Television, Reading and Oral Language Development: The Case of the Hispanic Child

Most of the research on children’s television viewing and reading ability has been conducted with native English speakers, and most studies have found an inverse relationship between television and reading. The nature of this relationship has varied, however, when controls for IQ and SES have been imposed. But one study found a positive relationship between reading and television viewing up to a threshold of three hours of viewing per day among second language speakers of English. These findings suggest that television may model English language usage for children whose first language is other than English, that these children may use television to develop their oral language skills in English, and that these skills, in turn, contribute to their reading ability. This study explored these possibilities. Questionnaires were administered to 168 Mexican and Puerto Rican children enrolled in grades 2, 4 and 7 who were no longer enrolled in the bilingual education program. Data on television viewing taken from these questionnaires, and children’s English and Spanish proficiency scores on the Language Assessment Scales (LAS), and their scores on the reading comprehension and vocabulary sections of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills served as measures. Findings indicated that there was a positive relationship between television viewing and reading scores among Hispanic children, but these relationships differed by ethnicity, by grade and by the time of day when television viewing occurs. When these relationships were examined by level of English language proficiency, there was a positive relationship between television viewing and the two measures of reading at the upper levels of English language proficiency. At lower levels of proficiency, the relationship between television viewing and proficiency was either negative or non-existent. Therefore, it appears that as English language proficiency increased, the relationship between television viewing and reading stabilized.