Home literacy practices that support language and literacy development in bilingual children: a longitudinal case study

Abstract

In the past few decades, literature has consistently suggested that bilingual children are at risk for academic failure due to their limited language skills. However, many of these studies included underprivileged bilingual children, and few of them attempted to disentangle the effects of bilingualism from the effects of socio-economic status. Critically, it is not clear how the language and literacy skills of bilingual children develop when they benefit from home support. This paper presents the case study of a child who emigrated from Romania to the United States at the age of 4.8 and enrolled in preschool with no prior knowledge of English. With support from his family, by the end of the 4th grade, his English vocabulary was 2.5 standard deviations above national norms (11th grade level equivalent), and all other standardized language and reading comprehension measures placed him between the 82nd and the 99th percentile. This study suggests that the socio-economic status (in general) and the home language and literacy environment (in particular) has the potential to play an important role in the language and literacy development of bilingual children.