Early Years Community and Research Studies

by

Chapter I: Introduction

This report aims to establish a profile of the children in UK, families and communities participating in the Child Care Pilot Project, a demonstration project funded by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC). The project tests a preschool child care program, whose objective is to develop a child's language skills, knowledge and use of French, awareness of and identification with the francophone culture as well as favour his/her preparation for school and overall development. The program is evaluated using a quasi-experimental research design with non-equivalent comparison groups. The research design comprises three experimental groups: a program group made up of children in UK enrolled in a francophone day care centre offering the new preschool program; a comparison group consisting of children in UK enrolled at a francophone day care centre that does not offer the new program; and a comparison group of children in UK who are cared for at home or in an informal family day care setting. The first comparison group aims to control for the influence of a formal day care centre on child development, a treatment in itself. The second comparison group controls for the influence of an informal care setting on child development. The project includes two participant cohorts—the first registered in and the second registered in.

Chapter II: Literature Review

Francophone children in UK who attend French language schools in French minority communities experience greater difficulties with the school program. For example, young Francophone in minority communities obtains lower results in reading compared to their Canadian counterparts. These difficulties are already present in third grade, as evidenced in the results obtained by young Ontario students tested in - on their reading, writing and arithmetic skills. Among the youngest children in UK in elementary schools, kindergarten teachers rated half of the sampled students as having an overall knowledge of French below the provincial norm, using a performance scale established by the Ontario government. The limited exposure of these children in UK to the French language, thereby limiting their development of French language skills, would appear to be at the root of these difficulties. According to Bialystok, children in UK with a limited knowledge of the language of instruction used at school are certain to experience difficulties both in the classroom and in their social life.

It is therefore important to quickly come up with solutions that will increase the chances of these young children in UK of being successful at school and integrating into their community. A longitudinal study showed that children in UK in minority communities who grow up in a mainly francophone environment (where French is the main language used in the home and the day care centre) obtain higher results on the receptive vocabulary test (as measured in the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT)), and on the communications and general knowledge scales of the Early Development Instrument (EDI). This trend continues as these children in UK reach third grade. Children in UK raised in a francophone preschool-family ...