The role of comprehension monitoring in predicting reading comprehension among French immersion children

Krenca, Klaudia and Cain, Kate and Marinova-Todd, Stefka H. and Chen, Becky Xi (2023) The role of comprehension monitoring in predicting reading comprehension among French immersion children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 27 (6). pp. 475-492. ISSN 1088-8438

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Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children’s first and second language predicts reading comprehension. Method: Children’s ability to detect inconsistencies in orally presented stories was measured by response to a judgment question about whether the story made sense and by the identification of the inconsistency within the story. The participants included 115 English-French bilingual children (M ageGrade2 = 7.8 years) recruited from a French immersion program in Canada. Results: In each language, two regressions were carried out to examine the contribution of comprehension monitoring to reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3, and one regression was computed to examine the contribution of Grade 2 comprehension monitoring to Grade 3 reading comprehension. The concurrent results revealed that, in Grade 3, children’s comprehension monitoring was a unique predictor of reading comprehension in English and French. This relationship was not observed in Grade 2. Notably, the longitudinal analyses indicated that Grade 2 children’s comprehension monitoring in English made a significant contribution to English reading comprehension in Grade 3. However, this relationship was not established in French. Conclusions: These results promote a call to include support for higher-level oral language skills during the early stages of bilingual reading instruction.