The role of receptive and decoding language skills in predicting reading comprehension: A cross linguistic investigation

• In Event: Family & community literacy: non-formal building blocks for ensuring educational success

Proposal

Purpose: The present study explored the role of vocabulary and decoding skills in predicting in reading comprehension utilizing data from first grade children in Kenya, a multilingual context. Participants were children whose mother tongue (L1) was a local ethnic dialect of Kenya (i.e. Kikuyu); who also speak the dominant language Kiswahili, the East African Lingua Franca; and are learning English in school through immersion. The three research questions addressed are: 1. How do receptive language and decoding skills in English predict English reading comprehension skills among multilingual children in Kenya? 2. How do receptive language and decoding skills in Kiswahili predict Kiswahili reading comprehension skills among multilingual children in Kenya? 3. Is there evidence for cross-language associations between basic literacy skills and reading comprehension?
Method: Participants were three hundred and twenty two first grade children drawn from four public schools in Western Kenya. The children completed pseudo word reading, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and receptive vocabulary assessments in both English and Kiswahili.
Results: The results revealed that receptive vocabulary and pseudo word decoding in English and Kiswahili were significant predictors of reading comprehension in each respective language. An examination of the cross linguistic variability showed that pseudo word decoding in English and Kiswahili explained a unique variance in reading comprehension cross linguistically while receptive vocabulary did not explain additional variance in reading comprehension across languages.
Conclusions: This study highlights the importance of receptive language skills and decoding skills in reading comprehension among multilingual children from lean resource contexts.

Authors

• Brenda Wawire, University of Kansas

• Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski, Florida State University