Part 1: Summary
The article ELL School Readiness and Pre-Kindergarten Care by Michael A. Gottfried examines the effectiveness of pre-kindergarten school care on kindergarten readiness for English Language Learners (ELL). In recent years, the student population in the United States has immensely grown due to an increase in immigrant population. As a result, this has created the need for educators and policy makers to develop sustainable, effective, and high-quality pre-school programs to meet the needs of ELLs. Gottfried (2016) posits that the ability of children to have better outcomes in elementary, middle, and high school partly depends on the effectiveness of their pre-school programs. The ELL student population in the United States tend to lag behind than monolinguals in academic achievement. Poor academic outcomes in ELL students are as a result of low parental education and poverty. According to Gottfried (2016), readiness refers to the proficiency of particular abilities or skills that enable a child to functions successfully in a school setting both academically and socially.
Gottfried's research stipulates that there is a need to for children to attend a non-home-based pre-kindergarten environment as they have decreased problem behaviors, increased communication efficiency and increased social skills (Gottfried, 2016). Thus, non-parental pre-kindergarten care have multiple openings for ELL students to reinforce their speaking and listening skills in English as well as catapult children to new opportunities for vocabulary development before school entry. Gottfried says that educators and administrators should prepare classrooms based on the prior knowledge of incoming pre-kindergarten students. He states that this prior knowledge is appropriate for teacher-student matching than students with no formal pre-kindergarten education. His research contributes to existing literature that pre-kindergarten care is vital to the development of social-behavioral school readiness for ELL students. Therefore, educators should develop robust and supportive policies to promote school readiness for ELL students.
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Part 2: Reaction
I think that Gottfried's article provides compelling evidence that subjecting children to pre-kindergarten care experience on readiness for ELL's can have profound effects on later social, academic, and adult outcomes. For educators and parents, this suggests that pre-kindergarten care is regarded as one of the most effective investments that they can make in children. This augmented by the fact that investments made by educators and policy makers in early childhood education are deemed to be more beneficial and cost effective than those made in later childhood and adolescence. As a result, educators must monitor the skills that are critical to the development of children and examine the relationship of these skills to academic success in order to identify ways that could proactively support the nurturing of these skills for long-term achievement effects.
It seems that the support for non-parental pre-kindergarten care is based on the premise that pre-kindergarten programs provide enriching undertakings exhaustively and more intentionally than parents can. Also, these programs can boost children’s learning and skill acquisition that paves the way for developing new skills in early elementary school. I feel that it is critical for all stakeholders to understand what factors both at home and school environments that support the developments of ELL children and the acquisition of English language proficiency. In my opinion, the participation of children in early care and educational programs my influence the time it takes for them to become proficient in English.
In conclusion, it should be noted that although English proficiency is seen as an imperative to academic success, it does not certainly go hand in hand with low academic achievement. And being fluent in English does not always predict high academic achievement among students. More research needs to be conducted on the complex relationship between English language proficiency and academic achievement.
Reference
Gottfried, M. (2016). ELL School Readiness and Pre-Kindergarten Care. Educational Policy , 31 (1), 39-72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904814558011.
