The simple view of reading across 14 new language pairs: evidence from Africa and the Philippines

• In Event: Understanding and measuring reading comprehension in multilingual, low- and middle-income countries: emerging research from the RELM and LITES studies

Proposal

Reading and language in education research has identified key skills that enable learners’ to read with comprehension. The cognitive foundations of reading acquisition (CFRA), an update to the simple view of reading (Hoover & Tunmer, 2020), holds that reading acquisition in any language requires two sets of skills: word recognition (or decoding) and language comprehension. Each of these skills has a set of sub-skills. These skills must come together with automaticity or fluency for a child to read any language with fluency and comprehension. There are also a set of linguistic and orthographic factors that play a part in terms of learning to read different types of languages include: orthographic depth, symbol set size or orthographic breadth, phonological unit size, and visual complexity.

When considering reading acquisition in multiple languages, the concept of skills transfer is important for understanding optimal multilingual reading acquisition. The cross-language transfer framework (Koda, 2008; Chung et al., 2018) highlights that learning to read in a second language (L2) is different from the process of learning to read in a first language (L1) because L2 reading is significantly and predictably impacted by L1 skills and knowledge along with L2 language proficiency. Others note that skills are shared between languages and can be reinforced across languages in both directions (Kim & Piper, 2019; Ching et al., 2018). The key factors that play a role in determining the nature of this relationship include: linguistic and orthographic distance between the two languages, level of L1 language comprehension and reading skills, level of L2 language comprehension, and level of academic vocabulary and subject-specific vocabulary in L2.

The LITES study (Language of Instruction Transitions in Education Systems) was conducted in 6 countries covering 16 languages, 7,200 students, and 375 schools. In each country, the theory of the simple view of reading was tested across one or more language pairs, students’ L1 and a target L2. For example, in Rwanda, this was Kinyarwanda (L1) and English (L2).

For this analysis, we used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in LISREL. Our findings support the theory of the simple view of reading in multilingual settings. Further analysis evaluates the degree that different language pairs assessed in the LITES study fit into this model comparatively, especially interesting in this analysis is the role of decoding skills in predicting L1 and L2 reading comprehension. Further analysis of Socioeconomic status and other students’ background characteristics’ impact on reading comprehension is ongoing and will be discussed in this panel.

Authors

• Annie Conaghan, University of Notre Dame-Pulte Institute of Global Development

• TJ D'Agostino, University of Notre Dame

• Pooja Nakamura, American Institutes for Research

• Jill Pentimonti