First-grade Latino English language learners’ performance on story problems in spanish versus english

Resumen

To explore whether teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) with an emphasis on English story problem is appropriate, we compared the performance of a group of Latino first graders when working in Spanish and in English on two equivalent sets of story problems. The students’ performance was slightly higher in English than in Spanish, but lower than monolingual students from other studies. ELLs’ success in English indicated that the children’s knowledge of conversational English was sufficient to comprehend story problems, leading us to conclude that teaching through story problems is a viable approach with ELLs.