Chapter Two Review Of Literature - 1584 Words

Chapter Two: Review of Literature Teachers in the United States are facing a new challenge. According to Capps (2007), at the time of the 2000 census, there were 3 million foreign born children in the United States and one fifth of the students in public schools were children of immigrants. This trend is expected to continue and even increase. In 2004, approximately 11% of the student population was identified as English language learners. This is a 60% increase from 1994 (Conger, 2008). Immigration has always been part of the United States, however, the new influx of immigrants brings with it new challenges. The latest wave of immigrants bring with them not only language differences, but they also bring with them religious and†¦show more content†¦Many students also have limited access to literacy skills at home, poor vocabularies, poor oral fluency, and often come from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Yesil-Dagli, 2011). In the past there was not a lot of emphasis on the pre-kindergarten years. Today , experts recognize the first five years of a child’s life as a time for enormous growth of linguistic, conceptual, and social competence (Pikulski, 2005). Yesli-Dagil (2011) found that the majority of research on literacy skills has been done with non-English language student populations or populations that had English language learners involved but there was no differentiation between the two groups. This research was then generalized to the English language student population, not taking into account that they may learn differently. The early years of a child’s life have a profound influence on that child’s language and vocabulary development, which greatly influences school success (Pikulski Templeton, 2004) Often times English language families do not have the resources in their homes to help develop literacy. Even though English language students go through many of the same stages of literacy development as their English speaking counterparts, it is typically in their native language and in turn they are exposed to less English language and literacy before entering schools. Linguistic