ACCELERATING SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN PRESCHOOL ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STORYBOOK INTERVENTION

Previous research documents the importance of maintaining the home language to the acquisition of a second language. This study examined the effects of a shared reading experience in the child’s home language on the emergent literacy and language acquisition in English of preschool-age English Language Learners (ELLs). Parents of Spanish-speaking four-year-old Head Start students read storybooks in Spanish with their children concurrently with the use of the English language version of the books in the classroom. A single subject design with multiple baselines across subjects and settings was applied. The researcher documented changes in the frequency of utterances, the Mean Length of Utterance-word (MLU-w), and the frequency of spontaneous or child-initiated utterances in various settings within the Head Start classroom. The Results indicated that there might be a relation between a shared reading experience in the home language and second language acquisition. Additionally, there appeared to be a relation between the behaviors and the settings