A longitudinal examination of French and English reading comprehension in French immersion programs in Canada

Abstract

Parental level of education, instruction time, and amount of language practice that children receive have enhanced our understanding of how bilingual and multilingual children learn to comprehend text. Guided by the simple view of reading and the interdependence hypothesis, this longitudinal study conducted in Canadian French immersion programs examined the (a) within- and cross-language association between oral language skills and reading comprehension of bilingual English–French and multilingual children and (b) patterns of growth, while controlling for possible influences of parental level of education and methods of instruction on reading achievement. The sample included 150 children tested once at the beginning of Grade 4 (T1) and again at the end of Grade 4 (T2) and in Grade 6 (T3). Individual growth modeling revealed that bilingual and multilingual children showed similar development in oral language and reading skills across the timeframe. Moreover, growth in English and French reading comprehension was associated with within-language variables. English reading comprehension in Grade 4 was also associated with cross-language variables, including French listening comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Reading development in the second and third language is enhanced in contexts where classroom instruction, as well as social, economic, and educational opportunities to learn, is equivalent for all students.

Assessing Executive Function Influences on Reading Comprehension in French Immersion

“…We found evidence of cross-linguistic association (r = .63) beween children's L1 vocabulary skills and their L2 RC, which may explain the stronger mean peformance on the latter task than on L2 word reading and pseudoword decoding, neither of which were strongly correlated with L1 vocabulary. Others have also reported correlation coefficients of a similar magnitude (r = .64) between an earlier version of the same measure in English (PPVT-III) and French RC in slightly older Canadian children (Grades 4 and 6) in FI (e.g., Bérubé et al, 2022). Our findings align with those of Bérubé's et al's as suggestive of linguistic interdependence across L1 language and L2 literacy (Cummins, 1991;Uchikoshi & Marinova-Todd, 2019).…”

“…Based on the hierarchical regression analyses and after controlling for the variance in word-level reading skills, WM and inhibition explained an additional 4.5% of the variance in RC and together the shifting measures explained an additional 16.5% of the variance in RC. That most of the variance in reading comprehenion was subsumed by children’s French L2 word level reading skills is unsurprising given the critical role that code related skills have in early reading development (García & Cain, 2014) and for children in the FI context (e.g., Bérubé et al, 2022). Inibition (i.e, stroop task) has been reported to contribute 5%−6% of variance to RC in younger (e.g., Conners, 2009) and older (e.g., Parker, 2022) children and our findings are consistent with these estimates.…”