Reading comprehension and strategy use in fourth- and fifth-grade French immersion students

Abstract

The Simple View of Reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990) assumes that reading comprehension success is determined by decoding skill and language comprehension (e.g., vocabulary). However, the strategies readers recruit during text comprehension should also uniquely contribute to reading comprehension success in both their first and second language. Seventy fourth-and fifth-grade French immersion students were assessed on language proficiency measures and on strategy use during a reading comprehension task by using a think-aloud procedure. Results indicate that students used more complex strategies (i.e., background knowledge, predicting and visualizing) in their dominant language, and more textbase strategies (i.e., summarizing) in their less proficient language. For both languages, using textbase and complex strategies each accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension performance beyond language proficiency. Relying on these strategies allow readers to both construct an understanding of a text and consolidate it into memory. Implications for second language teachers will be discussed.

Crosslinguistic transfer of higher order cognitive skills and their roles in writing for English-Spanish dual language learners.

“…Furthermore, the relation of the higher order cognitive skills to writing quality suggests that instruction on higher order cognitive skills, again in L1 or L2, would improve students’ writing skills. Higher order cognitive skills have been shown to be important to writing for monolingual students (Kim & Park, 2019; Kim & Schatschneider, 2017) as well as reading comprehension for monolingual students (Barnes et al, 1996; Cain et al, 2004; Kim, 2017) and dual language learners (e.g., Frid & Friesen, 2020). However, instructional studies that explicitly target higher order cognitions in L1 or L2 for dual language learners are scarce.…”

Development of Reading Comprehension in Bilingual and Monolingual Children—Effects of Language Exposure

“…Overall, our study aims to provide evidence about the extent to which the SVR (Gough and Tunmer 1986;Hoover and Gough 1990) can account for bilinguals' as well as to monolinguals' reading development (Babayi git 2014; Babayi git and Shapiro 2020; Frid and Friesen 2020;Geva and Farnia 2012;Goodwin et al 2015). Specifically, the findings of this study will add to existing evidence on how bilinguals' knowledge of two languages with different levels of orthographic transparency, Greek and English, approach reading comprehension (Bonifacci and Tobia 2017;Tobia and Bonifacci 2015).…”

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“…In other words, students who understand that certain strategies (e.g., predicting, rereading) can be used in both French and English would tend to be more effective readers. Frid (2018) further showed that French immersion readers deployed different types of strategies when they read an English or a French text. In French, they more frequently recruit text-based strategies such as necessary inferencing and summarizing.…”