Language skills and reading comprehension in English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children in grades 2–5

Abstract

The present study investigated language skills and reading comprehension with English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2-5. Of the 377 children in the sample, 207 were English monolingual and 170 were SpanishEnglish bilingual. Data were collected within a cohort-sequential design for two academic years in the fall and spring of each year. Growth modeling was used to estimate initial status on measures of vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, morphological awareness, and syntactic skill. A latent variable was created to capture the construct of reading comprehension, and growth modeling was used to estimate growth and ending status in latent reading comprehension. Analyses controlling for initial status in word recognition investigated relationships between initial status in language skills and growth and ending status in reading comprehension. Results showed that initial status on vocabulary breadth was related to growth in reading comprehension and initial status in vocabulary depth and syntactic skill were related to ending status in reading comprehension. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

Teaching Bilingual Learners: Effects of a Language‐Based Reading Intervention on Academic Language and Reading Comprehension in Grades 4 and 5

“…In the upper elementary and secondary grades, decoding typically becomes more automatic, texts become more linguistically complex, and teachers need to focus more of their instruction on language to keep pace with the comprehension demands of text. This has been shown to be consistent for monolingual and bilingual learners alike (Proctor et al, 2012;Silverman et al, 2015). However, meta-analytic work has shown that bilingual children, relative to monolinguals, are advantaged in thinking about language (i.e., in metalinguistic awareness) because "the experience of acquiring and maintaining two different languages-with different forms and structures-allows bilingual speakers to develop an explicit and articulated understanding of how language works" (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010, p. 209).…”

“…Instruction focused on developing students' understanding about the language components generally but specifically used morphological and syntactic examples from the intervention texts. We chose to focus on morphology and syntax because of their documented relations with both academic language (Brisk & Zhang-Wu, 2017;Uccelli et al, in press) and reading comprehension (Proctor, Silverman, Harring, & Montecillo, 2012;Silverman et al, 2015). In line with previous research, morphology instruction included a focus on common prefixes, suffixes (Baumann et al, 2003;Goodwin & Perkins, 2015;Kieffer & Lesaux, 2007), and root word meanings (Reed, 2008) via word study techniques (Bear, Templeton, & Invernizzi, 2008;Ganske, 1999).…”

The Roles of Vocabulary Size and Morphological Awareness Affecting Reading Comprehension

“…Among various factors loading highly on oral linguistic ability, vocabulary knowledge has been considered as a stronger factor in explaining reading comprehension (Droop & Verhoeven, 2003;Silverman, Proctor, Harring, Hartranft, Doyle & Zelinke, 2015;Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2011). This supports Lexical Restructuring Hypothesis (Metsala & Walley, 1998), in that vocabulary knowledge is as a part of oral language, and vocabulary growth has strong effect on the development of reading comprehension.…”

Making Sense of Science Texts: A Mixed‐Methods Examination of Predictors and Processes of Multiple‐Text Comprehension

“…Previous research has focused on several facets of language proficiency, including vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. Vocabulary knowledge has been consistently found to predict reading comprehension (Liebfreund, ; Silverman et al., ). For example, Droop and Verhoeven () found that reading comprehension in fourth‐grade monolingual and emergent bilingual students was influenced by vocabulary and morphosyntactic knowledge.…”