Chapter 2: The Effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching With Vietnamese American Students

The conception of Asian Americans as model minorities, has often led to overlook the conditions of educational risk that affect students from relatively recent Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Laos, Kampuchea) refugee families (Dao, 1991). Some of these issues include adjustment to the American academic milieu, scoring below the mean in standardized reading and writing assessments, and low levels of participation in American classroom discussions. These problems are not new, and are confirmed in anecdotal reports by many Southeast Asian students who have gone through American high schools. They are also supported by some standardized test data. For example, in 1986, Southeast Asians scored at the 28.5 percentile in reading and the 34.2 percentile in writing in the California Assessment Program testing (California Department of Education, 1986). Although current Southeast Asian American achievement test scores are not available statewide because students are categorized monolithically as “Asian American,” Stanford Achievement Test (SAT 9) of the San Diego City Schools reports break down scores by student ethnic background into Indochinese (i.e., Southeast Asian), and as such give a window into the performance of these Indochinese students. The total of 6,028 Indochinese students who took the SAT 9 (San Diego City Schools, 1999) is a sample large enough to make the San Diego data roughly representative of the performance of the Indochinese student population. Indochinese students’ reading scores show a drop from the 69.3 percentile in 2nd grade to the 31.4 percentile in 11th grade, as compared to other Asian American students who score at the 84.3 percentile in 2nd grade and the 56.9 percentile in 11th grade, and Caucasian students who score at the 71.7 and 64.3 percentiles in 2nd and 11th grade respectively. Indochinese students’ low reading scores in the 11th grade indicate that they are affected by the increasing demands of reading and comprehending high-level academic texts.