Supporting multilingual children at-risk of reading failure: Impacts of a multilingual structured pedagogy literacy intervention in Kenya

• In Event: Pedagogies of multilingualism in the early grades: Lessons learned from sub-Saharan Africa

Proposal

Many children in linguistically diverse low- and middle-income countries learn to read and write in multiple languages. Recent research provides implications for effective reading instruction with multilingual learners (Hall et al., 2019). Researchers from high-income contexts have examined components of effective reading instruction for bilinguals (Vaughn et al., 2006 a; Vaughn et al., 2006 b). However, there is limited empirical evidence on effective instructional practices for multilingual early grade learners who are at risk of reading failure. In Kenya, interventions targeting early literacy have been implemented at scale by bilateral donors such as the United States Agency for International Development and the United Kingdom’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, among others. Research reports indicated that literacy and learning outcomes among early grade bilingual children continue to remain low with minimal improvement. Despite advancing in school (to grades 3-7), a majority of the learners continued to exhibit comprehension skills at a second-grade level, with approximately 17% of second graders being non-readers in English and Kiswahili (Freudenberg & Davis, 2017; National Assessment System for Monitoring Learner Achievement [NASMLA], 2020). Many children go through the school system without gaining appropriate grade-level literacy competencies and thus are at risk of reading failure. In order to meet sustainable development goal 4 – to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all – it is essential that effective, evidence-based intervention mechanisms are identified and implemented for bilingual learners at-risk of reading failure. This paper is situated within the Response to Intervention (RTI) framework, which delineates reading disability as determined by an individual student’s response (or lack thereof) to more intensive levels of interventions. RTI encompasses comprehensive early detection and prevention strategies implemented to identify struggling readers and provide them with targeted instruction conceptualized in terms of three tiers (primary, secondary, and tertiary intervention) to meet the needs of students.
Our research aimed to examine the effect of structured literacy intervention on literacy skills for a cohort of first-grade children at-risk of reading failure as they learned to read in Kiswahili and English. Furthermore, we examined whether the cross-linguistic component skills predict Kiswahili oral reading fluency for multilingual children who are at-risk of reading failure. Data were drawn from a larger longitudinal randomized control trial of the Primary Math and Reading Initiative in Kenya, with 165 at-risk children identified (71 control; 94 treatment). Participants were selected to be included in the current study if they performed at or below the 25th percentile in nonword fluency in English after one year of English and Kiswahili literacy instruction. Children in the treatment condition received daily structured instruction in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, word reading, and reading comprehension in Kiswahili and English. Children in the control condition continued with the business-as-usual approach, typically whole word instruction. Path analysis was used to examine the intervention effect of the PRIMR program through second grade. The path models further explored the within- and cross-language relationships of variables that predict oral reading fluency over time.
Our analyses revealed that children in the treatment condition exhibited significantly higher growth in letter-sound knowledge for both Kiswahili and English. While growth was also observed for invented word reading in Kiswahili and English for both treatment and control groups, there were no significant findings for this skill that can be attributed to the PRIMR intervention. Our analysis revealed that cross-linguistic elements of English reading skills contribute to oral reading fluency skills in Kiswahili. In the presentation, we will discuss implications for aspects of structured literacy instruction essential for multilingual learners at-risk of reading failure.

Authors

• Brenda Aromu Wawire, African Population and Health Research Center

• Adrienne Barnes-Story, Florida State University

• Benjamin Piper, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation