Dual-language books' (DLBs) two-language format could support biliteracy development, but little is known about how children read them. Fifty-four third and fifth graders read aloud DLBs with English or Spanish first on each page to determine DLBs' potential affordances. Although there were no significant differences in oral reading fluency or…

The present study was carried out with 120 Native Tamil speakers to know the effects of age and instructional language on narrative comprehension and inference-making ability. Children from 3rd to 5th grades (8 to 11 years) were divided into Group A (n = 60; Monolinguals) and Group B (n = 60; Bilinguals). Seven questions were framed to assess…

Purpose: The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether parallel measures of narrative-based listening comprehension and reading comprehension reflected the same construct and yielded comparable scores from a diverse sample of second- and third-grade students. One hundred ten students participated in this study. Method: Three listening…

Using the transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1995, 2001) and translanguaging pedagogy (García, 2009) as guiding lenses, this study explores how 1st-grade Korean-English bilingual students engage in storytelling and meaning construction using two languages when they encounter one of the chosen wordless picturebooks. The findings indicate that…

Because word problems present mathematical information through a scenario, they are language-intensive and require mathematical and reading comprehension skills to solve them. In addition, they are linguistically complex, which makes them challenging for all learners, especially multilingual learners. Given the rising number of dual-language…

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also…

The present study examined the mediating role of text reading fluency in reading comprehension in English and Kiswahili utilizing longitudinal data from 628 first- and second-grade children from multilingual contexts in Kenya. We employed path analysis to explore the mediating role of text reading fluency on decoding and reading comprehension in…

Many children living 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 (e.g., Hall et al. in New Dir Child Adolesc Dev 166:145-189, 2019). However, there is limited empirical evidence on…

Purpose: This study examines the narrative language and reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual students who received instruction with the Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) program, a narrative language intervention. Method: The main effects of the SKILL program were evaluated in a randomized controlled trial in which…

As dual-language children's books are becoming increasingly popular in language and literacy education, scholars are starting to zero in on how students construct meaning as they read these books. In this paper, in light of the previously mentioned body of literature, we present a qualitative study focusing on the reading strategies that three…

This study examined whether, and if so how, L1 and L2 segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness is longitudinally related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Using a regression approach, we identified five types of comprehenders, i.e., 11 poor-Chinese/average-English…

This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children…

Purpose: Math word problem solving, a form of reading comprehension, is complicated by mathematical lexical ambiguity (e.g., the word "difference" can mean "dissimilarity" in everyday discourse but "the answer in a subtraction problem" in math). This study examined the role of mathematical lexical ambiguity in math…

The texts students encounter are becoming increasingly complex and multimodal. There remains a need to understand the semiotic resources students draw upon to make meaning with these multimodal texts. This study draws on social semiotics as a frame to explore the ways in which eight first graders with a wide range of literacy proficiency levels…

Understanding text in a second language can be particularly challenging. The authors explored the contribution of morphological awareness in children's first and second languages to development in second-language reading comprehension. Critically, the authors examined the role of a skill that might be at the heart of these cross-linguistic…