Predictors of reading ability for bilingual children

Tan, Y. H., Poon, K. K., & Rickard Liow, S. J. (2013). Predictors of reading ability in English for Mandarin-speaking bilingual children in Singapore. Early Child Development and Care, 183(10), 1420-1431.

Background

Because of its pivotal role in education and beyond, the topic of reading has received a lot of attention. However, research in the area of reading comprehension development has mainly focused on monolingual speakers of English. It remains unknown if the findings from these studies are applicable to the context of bilingual literacy acquisition.

Aims

The authors sought to identify the factors (i.e., phonological awareness, vocabulary, grammar, memory) predicting English reading accuracy and reading comprehension ability amongst female bilingual children in Singapore. The aim was to establish the relative importance of these factors as predictors of reading accuracy and reading comprehension ability.

Sample

A total of 84 Primary 1 pupils from an all-girls’ school in Singapore participated in the study. All the participants were bilingual in English and Mandarin.

Method

This study adopted a correlation design. Participants were administered a battery of tests measuring phonological awareness, vocabulary, grammar, short-term and working memory, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension ability. Hierarchical regression was employed as the method of data analysis.

Findings

Consistent with prior research on monolingual children, phonological awareness was found to be a critical factor for reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills. Word recognition and grammar also emerged as significant predictors of reading comprehension skills in bilingual children as with monolingual children. However, vocabulary and memory did not significantly predict reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills for bilingual children. This finding stood in contrast with the results from research on monolinguals.

Implications

The authors attributed the lack of a statistically significant memory contribution to the assessment task. They proposed that future work measure short-term and working memory separately with assessment tools such as nonsense word repetition and listening comprehension, respectively. Conversely, the lack of predictive power observed for vocabulary was speculated to be the result of bilingual participants’ adeptness at guessing word meanings. Finally, the authors also proposed the need to conduct a longitudinal study to establish a causal relationship between phonological awareness and grammar, and reading accuracy and comprehension ability among bilingual boys and girls, or an intervention study so as to establish if a programme designed to improve phonological awareness and grammar does indeed result in better reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis Online.