Exploring the Development of Reading in Multilingual Education Programs

Abstract

Researchers in the West have developed detailed standards – reading rate, reading accuracy, and comprehension – to both characterize and track progress towards learning to read in early basic education. The existence of such standards raises the obvious question of whether or not they can be extended to broader educational practice, since recent research has established that the development of reading skills in lower-income countries tends to lag far behind these standards. This chapter investigates some of the data on reading development from low-income countries and provides evidence that educational policy on language of instruction may, in fact, be the most salient explanatory variable in explaining the widely observed deficit in reading skill development in such countries.