English literacy promoted through home-school connections in first grade

Abstract

This paper aims at describing the influence of parents’ involvement in first grade students’ English literacy development in a bilingual school. The term ‘involvement’ is used here to refer to the guided participation of parents in all the activities that promote the development of their children’s English literacies at home. In order to achieve this goal parents participated in a program called NYschool-home connection. They took part of some workshops where they participated in activities which intended to develop language literacies; reading, writing and multimodal activities. Additionally, the use of Literacy Bags (LBs) was a strategy used to promote parents and children literacy practices at home and they enriched children’s literacy environment. This strategy was a weekly rotation of fiction, informative and non-fiction books among participating families. Parents were asked to share books with their children and motivate the development of reading strategies such as predict, infer, summarize and evaluate. Besides, they were also asked to promote literature discussions on the content of the texts relating it to their personal experiences, encourage the vocabulary construction, and stimulate the development of oral skills. The findings revealed that children became more confident to read a picture book in English due to guided process followed with their parents at home using the literacy bags. They read about 8 books in two months and trough time they felt more confident to read and understand a book independently; retell a story, and connect the content of the text with the pictures and with their personal lives to make meaning. Furthermore, parents recognized that literacy workshops as a relevant tool to support their children’s English literacies at home. They felt empowered to perform literacy activities and assist their children. Likewise, findings showed that English literacy development is promoted by the parents and child interactions through the literacy bags. Children showed that through the usual shared reading experiences with their parents they became more confident to talk and express ideas on the text; they related the story to their personal experiences to construct their own ideas; they built vocabulary in the context of the text and became more engaged in reading. Finally, the reading experiences with the literacy bags (LBs) not only turned into a common literacy practice in which parents help children to foster their reading skills and language literacy but it became special family time in which parents stimulate children learning of values and enjoy sharing together in a meaningful way.