Supporting Multilingual Children Succeed in Their Early Literacy Development

Abstract

The Better Start Literacy Approach (Gillon, McNeill et al. 2022, 2020, 2019) is a comprehensive approach to supporting children’s early literacy success. The teaching content includes research informed strategies to advance children’s phonological and morphological awareness, alphabet knowledge, vocabulary learning and oral narrative skills. It is set within a strengths-based and culturally responsive framework to literacy teaching. The New Zealand Ministry of Education is funding a national roll-out of the Better Start Literacy Approach (BSLA) which is now being implemented by junior school teachers and literacy specialists in over 800 English medium schools across the country.

This presentation focuses on how children identified at school entry as English as Second Language (ESL) learners are responding to the approach. Baseline data on measures of phoneme awareness, alphabet knowledge, nonword reading, and oral narrative skills for 2,785 ESL learners is presented. The children (49% female and 51% male) had a mean age 65.2 months (SD=3.9). The majority of these learners were identified as being of Asian or Pacific Island ethnicity. Data analyses suggest that multilingual children identified at school entry as ESL learners showed a similar strong, positive response to the Better Start Literacy Approach teaching as their peers. The important role speech-language therapists have in collaborating with class teachers to support children’s early literacy success will be emphasised throughout the presentation.