The Effects of Bilingual Reading Program on Chinese Children from Low Socioeconomic Status Families

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: This study evaluated the impacts of a bilingual Chinese-English reading program on Chinese children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families. Ninety-nine children in the third year of kindergarten (K3) were recruited from five local kindergartens in two low-SES districts in Hong Kong, China. Children in the intervention group who participated in 15-weeks of language and literacy intervention were compared to a control group of 40 children who attended only regular literacy classes in their kindergartens. ANCOVA analyses revealed that after controlling for child gender and age, the intervention group performed significantly better than the control group on the posttest in Chinese phonological awareness and morphological awareness, English phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and English word reading. These results point to a reading program’s utility, emphasizing multi-component interventions for early bilingual language and literacy learning. Practice or Policy: Findings support the development of locally derived, evidence-based reading programs to cater to low-SES children’s learning needs. These findings may also provide research-based evidence for formulating public policies and services, targeting the early language and literacy issues for low-SES children and their families and raising public awareness of the influence of poverty on child development in the early years.

Acknowledgments

We thanked the research assistants and faculty collaborators for their help in conducting this study, as well as the participating kindergartens and families for their time and insight about child language and literacy development.

Disclosure Statement

The authors reported no potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant by the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research, Hong Kong, to Kevin Kien Hoa Chung [EDB(LE)/P&R/EL/164/1].