| Description |
The present study investigated the efficacy of early English; immersion in the Shi Da Fu Elementary School in Xi'an, China. Three hundred and fifty one students were tested in Grades 1-6. There were two main purposes that motivated this longitudinal and cross-sectional study. The first goal was to compare the L1 and L2 language and literacy performances of the immersion students to a comparable group of children who attended the same school and were taking English; as a core subject. The second purpose was to investigate which variables successfully predicted L2 English; word identification and reading comprehension for the combined group of students. After pretest scores were controlled, it was found that the immersion students significantly performed at a higher level than the nonimmersion students on measures of oral language proficiency, vocabulary, phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, reading identification, and reading comprehension, but there were no significant differences on measures of alphabet recognition, morphological awareness, or written grammar. |
