Understanding the language subskills and other school and student factors predicting reading comprehension in the Mozambican bilingual education program

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

Proposal

Outcomes in reading comprehension in the Mozambican early grades have been a concern to education authorities and society alike. To date, there have been two national large-scale assessments, whose results/reports have been published. According to INDE (2016), in 2013 and 2016, 6.3% and 4.9% of grade 3 students read with comprehension respectively. The studies were carried out in Portuguese monolingual education classrooms. Within the bilingual education program, there have not been other published studies, though within our own LITES study we tested reading comprehension in both the L1 and the L2. Again, the results were low. However, despite those low levels of reading overall in both languages, there is evidence of reading skills transfer from L1 to L2, thus affirming the benefits of the L1-based ME model for L2 reading comprehension. The bilingual education model in implementation in Mozambique is a transitional model, geared mainly towards literacy in the L2 (Portuguese), which is seen as the language of social mobility in the country. With that in mind, we assessed the predictors and pathways to L2 reading comprehension. Our data suggest that L2 language subskills, namely decoding and oral reading fluency, oral reading fluency (ORF), expressive vocabulary and receptive vocabulary, as well as teacher’s training in the L1 and students’ socio-economic status are predictors of L2 reading comprehension. The same data suggest that similar subskills in the L1 do play a role in influencing L2 subskills, which in turn predicts reading comprehension in the L2, thus providing some explanatory power to language transfer effects and/or interdependence. In our analysis, we use multivariate regression model, and try to understand how the subskills predicted reading comprehension. We also use the HLM model to explore which classroom factors and student-background characteristics predict L2 reading comprehension. In this presentation, we will look at the role of these predictors and the pathways through which those predictors exert their impact. The ultimate goal is to suggest/discuss ways in which reading comprehension could be boosted within the bilingual education program in Mozambique.

Author

• Carlos Joaquim Manuel, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane