Vocabulary and Reading Skills of Cantonese and Filipino English Language Learners and English Monolinguals in Canada

• In Event: Effect of Vocabulary on Literacy From Pre-K Through Grade 2: Spanish, Cantonese, and Tagalog English Language Learners

Abstract

Background. The main goal of this study was to establish the vocabulary and reading skills of two groups of English-Language Learners (ELLs) and the degree to which vocabulary predicts their reading abilities in English. To date little research has examined the connections between oral proficiency and other measures associated with literacy development in ELLs of different language backgrounds. Vocabulary size has been established as an important predictor of reading comprehension in monolingual children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) and it is important to examine whether this association is also present in ELLs of different home-language backgrounds.
In this study, the vocabulary skills in English of the ELLs were measured with a formal measure of vocabulary, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – III (Dunn & Dunn, 1997), as well as in an informal communicative context, such as telling a story. Examination of children’s narratives allows us to study how children use different language structures simultaneously (Miller et al., 2006). On one hand, when producing a story, children need to rely on a rich lexical repertoire and be able to use utterances of various syntactic complexity; on the other hand, they need to create a coherent story that is well-organized, thus has a narrative structure.
Methods and Data Sources. We assessed lexical diversity in the English narratives of 68 Kindergarten- and 72 Grade 2 ELL students (58 Cantonese-, and 38 Filipino-speakers) who attended public schools in Western Canada. Two comparison groups of monolingual English speakers (21 in K and 24 in Grade 2) were also included. Narratives were elicited using a wordless picture book, Frog, Where are you? As a measure of lexical diversity, the number of different words, and the total number of words were calculated as a proportion of the total length of the transcribed narratives. Reading abilities in English were measured with the letter-word identification and passage comprehension subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery (Woodcock, 1991).
Results. Group comparisons showed that across grades both ELL groups had lower PPVT scores than monolinguals, F(2, 139) = 7.10, p = .002. Only in Kindergarten the Filipino ELLs included fewer different words in their narratives than the monolingual children, F(2, 67) = 5.12, p = .009, and in Grade 2 both groups of ELLs produced shorter narratives, but in terms of vocabulary richness their narratives were equivalent to those of the monolingual group. The ELLs’ reading skills in English were equivalent to those of the monolinguals in both grades. Preliminary multiple regression analyses revealed that only in Grade 2 PPVT scores predicted reading skills in English in both ELL groups and together with decoding skills explained 56% of the variance in reading comprehension.
Significance. These findings demonstrate that despite lower PPVT-III scores, ELLs of Cantonese and Filipino background produce narratives equivalent to those of monolingual children in terms of lexical diversity, and their reading abilities in English are not affected in the early grades. Therefore, assessing children’s lexical diversity with different measures provides for a more complete understanding of their vocabulary skills.

Authors

• Stefka H. Marinova-Todd, The University of British Columbia

• Daniel Berube, The University of British Columbia