The Daily Bulletin Archive

Jing Zhang, assistant professor of elementary education and reading, will share her research as part of the Emerging Scholar series on Friday, February 10, from noon to 1:00 p.m. in E. H. Butler Library 210. This series of presentations provides early-career faculty with an opportunity to share their intellectual work with the rest of the campus.

Zhang investigated potential learning outcomes when a family literacy program with language supports was provided to Chinese immigrant families. An eight-week (two hours per week) literacy program was implemented in three Chinese community centers in Ontario, Canada. This study has shown that a family literacy intervention, adapted for use with Chinese preschoolers and their parents, can have a significant and positive impact on children’s literacy development in both English and Chinese. Further, it was shown that specific home literacy environments in Chinese and in English are related to children’s literacy development in both languages. In Chinese, the number of Chinese reading materials in the home had the greatest impact on children’s Chinese receptive and expressive vocabularies. In English, the age at which the child was first read to in English had the greatest impact on children’s English expressive vocabularies, their letter-sound production knowledge, and their early reading ability.