Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The overarching goals of this dissertation were to examine the extent to which lower-level oral language skills facilitate phonological awareness and to investigate the importance of higher-level oral language skills in the development of reading comprehension among children enrolled in Canadian French immersion programs. The first study investigated how lexical restructuring can stimulate children’s phonological awareness in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Sixty-two emerging English (L1) – French (L2) bilingual children were taught new English and French word pairs differing minimally in phonological contrast. The results indicated that lexical specificity in English at the beginning of Grade 1 mediated the relationship between English vocabulary and English phonological awareness both concurrently and longitudinally. Furthermore, a longitudinal relationship was established among French vocabulary, French lexical specificity, and French phonological awareness at the end of Grade 1. Notably, cross-language transfer from English was a better predictor of development in French phonological awareness, especially for words that contained phonological contrasts common to both languages. The second study was designed to understand the extent to which second graders’ comprehension monitoring predicts reading comprehension in the third grade. The ability to monitor one’s comprehension was assessed by the proficiency to detect internal inconsistencies in orally presented stories among 115 emerging bilingual children. The concurrent results revealed that in Grade 3, children’s comprehension monitoring served as a unique predictor of reading comprehension within English and French, over and above the contribution of word reading and vocabulary. This relationship was not observed in Grade 2. Moreover, the longitudinal analyses indicated that Grade 2 children’s comprehension monitoring in English made a significant contribution to English reading comprehension in Grade 3, even after controlling for word reading, vocabulary, and the autoregressor variable. However, this relationship was not established in the L2. Overall, the results from this study lay the groundwork for the development of screening measures that can be used by educators to support phonological foundations of literacy. Furthermore, the findings suggest there is a need to include support for higher-level language skills, such as the ability to monitor one’s comprehension, in the early stages of bilingual reading instruction.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Klaudia Krenca
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3144158212