Description

Purpose: Bilingual children bring to school important knowledge in their native language. If these skills are not assessed, educators may not understand the full picture of a child’s language and literacy abilities. We report on the development and piloting of a new assessment of Spanish code-based literacy skills: Conocimiento de Letras y Ortografía (CLO). This is a computerized assessment that is intended to monitor progress in Spanish literacy skill acquisition. We wanted to understand what bilingual, preschool-aged children in English-only educational environments would know about letters and sounds in Spanish.Procedures: Thirty-five children enrolled in the 4-year-old classroom at local Head Start locations were enrolled in the study. Children were all four years old. Many of these children came from a Hispanic background and the parents varied in educational level. The majority of the parents except for one speaks Spanish coming from Mexico. The assessment was administered on a touchscreen computer and consisted of three subtests: Letter ID, Sound ID, and Syllable ID. Within each subtest, items were presented in random order. Results: For letter identification, overall identification of letter names in Spanish was low (overall accuracy: 40.4%). Only four letters were identified correctly more than 50% of the time: “B” (55.6%), “O” (70.7%), “t” (61.1%), and X (83.3%). For letter sound items, again overall accuracy was low (36.7%). Only four letter sounds were correctly identified at least 50% of the time: “C corresponding to /k/” (50%), “Q corresponding to /k/” (50%), “O corresponding to /o/” (76.9%), and “U corresponding to /u/” (58.3%). Finally for the syllable ID subtest, the overall performance was predictably even lower (33%) because the task difficulty was higher. Only 14/43 items were responded to accurately at least half of the time.