New York City has a large Spanish-speaking immigrant population coming from Latin American countries, especially from Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador. The children of these immigrant families grow up bilingual but attain lower levels of skills in their L1 and L2 than those expected in children their age. In addition, they show comparatively low literacy achievements as early as first grade, and continue to lag behind their English-speaking peers.
Previous literacy research has shown a correlation between the development of cognitive-linguistic competence and skills, and success in the acquisition of literacy skills, both in L1 and in L2. Good comprehension in certain areas of syntax correlates significantly with L2 English reading attainment (Martohardjono et al., in press). The ability to detect lexical and syntactic ambiguity also appears as a strong predictor of early L1 reading ability (Cairns, Waltzman, & Schlisselberg, 2001).
The purpose of the study reported here is to support and reinforce the development of the cognitive-linguistic skills central to the acquisition of reading, by enhancing the language input to which Spanish/English bilingual pre-kindergarten children are exposed.
This intervention was designed to bring this population to higher levels of linguistic proficiency and skills, thus fostering children's optimal reading readiness levels. This intervention, which targets a pre-K population in three schools in the New York area, consists of a number of game-like tasks targeting the development of two specific areas of linguistic knowledge, namely complex sentence structure, and lexical ambiguity. The intervention groups received instruction in one of these two areas, while the control group did not go through the treatment. The study also includes a teacher-training component.
Our presentation describes the goals of the study, the research background that supports the development of the intervention, the general design of our study, the criteria followed in task design, the implementation of each task, and the materials used in the intervention. This paper discusses the results obtained by the intervention/control groups in this intervention in the light of the predictions derived from our hypotheses.

Complete List of Presenters: Gita Martohardjono, Silvia Rivero, Michele DeGoeas-Malone, Elaine Klein, Stephanie Solt