Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children’s Personal Narratives

This chapter focuses on Spanish-speaking children’s evaluation and temporality in the construction of personal narratives. The study analyzes 32 personal narratives produced by 8 Andean Spanish-speaking children from the Andean city of Cusco in Peru All children were monolingual speakers of the Andean Spanish variety and came from lower-middle-class families. Half the children were preschoolers (4;9 to 5;5 years) and the other half were first-graders (6;6 to 7;8 years). Both age groups were balanced in terms of gender. Children were interviewed and tape-recorded by the author using the ConversationalMap of Narratives of Real Experiences (McCabe & Rollins, 1994) as the elicitation procedure. Narratives were transcribed using CHAT conventions (MacWhinney, 2000) and were subsequently coded for narrative components (Peterson &McCabe, 1983) and temporal organization (Genette, 1980). Results indicated that contrary to the sequentiality and single-story structure reported as characteristic of U.S. European American English-speaking children, these Andean Spanish-speaking children’s narratives present a distinctive feature labeled herein as structural evaluation. Structural evaluation takes two forms, either (1) a functional deviation from the timeline of real events; or (2) a chain of independent stories connected within the boundaries of a single narrative. These young narrators used these strategies to evaluate a specific point in the narrative, consequently affecting both the temporal organization of events and the episodic complexity of the narratives. Deviations from the timeline are usually identified as indicators of language pathology or immaturity for U.S. European American English-speaking children. In these Andean children’s narratives, conversely, departures from the timeline served a rhetorical function that reflected a sophisticated discourse skill. Results highlight the need of data-driven interpretative approaches of Spanish-speakers’ narratives in a field increasingly focused on cultural/linguistic diversity but still dominated by Anglo-centric views of development

Emerging temporality: past tense and temporal/aspectual markers in Spanish-speaking children's intra-conversational narratives

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components were analyzed to explore interrelationships among grammatical and discourse skills. Children progressed from scattered unsystematic means of encoding temporality to mastering a basic linguistic system that included devices to mark location of events, temporal relations and aspectual meanings. The consolidation of perfective past tense to express narrative events marked a crucial developmental point which preceded an explosion of additional verb tenses and temporal markers. The value of spontaneous language data, and the need to study grammar and discourse simultaneously to construct a comprehensive developmental picture are highlighted. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical proposals on the development of temporality

Mastering Academic Language: Organization and Stance in the Persuasive Writing of High School Students

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically-useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern U.S. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers; transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures; and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker, i.e., epistemic hedges, significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically-informative assessment tools

Core Academic Language Skills (CALS): An expanded operational construct and a novel instrument to chart school-relevant language proficiency in per-adolescent and adolescent learners.

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as ‘Core Academic Language Skills’ (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in grades 4-8. Results revealed between- and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was found to be predictive of reading comprehension. Findings suggest that the CALS construct and instrument appear promising for exploring students' school-relevant language skills

Efecto de una plataforma virtual en comprensión de lectura y vocabulario: Una alternativa para mejorar las capacidades lectoras en primaria

Frente a los bajos resultados que los niños peruanos obtienen en las pruebas nacionales e internacionales de comprensión de lectura y tomando en consideración el aumento de inversión en tecnología en las instituciones educativas del país, el presente estudio buscó desarrollar y evaluar una herramienta virtual para mejorar la comprensión de lectura. Para ello, se adaptaron las estrategias de comprensión de lectura y ejercicios de vocabulario del entorno virtual ICON y se diseñó la plataforma LEO. Un total de 88 estudiantes de quinto grado de primaria, provenientes de colegios privados de nivel socioeconómico medio-bajo de Lima Metropolitana, participaron en este estudio cuasi-experimental, con un grupo control y un grupo que participó en la intervención digital a lo largo de 12 semanas. Todos los participantes fueron evaluados utilizando pruebas de entrada y salida de comprensión de lectura y vocabulario. Los resultados revelaron que los estudiantes que interactuaron con la plataforma LEO obtuvieron resultados significativamente más altos en la comprensión de textos narrativos y vocabulario luego de finalizada la intervención, respecto a sus puntajes al inicio de la misma y también en comparación con el grupo que no empleó la plataforma. "Effects of a virtual platform in reading comprehension and vocabulary: An alternative to improve reading abilities in Elementary school" Given, on the one hand, the poor results obtained by Peruvian children in the national and international reading assessments. And on the other hand, the increased investment in technology for schools in the country, this study aimed to develop and test an online tool to improve reading comprehension. In order to do this, the reading comprehension strategies and vocabulary activities from the research-based digital environment ICON were adapted to design the platform LEO. A total of 88 fifth graders from urban middle-to-low-income private schools from Lima participated in this quasi-experimental study, which involved a control group and a treatment group that participated in a 12-week teacher-mediated digital intervention. All participants were administered reading and vocabulary assessments pre and post intervention. Results revealed that students who participated in the intervention achieved higher comprehension scores for narrative texts and higher vocabulary scores than those of the control group

Fifth-grade students’ digital retellings and the Common Core: Modal use and design intentionality

Multimodal composing is part of the Common Core vision of the twenty-first-century student. Two descriptive studies were conducted of fifth-grade students’ digital folktale retellings. Study 1 analyzed 83 retellings in relation to the types and frequencies of modal use, such as image, sound, movement, and written text, as well as their retelling accuracy. Students composed within a scaffolded digital composing environment which comprised the PowerPoint authoring/presentation tool and a researcher-developed story frame. All students’ retellings included writing and visual design, 80% included animation, and 70% included sound. Retelling accuracy scores averaged 54%. Study 2 was conducted with a new group of 14 fifth-grade students who had previous digital retelling experience. The retellings included the same types of modal use, but at a higher level of frequency. In their retrospective design interviews, students expressed design intentionality and a metamodal awareness of how modes work together to create an appealing story

Beyond Vocabulary: Exploring Cross-Disciplinary Academic-Language Proficiency and Its Association With Reading Comprehension

Despite a longstanding awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic language proficiency construct, Core Academic Language Skills (CALS). CALS refers to a constellation of high utility language skills hypothesized to support reading comprehension across school content areas. Using the CALS-I, a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative instrument, we first examined the variability in students' CALS by grade, English proficiency designation, and socioeconomic status (SES). Then, we examined the contribution of CALS to reading comprehension using academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic factors as covariates. A linguistically and socioeconomically diverse crosssectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (GMRT), an academic vocabulary test (VAT), and a word reading fluency test (TOSWRF). GLM analysis of variance revealed that CALS differed significantly by grade, English proficiency designation, and SES, with students in higher grades, English proficient students, and those from higher SES backgrounds displaying higher scores, on average. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified CALS as an independent predictor of reading comprehension, even after controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and socio-demographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of school relevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators

Children's Early Decontextualized Talk Predicts Academic Language Proficiency in Midadolescence

This study examines whether children’s decontextualized talk—talk about nonpresent events, explanations, orpretend—at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language(AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL profi ciency has been identified as an important predictor ofadolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualizedtalk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomesremains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of childtalk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of seventh-grade AL proficiency, even aftercontrolling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, andchild syntactic comprehension