Valuing Home Languages Sets The Foundation For Early Learning
Our guest author today is Candis Grover, the Literacy & Spanish Content Manager at ReadyRosie.com, an online resource that models interactive oral language development activities that parents and caregivers of young children can do to encourage learning.
Many advocates, policymakers, and researchers now recognize that a strong start requires more than just a year of pre-K. Research shows that promoting children’s success starts with helping parents recognize the importance of loving interactions and “conversations” with their babies.
The above statement, which is taken from a recent report, Subprime Learning: Early Education in America since the Great Recession, emphasizes the role of parents as the earliest investors in the academic success of their children. This same report states that more than one in five of these families speaks a primary language other than English, and that this statistic could reach 40 percent by 2030. Despite the magnitude of these numbers, the Subprime Learning report asserts that the research on dual language learners has been largely ignored by those developing early childhood education policies and programs.
As a bilingual (English/Spanish) educator who has worked with dual language learners since 1999, I have read many books and attended numerous trainings that encouraged me to value home language as the foundation upon which to build English and academic skills. However, it was not until I became a mother that I truly appreciated the research supporting the importance of native language instruction.
Although I am not a native Spanish speaker, my years of teaching in a bilingual classroom inspired me to