Abstract
The early grade reading assessment (EGRA) is frequently used in low and middle-income countries to inform the state of reading outcomes and reading instruction (Dubeck & Gove, 2015). Although the EGRA has been administered in languages with varying orthographies and scripts, there is little research on the cross-linguistic comparability of the psychometric properties of its subskills in a wide range of languages and diverse writing systems. In this study, Grade 2 and 4 assessment results in the Kyrgyz, Russian, and Tajik languages from the Kyrgyz Republic (4751 pupils) and Tajikistan (4328 pupils) were analyzed to determine the number and nature of the underlying EGRA constructs. These three languages represent very different languages families but all three use the Cyrillic or modified Cyrillic script. Principal axis factor analysis was employed on nationally representative samples to factor analyze reading results on nine reading subtasks for Grade 2 and seven reading subtasks for Grade 4. The results for all three languages indicate that the data structure confirms two common underlying reading constructs: decoding and language comprehension. By focusing our investigation on Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, we go beyond the “anglocentricities” (Share, 2008) and monolingualism inherent in the theoretical base that informs the development of many EGRAs. This is important not only for programmatic decision making and impact evaluation outcome measure identification, but also for the development and definition of literacy metrics that may be used in the measurement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and other international development benchmarks.
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Notes
Contested issues include an alleged “Russification” of Kyrgyz syntax and expression (especially the use of the conjunction “and” in Kyrgyz); unresolved regional dialect issues that result in inconsistencies in textbooks and other educational materials in regard to rules, syntax, vocabulary, etc.; ideological forces that seek to eliminate loan words from the Kyrgyz language; how to incorporate new words and concepts into the language, just to name a few key issues. For more detail on these debates, see Wright (1999), Korth (2004; 2005), and Drummond (2011).
Overall, 98% of all Kyrgyzstanis report their native language to be that of their ethnicity, regardless of their functional capacity in that language.
The assessment tools employed in this study were developed with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). While each Early grade reading assessment is customized for local context, more information about overall rationale and design principles can be found in Gove (2009). More in-depth reports from these two countries are also available (AIR, 2014; AIR, 2016; AIR, 2017).
Dictation was included in the early grade reading assessment as it is a commonly used pedagogical tool in Central Asia and throughout the former Soviet Union (Tvaruzkova & Shamatov, 2012). It is frequently employed to assess listening comprehension as well as writing (reproductive) ability. Pupil ability to hear sounds and correctly recreate the letters and words corresponding to what they hear indicates knowledge of the alphabet and skill in word formation. The specific design employed a subtask which has been validated in other contexts (Denton, Ciancio, & Fletcher, 2006).
In the pattern matrix output in SPSS, the coefficients presented are beta weights not correlation coefficients.
For Grade 4 there were only 7 subtasks were entered into the analytic model as the older pupils did not sit for the Letter Name Recognition and Initial Letter Sound subtasks.
This analysis was not carried out with the Kyrgyz and Tajik groups because these cohorts were more homogenous in terms of home language, with close to 100% of these students having a match between home language and LOI.
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Acknowledgements
The dataset utilized in this study came from Early Grade Reading Assessments (EGRAs) administered in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2016 as part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded project Quality Reading Program (QRP).
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Drummond, T., Nakamura, P.R. An examination of early grade reading assessments in Central Asia: using factor analysis to determine the latent data structure in Kyrgyz, Russian, and Tajik. Read Writ 34, 1343–1366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10110-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10110-9