Converging trajectories: Reading growth in language minority learners and their classmates, kindergarten to grade 8

Kieffer, Michael J. (2011). Converging trajectories: Reading growth in language minority learners and their classmates, kindergarten to grade 8. American Educational Research Journal, 48(5), 1187-1225.

The story told in this article is more than meets the eye. On the surface it is the story of how one researcher took a new look at the factors that underlie the literacy achievement gap between children whose home language is not English and native English speakers. Keiffer examined longitudinal research on the literacy development of English learners over the course of their elementary and middle school years (this is one of only a few truly longitudinal studies of the literacy development of this population), and controlling for socioeconomic variables, discovered that the real factor that seemed to make a difference was the level of English proficiency these children developed, and how soon they developed it. Those children who developed English proficiency early in their elementary school years soon narrowed the gap between themselves and children who were native English speakers, though both kinds of children, if they were from families who qualified for free and reduced price lunches, and if they attended urban schools which had high numbers of such families, tended to still achieve at levels below the national average. These findings point to the conclusion that developing English language proficiency is the key to eventually achieving on similar levels to children who are native English speakers, but that may still not mean these children achieve as well as they need to do to succeed in American society, because poverty, and all it means, is still a powerful factor.

Keiffer’s findings are a story in themselves, but I saw a bigger, quintessentially American story here as well. In many ways the story here is the American immigrant story that has been a part of U.S. history from the beginning. The story goes like this: A group of people comes to the United States in search of a better life. In the beginning, there are many struggles and dissonances. The adults in these groups may sacrifice careers, livelihoods, homes, and feelings of adult competence that they may have developed as citizens and breadwinners in their native lands. Even so, they believe that whatever reasons compel them to uproot and immigrate are worth the struggles. Some of the adults manage to succeed in the new environment, and some do not, but their children are the hope for the future. If those children can develop the language skills and other skills needed to succeed in the new country, then they have a chance to compete with, and even perform better than, children who have been here for generations. One of Keiffer’s most interesting findings here points to that hope. Keiffer discovered that children from non-English speaking homes who develop English proficiency early in their school careers, and thus become bilingual at an early age, often do not just narrow the gap between themselves and native speakers at similar socioeconomic levels—they tend to actually surpass their low-income native speaker peers.

Can it be that whatever factors, individual and contextual, lead to some English learners developing English proficiency earlier than others, also lead to eventual higher achievement levels? Does bilingualism create cognitive, social, linguistic, and other strengths that can work to some degree against the powerful effects of poverty? It would be interesting to follow the children whose longitudinal data were analyzed in Keiffer’s research as they progress into high school, maybe college, and adult career life. Will early bilingualism have even farther-reaching effects than what are reported here? What are the long-term advantages of developing early proficiency in more than one language? And what family and home factors are associated with whether children become bilingual early in their school careers or not? Keiffer’s findings are important because they open up new possibilities for understanding why some children of immigrants are able to become participants in “the American dream” sooner than others. Literacy development is one important key to that dream, and from what we read here, early English language development is an important key to literacy.

Just a note to those less experienced in reading highly technical research reports: You will find that the statistical procedures used to arrive at the findings reported here can be mind-boggling at times. I went through graduate school at a time when the array of procedures was smaller than what we now see in many journal articles, and so I struggled to grasp how the sophisticated, cutting-edge procedures used here to tease out findings from this vast set of longitudinal data actually worked. In order to fully trust findings, the reader must understand how they were arrived at, but I must admit that in this case, my understanding is not complete. However, I know the work of Keiffer. He, along with fellow researcher Lesaux and others, is building a growing body of solid, informative research on the literacy development of English learners. Some of that work has been described in other annotations in this blog (see the Academic Literacy heading on the All Topics page for references to articles). Keiffer and his colleagues are becoming some of my “go-to” authors when I want to learn more about this line of research. So, though I will work to understand the statistical procedures better because we should always read research through a critical, informed lens, on the basis of the large body of solid work that this article is part of, I believe I can rely on Keiffer’s findings here as much as I can for any research. I follow this research line with interest, and look forward to further developments.

There is so much we still need to learn about the ever-growing population of English learners, who are now writing their own chapter of the American immigrant story. For many in the U.S. who are native English speakers, myself included, the story of coming to a new country and struggling with learning a new language is only a few generations in their families’ past. If we recognize the importance of those struggles to what our nation has been, is now, and will be in the future, it becomes essential for us as educators to understand the nature of those struggles and what factors can make a difference in the outcome.