Syntactic Awareness and Reading Comprehension in Emergent Bilingual Children

Abstract

The present study investigated the role of syntactic awareness in reading comprehension among English–French bilinguals learning French as an additional language in Canadian French immersion programs. We examined the direct effect of French syntactic awareness on French reading comprehension as well as the indirect effects mediated through French word reading and French vocabulary. We further examined the extent to which English syntactic awareness contributed to French reading comprehension through cross-language transfer, again considering both the direct effect and the indirect effects through French word reading and French vocabulary. Mediation analyses indicated that, within French, the relationship between French syntactic awareness and French reading comprehension was fully mediated by both French word reading and French vocabulary. In contrast, English syntactic awareness contributed directly to French reading comprehension. Finally, French word reading partially mediated the relationship between English syntactic awareness and French reading comprehension. Our study suggests that children who learn French as an additional language rely on word reading and vocabulary, in addition to French syntactic awareness, to comprehend French texts. Given that English is French immersion children’s stronger language, they use English syntactic awareness to support French reading comprehension both directly and indirectly through French word reading.

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“…Finally, syntactic awareness is "the ability to manipulate and reflect on the grammatical structure of language" (Murthy et al, 2017: 533). Current theories such as the Reading Systems Framework (Perfetti and Stafura, 2014) see syntactic awareness as closely related to the reading comprehension process through the mechanisms of parsing (Burchall et al, 2023). Syntactic awareness increases in bilingual children, who perform better than same-aged monolingual peers, as the former must learn to control attention to language choice (Foursha-Stevenson and Nicoladis, 2011).…”