Reading comprehension in Spanish by Quechua-Spanish bilingual children

ABSTRACT

This research analyzes data collected by the Young Lives project on childhood poverty. It addresses the effect of socio-demographic, individual, and linguistic variables – focusing on the latter – on reading comprehension in Spanish by 502 Peruvian Quechua-Spanish bilingual children aged 8 years. The regression model tested explained 46% of the variance found: beyond the effect of non-linguistic factors, receptive vocabulary – followed by listening comprehension and reading accuracy – played the most important role. The importance of specifically promoting vocabulary development in the classroom over skills related to decoding is underlined.

KEYWORDS:

• vocabulary
• simple view of reading
• reading comprehension
• minority language students
• reading fluency
• bilingualism

Acknowledgments

The data used in this publication come from Young Lives, a 15-year study of the changing nature of childhood poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam (www.younglives.org.uk). Young Lives is funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID). The views expressed here are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those of Young Lives, the University of Oxford, DFID, or other funders.

Data availability statement

The data used for this analysis come from the first three rounds of data collection of the Young Lives study. The data are publicly available for researchers, upon request, in the UK Data Service at http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5307-2, reference number 5307 (round 1), http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-6852-2, reference number 6852 (round 2), and http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-6853-2, reference number 6853 (round 3).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ These proportions may result surprising based on what we know about the distribution of indigenous people in Peru. It is most probably due to the fact that we selected only the data from children who chose to be tested in Spanish, mostly spoken in urban settings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Junyent

Andrea Junyent has a degree in Linguistics from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP, by its acronym in Spanish), a master degree in Language Sciences from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a PhD in Developmental Psychology from University of Padua (Italy). She is a postdoctoral researcher in Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental - National Scientific and Technical Research Council - Argentina (CONICET) and also carries on research activities with the Department of Humanities at PUCP. Her main areas of research are first andsecond language development, literacy acquisition, and language impairment. Andrea is coauthor of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories adaptation to Peruvian Spanish. She is amember of the Interdisciplinary Research Group Mind and Language, and the Research Group in Language Acquisition (GRIAL) at PUCP, as well as the Lab-Las at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation of the University of Padua.

María Fernández-Flecha

María Fernández-Flecha has a degree in Linguistics from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP, by its acronym in Spanish) and a PhD in Language Intervention from Complutense University of Madrid. She currently serves as Associate Professor of the Humanities Department at PUCP. Her research interests include the acquisition of Spanish both as first and second language, specially the interaction between gestures and words in early communication, and the development of literacy skills in the national multilingual context of Peru. She is also coauthor of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories adaptation to Peruvian Spanish. She teaches language acquisition courses, psycholinguistics and research methodology and is currently a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Group Mind and Language, and of the Research Group in Language Acquisition (GRIAL) at PUCP.