One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language

Shows how teachers can accommodate children learning English as a second language without major changes to the curriculum or early childhood classroom structure. Emphasis is on facilitating the natural progression of second-language acquisition in young children, creating a supportive classroom environment, and recognizing the importance of children's home languages and cultures. Presents ways to measure progress, address individual differences, and work with parents. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., is Research Associate in the Projects in Language Development at the Grad-uate School of Education at Harvard University. For the past 9 years, Dr. Tabors has been the Research Co-ordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, a longitudinal study of low-income, English-speaking children and their families. For the past 4 years, she has also directed research related to the mother-child book-reading project of the Manpower Development Research Corporation's evaluations of New Chance and JOBS training programs.

Pursuing an interest that developed while teaching bilingual students in the Cambridge Public Schools, Dr. Tabors entered the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University in 1981 to study first- and second-language acquisition. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, resulted in the delineation of the developmental pathway for young children learning English as a second language. In 1989, she used this information in planning a trilingual preschool/primary school for the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. In 1995, Dr. Tabors became coordinator of the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a research activity of the New England Quality Research Center on Head Start.

While writing One Child, Two Languages, Dr. Tabors was able to visit preschool classrooms, interview teachers, and hold workshops related to the topic of young children learning English as a second language. Recognizing the importance of a continuing dialogue on this topic, she has established an e-mail account (patton@onechild.