An experiment in teaching English to Spanish-speaking beginners through the use of a series of original pictures

An experiment was carried on to determine how effectively Spanish-speaking beginners could learn English through pictures used as vicarious experiences. Each teacher was given a set of seven original pictures with a teacher's guide for presenting a vocabulary of five hundred fourteen words compiled from the vocabularies of nine series of basal readers which are used in the first grade in the states of the Southwest—Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas-and in the state of Florida. The investigation was carried on in four elementary schools in Houston, Texas, with one kindergarten teacher in each school teaching an experimental group and a control group. To determine the mental maturity of the children the Goodenough Draw-a-Man Test was given in September, 1963. To measure the success of the experiment the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Tests of the Metropolitan Readiness Test, Form R, were given in May, 1964. An analysis of the results of the Goodenough Draw-a-Man Test revealed no significant difference in the mental maturity of the children in the experimental groups as a whole and that of the children in the control groups as a whole. An analysis of the results of the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Tests showed a difference at the .05 level of significance in favor of the experimental groups as a whole. The results also showed that 74.3 per cent of the children in the experimental groups as a whole achieved a Reading Readiness Status of Average or above and that 64.1 per cent of the children in the control groups as a whole had a Reading Readiness Status of Average or above. Analysis of the results of the individual readiness tests showed that the children in the experimental groups acquired a broader range of information, a greater understanding of sentence meaning, and greater skill in visual perception than the children in the control groups. Since there was no significant difference in the mental maturity of the children in the experimental groups and of those in the control groups, and since the same teachers worked with both groups, It would appear that the higher achievement of the children In the experimental groups was due to the program in language instruction. The following recommendations were made: (1) that the program should be continued; (2) that the program should be evaluated continuously to insure improvement; (3) that programs of this type should be developed for children whose language background is other than English; and (4) that an experiment should be conducted using this program with English-speaking children from culturally deprived environments.