Reading anxiety in minority language children

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between reading anxiety and mother tongue in second grade poor readers.
Reading anxiety is a specific form of anxiety related to reading and reading skills. It is an acute fear or apprehension related to situations that require the processing of textual information. Reading anxiety can be found in typical readers as well as struggling readers (Ramirez, Fries, Gunderson, Schaeffer, Maloney, Beilock & Levine, 2019; Katzir, Kim & Dotan, 2018). Reading anxiety and academic performance were found to have a bi-directional predictive negative correlation, with reading anxiety predicting low academic performance and low academic performance predicting reading anxiety (Remirez at al., 2019). Reading anxiety has been scarcely studied in children, and only in native speakers. It was linked significantly to reading rate. It was also found to be related to working memory, gender and reading self-concept (Katzir at al., 2018).
Shahar-Yemes and Prior (2016) found that minority language children acquire reading skills slowly and exhibit gaps in reading rate and reading accuracy in elementary school. The literacy gaps found in language minority children may place them at a higher risk for developing reading anxiety and a low reading self-concept.
In this large scale study, we investigate the profile of poor readers who are also language minority students compared to native speaking poor readers in second grade. We will examine potential differences in reading anxiety and reading self concept among the two groups, and also the direct and indirect predictors (working memory, vocabulary, reading rate, and gender) of these constructs in this sample.
430 poor reader children (156 minority language children and 274 Hebrew native children) in a city in south of Israel, completed measures of vocabulary, reading (word reading rate and accuracy, reading comprehension),cognitive tasks (working memory) and reading anxiety as well as reading self-concept questionnaires.
Preliminary analysis indicate that native speakers preformed significantly higher on vocabulary knowledge than language minority children. F(1,210)=46.92, p<0.001., SD=2.79. In addition, in a preliminary stepwise regression we found a significant prediction model of reading anxiety F(2,214)=10.12, p<0.001. predictors were vocabulary knowledge (β=-0.25, p<0.001) and reading fluency (β=-0.11, p=0.11).
In the conference we will present a SEM model of the predictors of reading anxiety in monolingual and multilingual children based on the work of Katzir et al (2018) and Remirez et al. (2019). Results from this study will assists in gaining improved clarity on emotional impacts on literacy skills that can help monolingual and multilingual children in reading acquisition and in developing intervention plans.

Group Authors

Gili Stolarski M.A students, Shahar Dotan Ph.D. students, Tami Katzir, Ph.D.

Authors

• Gili Stolarski, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Shahar Dotan, University of Haifa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tami Katzir, Haifa University
  Non-Presenting Author