ABSTRACT

Young English learners (ELs) whose home language is Spanish continue to lag behind in several school readiness areas including language and literacy skills in spite of their strong social skills, which are positively related to language and literacy. The purpose of this article is to identify challenges that preschool Spanish speaking ELs face, explore theoretical underpinnings of context-based instructional models, and discuss implications for research, practice, and policy making. Based on sociocultural theory and social transactional theory, we propose a conceptual framework that consists of embedding a teacher-scaffolded instruction within reciprocal peer mediated interactions to promote preschool Spanish speaking ELs’ English language and literacy skills for kindergarten readiness. Given the transactional nature of peer tutoring, we hypothesize that children receiving the scaffolded reciprocal peer tutoring will have increased social interaction. Additionally, we expect a mediating effect of children's social interaction on their language and literacy development.

摘要

尽管他们的社交能力与语言和读写能力成正比，但以英语为西班牙语的年轻英语学习者（ELs）在包括语言和读写能力在内的几个学校准备就绪领域仍然落后。本文的目的是确定学龄前讲西班牙语的EL面临的挑战，探索基于上下文的教学模型的理论基础，并讨论对研究，实践和政策制定的影响。基于社会文化理论和社会交易理论，我们提出了一个概念框架，该框架包括在互惠的同伴介导的互动中嵌入教师脚手架的教学，以促进学龄前讲西班牙语的英语语言者的英语和读写能力，使他们为幼儿园做好准备。鉴于同伴辅导的交易性质，我们假设接受脚手架互惠的家教的孩子会增加社交互动。此外，我们期望儿童的社交互动对他们的语言和素养发展具有中介作用。