Chapter 9: Issues in Early Childhood Education for English Learners: Language Proficiency Assessment, Professional Development and the Outcomes of Early Literacy Intervention

While elementary and secondary schools struggle to raise all students’ reading and writing skills to higher levels needed to succeed in a technologically advanced society, there also have been several national calls for a strengthening of programs and practices that are germane to the growth of early social and academic abilities, particularly those related to early language and literacy development even before kindergarten (e.g., see Bowman, Donovan, & Burns, 2001; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Additionally, an important consideration for this general area of research concerns the early education of the large number of English Language Learners (ELLs) entering U.S. schools. This issue is of such portent that a new national panel (August, 2002) has been appointed to study issues related to the literacy achievement of children learning English as a second language (see also August & Hakuta, 1997, for an earlier National Research Council review). To give some background to the scope of the language and literacy learning issue, we detail some of the changing patterns in terms of demographics in this country.