Emergent Bilinguals' and English Monolinguals' Reading Achievement: Disentwining Contributions of Motivation, Anxiety, Engagement, and Strategies

• In Event: Cognitive and Motivational Factors in Multilingual Learners' Reading: Findings Before and During the Pandemic

Abstract

This study examined the roles that reading motivation and anxiety play in the reading achievement of Emergent Bilingual (EB) and English Monolingual (EM) elementary students. The reading engagement framework (Guthrie et al., 2012), which posits that several motivation dimensions – positive and negative – affect individuals’ reading engagement, in turn directly influencing their reading achievement, guided the study. The control-value control-value theory of achievement motivation (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012) also informed it. In this theory, anxiety is a negative-activiating emotion, engendered by feeling lack of control in valued achievement domains, which typically promotes avoidance (i.e., disengagement) and thereby negatively impacts achievement.

We addressed two questions: (1) Do upper elementary-grade EBs and EMs differ in their levels of reading motivation (self-efficacy, intrinsic, extrinsic), anxiety, engagement, cognitive strategies, and/or achievement? (2) How does each motivation, anxiety, engagement, and strategies relate to EBs’ and EMs’ achievement? (Do these variables uniquely relate to reading achievement? Is there any indication of mediated relations?)

Participants included 339 Spanish-English EBs and 196 EMs in Grades 3-5 attending suburban public schools in the Eastern U.S. EBs currently or previously received pullout oral English instruction. Measures were the self-report Motivations for Reading Questionnaire, revised with young EBs in mind (Taboada Barber et al., 2020), which assessed two intrinsic motivations (involvement, curiosity), two extrinsic motivations (recognition, competition), self-efficacy, and reading anxiety; teacher-completed Reading Engagement Index (Guthrie et al., 2007); assessments of comprehension monitoring (Cain & Oakhill, 2007) and inference-making (LRRC & Muijselaar, 2018), which were combined to form a cognitive strategies composite; Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension (MacGinitie et al., 2000), WJ-IV Letter-Word, and WJ-IV Passage Comprehension tests (Schrank et al., 2014), all combined to form a reading achievement composite.

Regarding Question 1, regression analyses, with grade level controlled and language group (EB or EM) as an independent variable, indicated that EBs were statistically significantly lower than EMs in self-efficacy, strategies, and achievement, and higher in anxiety (Table 1). For Question 2, multiple hierarchical regression analyses, again controlling for grade level, indicated that when all independent variables were entered (Table 2, Model 5), anxiety, engagement, and strategies showed significant (or, marginally significant, in one case), unique relations with reading achievement in each language group. Further, within each model, the motivations, anxiety, and engagement showed relations of the same valence and vastly similar strength across groups. Lastly, declines in the standardized coefficients (βs) for self-efficacy and extrinsic motivation when anxiety and engagement were added, and in the anxiety β when engagement was added, suggested that further exploring the potential mediatory roles of anxiety and engagement is merited.

This study supports the growing convinction that reading-specific motivations and emotions matter for reading achievement, and do so similarly for EBs and EMs (Jalongo & Hirsch, 2010; Taboada Barber et al., 2020). It further suggests that reading motivations and emotions should be examined within models that afford investigation of causal relations among them, engagement, and cognitive contributors to reading achievement.

Authors

• Ana Taboada Barber, University of Maryland

• Susan Lutz Klauda, University of Maryland