Abstract
We study the benefits of junior kindergarten for linguistic-minority 4-year-olds compared to their linguistic-majority classmates from the same low-income neighborhoods. At the end of the school year, linguistic-minority children made significantly greater improvements in language skills than their host society classmates. At the mid-year point, junior kindergarten teachers made efforts to help linguistic-minority children overcome the challenges of the school environment of their new host society by adapting their pedagogical strategies to those showing difficulty in their receptive vocabulary skills. They also offered greater means of contact to parents of linguistic-minority children having difficulty attaining language proficiency than to parents of children showing better improvements. Parents of linguistic-minority students showing smaller gains were more likely to use a larger proportion of the communication methods offered by teachers and participate in the parent–school relationship for the well-being of their children. Long-term results suggest that linguistic-minority children continued to make significant improvements.
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Notes
Cases that did not fit this criterion were not retained. Additional subjects were lost because of an incomplete data set per case (incomplete parent, child, or teacher data). As a result, 309 cases were retained for analysis (French-speaking and linguistic-minority)
Because they tapped similar constructs and were psychometrically similar, we collapsed the Order and Organization and Rules factors into one composite score for the analyses.
Family structure was omitted. It correlated with the other controls (from p < 0.05 to p < 0.001).
Our own multilevel analyses on this sample show nonsignificant variation both between and within schools. This indicates that there is not more social class variation between schools and not less social class variation within schools, as is found in the United States.
Using official school commission records of the entire catchment area, 90% of the junior kindergarten sample was traceable at the end of kindergarten (92% French-speaking and 85% linguistic-minority). Cases lost can only represent those children whose families moved out of the low-income districts offering the program. This movement out of poverty is not unusual given the dynamic nature of certain poverty groups (see Pagani et al., 1997, for more details on the duration and timing of poverty and its population characteristics). Similarly, 75% of the junior kindergarten sample was traceable by the end of grade 1 (80% French-speaking and 66% linguistic-minority from the original 309 used for analyses in junior kindergarten), with data loss occurring because of tracking difficulty and if traced, refusal to consent for longitudinal component of the study (requested again during the first grade data collection). Although we cannot compare the 25% lost (over represented by linguistic-minority children) on first grade socio-demographic characteristics, we found no significant differences between the linguistic-minority cases retained and nonretained when using junior kindergarten and kindergarten data.
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Pagani, L.S., Jalbert, J., Lapointe, P. et al. Effects of Junior Kindergarten on Emerging Literacy in Children from Low-Income and Linguistic-Minority Families. Early Childhood Educ J 33, 209–215 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-005-0031-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-005-0031-5