Limited research has been conducted on the literacy skills of Arabic-speaking refugee children. This study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal roles of morphological awareness in Arabic word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 75 Syrian refugee children aged 6-13 years resettled in Canada were administered measures of nonverbal…

Orthographic knowledge is predicted to be central in the process of children's reading development. We examined both the temporal order between orthographic knowledge and each of word reading and word spelling--effectively, which predicts which by including autoregressive controls--and cross-linguistic transfer between English and French for our…

In Canada, approximately 12% of school-aged children are enrolled in French Immersion (FI), with some provinces estimating close to 30%. FI programs are intended to produce bilingual individuals who can functionally communicate in both of Canada's official languages. Yet, we are currently underinformed as to how to identify children with French…

Research has shown that language and literacy skills in a first language (L1) are related to performance in a second language (L2) and that these relations are reciprocal. However, cross-linguistic skills related to word reading are influenced by numerous factors. These include linguistic factors such as the specific language and literacy skills…

According to the Componential Model of Reading (CMR; Aaron, Joshi, Gooden, & Bentum, 2008), reading comprehension can be explained by 3 domains--cognitive, psychological, and ecological domains. We examined the direct and indirect contributions of these 3 domains to reading comprehension in bilingual learners. Participants included 124…

This study explored components of language comprehension (vocabulary, grammar, and higher-level language) skills for poor comprehenders in French immersion. We identified three groups of bilingual comprehenders (poor, average, and good) based on English reading performance and compared their language comprehension skills in English L1 and French…

The purpose of the current study was to explore longitudinally the bidirectional cross-language effects between morphological awareness and vocabulary development across English and French over one year. Participants included 81 Grade 1 students and 75 Grade 2 students. All were non-native speakers of French, and demonstrated average English word…

The present study examined the language and literacy skills and their relations to each other in multilingual children, who have a broad range of oral and written language proficiency in each language that they "know". Reading and vocabulary skills were tested in 50 Canadian children (ages 6-10 years) who were Urdu-English speakers,…

This study investigated an emergent interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge in the prediction of reading comprehension among French immersion students in Grades 2 and 3. A group of 66 students were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, vocabulary, word reading…

These two studies examined the processes underlying English and Chinese word reading in Chinese-English bilinguals in relation to their experiences with their second language (L2), as determined by length of time in an English-speaking environment. Phonological awareness, morphological awareness and vocabulary measures were administered in English…