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

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Abstract

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French immersion elementary students were assessed in English and French on (1) language proficiency measures, and (2) reported strategy selection during a reading comprehension task. Although students reported different strategy use in each language, similar strategies (e.g., inferencing and reliance on text structure) accounted for reading comprehension performance in English and French. These strategies explained unique variance in addition to language measures, suggesting that reliance on these strategies either reflects greater understanding of the text or enables the reader to better consolidate the text into memory for later retrieval.

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Notes

  1. These students had English vocabulary scores within 1.5 standard deviations of the group mean.

  2. There is a French version of the PPVT (known as the Échelle de Vocabulaire en Images Peabody; Dunn, Thériault-Whalen, & Dunn, 1993). It was not used because several items are French–English cognates (~ 33%) and the sets do not increase in difficulty like the PPVT.

  3. Vocabulary was removed from the analysis given that it was only identified twice as a strategy in English.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Western Faculty Research Development Grant (R5539A03) to DF. We wish to thank Kayla Edwards for her help with data analysis.

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  1. Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario, 1137 Western Road, London, ON, N6G 1G7, Canada

    Bailey Frid & Deanna C. Friesen

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Frid, B., Friesen, D.C. Reading comprehension and strategy use in fourth- and fifth-grade French immersion students. Read Writ 33, 1213–1233 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-10004-5

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