Addressing the Literacy Needs of Struggling Spanish-Speaking First Graders - First-Year Results From a National Randomized Controlled Trial of DescubriendoLaLectura (DLL)

Oct 15, 2026

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A multisite, multicohort, student-level randomized controlled trial evaluates Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL), an intensive one-to-one literacy intervention for struggling first-grade Spanish-speaking students. DLL delivers Spanish native-language instruction at an individualized pace over roughly 12 to 20 weeks by trained bilingual teachers. The study reports first-cohort outcomes across 11 Spanish literacy measures, where treated students outperform controls with statistically significant effects (0.34–1.06). English assessments show positive effects without statistical significance.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Addressing Literacy Needs of Struggling Spanish-Speaking First Graders

Study design and intervention (Descubriendo La Lectura)

Impact on Spanish and English literacy outcomes

Background and policy/practice context

AERA Open July-September 2019, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 1–14 DOI: 10. 1177/2332858419870488 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2019. [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Addressing Literacy Needs of Struggling Spanish-Speaking First Graders: First-Year Results From a National Randomized Controlled Trial of Descubriendo la Lectura Trisha H. Borman American Institutes for Research Geoffrey D. Borman University of Wisconsin–Madison Scott Houghton So Jung Park Bo Zhu Alejandra Martin Sidney Wilkinson-Flicker American Institutes for Research Given the growing number of Latino English learners and the lack of evidence-based educational opportunities they are provided, we investigated the impact of one potentially effective literacy intervention that targets struggling first-grade Spanish-speaking students: DescubriendoLaLectura (DLL). DLL provides first-grade Spanish-speaking students one-on-one literacy instruction in their native language and is implemented at an individualized pace for approximately 12 to 20 weeks by trained bilingual teachers. Using a multisite, multicohort, student-level randomized controlled trial, we examined the impact of DLL on both Spanish and English literacy skills. In this article, we report findings from the first of three cohorts of students to participate in the study. Analyses of outcomes indicate that treated students outperformed control students on all 11 Spanish literacy assessments with statistically significant effect sizes ranging from 0.34 to 1.06. Analyses of outcomes on four English literacy assessments yielded positive effect sizes, though none were statistically significant. Keywords: English language learners, Spanish, randomized controlled trial, literacy The rich cultural and language diversity of our nation continues to grow. As of fall 2015, English language learners (ELLs) made up nearly 10%(4.8 million) of public school students in the United States (Office of English Language Acquisition, 2015), with recent projections suggesting that ELLs will comprise 25% of the nation’s students by 2030 (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, 2011) . Spanish speakers represent the majority ofELL students (77%) and the overall Latino population is expected to double to 28.6%(or 119 million) of the U.S. population by 2060. Even as Latino ELL students represent a larger and larger share of the U.S. student population, interventions and policies to support their educational opportunities and outcomes have been insufficient. For instance, Latino ELL students have fewer opportunities to practice literacy, particularly in English, before formal schooling begins (Schneider, Martinez, & Ownes, 2006) and generally attend schools with less favorable learning environments relative to White students, including less experienced teachers (Galindo & Reardon, 2006; Reardon & Galindo, 2009) . The progress of ELL students may be further constrained by statewide English-only programming policies that are associated with higher rates of special education referrals and dropout for ELLs (Gandara & Hopkins, 2010) . Finally, the assessments themselves can contribute to inaccurate and biased estimates of ELLs’ achievement when the test items confound students’ cognitive skills in the measured content area with unrelated cultural and linguistic knowledge (Abedi, Hofstetter, & Lord, 2004) . Addressing the Literacy Needs of Spanish-Language ELLs: Best Practices and the Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL) Theory of Action As existing policies and practices have largely failed to capitalize on the strengths of Latino and ELL students, compromising students’ educational and labor market Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.

FAQs

What is the Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL) intervention evaluated in the study?

DLL provides struggling first-grade Spanish-speaking students with one-to-one literacy instruction in their native language, delivered by trained bilingual teachers and implemented at an individualized pace.

How was the study conducted?

The article reports results from the first of three cohorts drawn from a multisite, multicohort, student-level randomized controlled trial.

What were the main outcomes for Spanish and English literacy?

Treated students outperformed controls on all 11 Spanish literacy assessments with statistically significant effect sizes; English literacy assessments showed positive effect sizes but none were statistically significant.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanford