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How syntactic awareness might influence reading comprehension in English–French bilingual children

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Abstract

This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English–French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children received all school instruction in French, English was their stronger language and the language of the broader community. Given this dual language context, we examined relations from syntactic awareness in each of English and French to children’s French reading comprehension. Path analyses showed that within French, the language of school instruction, syntactic awareness contributed to reading comprehension indirectly through word reading. The findings suggest that novice readers rely more heavily on basic reading skills, such as word reading, to comprehend texts and syntactic awareness facilitates reading comprehension through word reading. Across the two languages, English syntactic awareness contributed both directly to French reading comprehension and indirectly through French word reading. The cross-language findings suggest that English syntactic awareness is related to French to support French reading comprehension. These findings help fill in a developmental picture in early bilinguals, particularly given studies of older, more skilled monolingual readers showing evidence for solely a direct relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension.

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Notes

  1. The pattern of results obtained using the original data were similar to that derived from the data where the outliers were replaced with the upper and lower bound values calculated using the IQR criterion.

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Funding

This research was supported by two Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, awarded to Juwairia Sohail (Grant Number 752-2016-1190) and Xi Chen (Grant Number 435-2013-1745).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. W. Room 9-209, Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6, Canada

    Juwairia Sohail & Xi Chen

  2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Tamara Sorenson Duncan & S. Hélène Deacon

  3. School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Tamara Sorenson Duncan

  4. Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Poh Wee Koh

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  1. Juwairia Sohail
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  4. S. Hélène Deacon
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Correspondence to Juwairia Sohail.

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This research was approved by the Research Ethics Board at the University of Toronto. Tri-council policies and American Psychological Association guidelines regarding the ethical treatment of participants and the protection of their rights were followed.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 6 Practice and test items on the English syntactic awareness task
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Table 7 Practice and test items on the French syntactic awareness task
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Sohail, J., Sorenson Duncan, T., Koh, P.W. et al. How syntactic awareness might influence reading comprehension in English–French bilingual children. Read Writ 35, 1289–1313 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10245-3

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