  Use a bilingual examiner whenever possible
References
Paired-Samples T-Test Results for California English Language Development Test
30
Implications for DLL Instruction
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