The Role of Comprehension Monitoring in Predicting Reading Comprehension Among French Immersion Children

ABSTRACT

Purpose

This study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children’s first and second language predicts reading comprehension.

Method

Children’s ability to detect inconsistencies in orally presented stories was measured by response to a judgment question about whether the story made sense and by the identification of the inconsistency within the story. The participants included 115 English-French bilingual children (M_ageGrade2  = 7.8 years) recruited from a French immersion program in Canada.

Results

In each language, two regressions were carried out to examine the contribution of comprehension monitoring to reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3, and one regression was computed to examine the contribution of Grade 2 comprehension monitoring to Grade 3 reading comprehension. The concurrent results revealed that, in Grade 3, children’s comprehension monitoring was a unique predictor of reading comprehension in English and French. This relationship was not observed in Grade 2. Notably, the longitudinal analyses indicated that Grade 2 children’s comprehension monitoring in English made a significant contribution to English reading comprehension in Grade 3. However, this relationship was not established in French.

Conclusions

These results promote a call to include support for higher-level oral language skills during the early stages of bilingual reading instruction.

Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the support of the teachers, parents, and children at our partner schools, in addition to all of the research assistants of the Multilingualism and Literacy Lab. Portions of these findings were presented as a presentation at the 26^th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Toronto, Canada in July 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

Ethics approval was obtained from the University of Toronto’s Social Sciences, Humanities and Education Ethics Board and the participant’s School Board, prior to data collection. The study complies with the standards set out in the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. Parents/guardians of the participating children completed a consent form at each wave of the study and a questionnaire at the beginning of Grade 1 to collect basic demographic and background information on children’s home language environment. The participant’s assent was obtained at the beginning of each session, and they were told that they could take a break or end the activity at any time. Multiple check-ins were done throughout each session to ensure the participant continued to assent.

Notes

1. Place of birth is missing for three participants.

2. Data is based on 79 participants.

3. The administration of this test differed from standardized procedure. Only the “La Carte des Mots” (Word Reading Card) was used to assess children’s word reading accuracy from this subtest.

4. Given the experimental nature of the task, Cronbach’s alpha reliability is in line with previous research among English monolingual children. Internal consistency for the same experimental comprehension monitoring task ranged from .73 to .84 across Grades 1–3 (LARRC & Yeomans-Maldonado, 2017).

5. The outliers were extremely low values for the English measures. The same pattern of findings emerged when analyses were performed without outliers; therefore, we report the analyses based on the entire sample.

6. Unless indicated, the same pattern of findings emerged when analyses were performed with raw scores, transformed scores, and bootstrapped scores; therefore, we report the analyses with raw scores for ease of interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant # 435-2013-1741 (to X.C.). Opinions reflect those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agency.