Laura Latta, a doctoral student in early childhood education in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at OU Tulsa, conducted a year-long research study in a first-grade classroom on the needs of dual language learners in their efforts to learn to read and write.
The article, Learning to Listen: Supporting Dual Language Learners’ Language Acquisition and Learning Identities, was featured in the March 2019 edition of Young Children by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. While Latta went into the study with an expectation of how the students would be studied, she learned along the way that it was important to acknowledge the children’s ideas and to listen to them describe and define the learning experiences most useful to them.
In Latta’s classroom, a majority of her students (14 of 24) are dual language learners. While learning English at school, they are also being taught their home languages (in this case, Spanish, Vietnamese and Hmong). In taking a position at a Title I public elementary school where two-thirds of the children speak Spanish, Latta felt it was important to understand second language development. In researching this area, Latta realized there was a limited amount of research that included the first-hand perspective of the students themselves, reflecting on their own language acquisition process.
To read the article, visit https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/mar2019/supporting-dual-language-acquisition-identities?fbclid=IwAR1qY9c10Vy-KZxXdMVvv6RFpWppEx9i5YPZI2jcVQ57y9pDHrPz-2uuCGA