Poster #57 - The influences of cognitive factors on Spanish Reading Comprehension in young Spanish heritage language learners

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

This study examines Spanish heritage language (HL) learners’ cognitive factors associated with the development of reading comprehension (RC). As the ultimate developmental outcome of reading, RC is an essential skill for successful learning and cultural integration. Our research focuses on those Spanish HL children who face the challenging task of acquiring RC in Spanish in an English-dominant environment. While literacy research demonstrates that English learners learning to read in the HL often master reading in English better than peers taught to read in English only (e.g., Huang et al., 2022; Goodrich et al., 2013), US children’s early Spanish language and literacy development remains under-studied– despite the fact that 25% of US-born children are now of Hispanic descent (Bauman, 2017).

Well-established models of RC like the SVR (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) posit that RC is a product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. However, SVR findings are largely limited to monolingual English-speaking populations, and crosslinguistic evidence from non-English monolingual learners or bilingual learners is inconsistent and scarce (e.g.Goodwin et al., 2015; Kim and Pallante, 2012).

The current study tests the applicability of the SVR framework on a population of approximately 52 Spanish heritage learners, ages 4-7. Children are recruited from a Saturday Spanish HL school in SE Michigan, in an area of relatively recent-arriving immigrant Latino families (4.6 %; DATA USA, 2022). Unlike the large percentage of US-born Hispanic children who might speak, but not read, Spanish at home, factors of geography, age and access to formal Spanish instruction have produced our justifiably selective participant sample, who is uniquely qualified to perform the study’s language and early literacy standardized tests administered in Spanish.

Participants were divided into two experimental groups, readers and non-readers. All tests were conducted exclusively in Spanish. Preschool code-related skills in non-readers (e.g., letter recognition, phonemic-phonological awareness) were tested using the Spanish version of Illinois Snapshots of Early Literacy (ISEL, Barr et al., 2010). Linguistic comprehension was assessed in both groups with the Test de Vocabulario de Imagenes Peabody (Dunn et al., 1986) and the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment grammar test (BESA, Peña et al., 2016). Spanish reading/listening comprehension was evaluated through the Razkids platform (Lazel, 2022). We evaluated readers on fluency and word recognition.

We implement hierarchical regression analysis for exploring the main and combined effects of linguistic comprehension and decoding on RC. In line with SVR, we hypothesize that both components explain significant and unique variance in RC, but the interaction of linguistic comprehension and decoding improves the explained variance estimate over that obtained from their linear combination. However, we also ask whether Spanish fluency and vocabulary measures parallel English-based SVR, or instead constitute language-specific outcomes. Educational implications: The study is conducted within a highly heterogeneous Spanish-speaking population since early readers and non-readers possess varying degrees of Spanish proficiency. Study findings will inform parental and educator practices to effectively support children’s HL and foster RC skills, thus contributing to equity-based research and education strategies that support minority(language) children

Authors

• Valeria Ortiz Villalobos, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Teresa Satterfield, University of Michigan