Ellen Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Financial Disclosure: Dr. Kester is the founder and owner of Bilinguistics. She receives a salary and receives royalties for products that may be mentioned in this presentation.
Non-Financial Disclosure: None

Kari Kurto, M.A.
Financial Disclosure: Kari receives a salary for her roles as the National Science of Reading Project Director at The Reading League.
Non-Financial Disclosure: None

Research strongly supports the idea that shared syntactic features across languages can facilitate language and literacy development in both languages (Hartsuiker, Pickering & Veltkamp, 2004; Vasilyeva et al., 2010). Similarly, native language phonological and morphological awareness skills have been found to positively affect decoding in a second language (Kim, 2009; Sun et al., 2022). Understanding such shared features across languages can help educators leverage linguistic assets in one language to facilitate language and literacy development in the other language.

Participants will be able to:
• Differentiate between language and literacy needs of monolingual students and English learner/emergent bilingual students.
• Describe how the sound systems of a bilingual student’s two languages can influence each other in spoken and written language.
• Explain how contrastive analyses of language can predict patterns in bilingual students’ spoken and written language, using the skills of one language as an asset to facilitate reading skills in a second language.
• List 3 contrastive analysis resources to strengthen evidence-based resources.

Time-Ordered Agenda
5 minutes Introduction to the topic
10 minutes Components and skills necessary for proficient literacy development
15 minutes Differentiating between language and literacy needs of monolingual students and English learner/emergent bilingual students
15 minutes How the sound systems of a bilingual student’s two languages can influence each other in spoken and written language
15 minutes- How contrastive analyses of language can predict patterns in bilingual students’ spoken and written language, using the skills of one language as an asset to facilitate reading skills in a second language
15 minutes – Leverage contrastive analysis resources to strengthen evidence-based
15 minutes – Moderated Q&A