Literacy development is one of the most important components of a child's education. Both oral language and pre-literacy skills are strong predictors of young children's future reading ability. The child's home experiences are considered the foundation for the development of these skills. The purpose of this Minority Post-Doctoral Fellowship is to determine a relationship between home literacy factors and the development of language and literacy skills in young low-income Hispanic children, during their first two years of schooling, preschool and kindergarten. The sample for this study is drawn from a larger longitudinal study, "The Early Childhood Study of Language and Literacy Development in Spanish-Speaking Children," and it consists of 51 children and their families. The children were chosen for their placement into one of four categories of language proficiency: high English-high Spanish; high English-low Spanish; low English- high Spanish; and low English- low Spanish. Home visits were conducted with these families during the Spring 2002 and follow-up interviews will be done with the families in the Spring 2003. This third year of Fellowship support will allow for further interviewing, transcription, and coding of data, as well as publication of results.
