Differences Of Reading Comprehension Development Between...

Overall purpose(s) of the study, and research question(s): The purpose for this study was to assess if there were differences in reading comprehension development between monolinguistic students and bilingual students learning English as a second language. The researchers wanted to know how they differed in word reading, reading comprehension, working memory, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and morphological awareness. Methodology: The participants in this study consisted of monolinguistic and ESL children, defined as speaking any language other than English at home. These students hail from 30 different schools in a local school district of British Columbia, Canada. A total of 674 seventh grade students were compared in word reading, reading comprehension, working memory, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and morphological awareness, where 572 were monolinguistic and 102 were ESL coming from a wide range of language backgrounds. They were assessed with the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test - Revised and the Test of Word Reading Efficiency for the word reading measure; students were instructed to read a list of words in the WRMT-R and given 45 seconds to complete the same task from the Sight Word Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency subtests in TOWRE. Assessment terminated after 10 errors. In the reading comprehension measure, there were two different assessments in place: the Stanfo rd Diagnostic Reading Test and the Planet Filk and Greb test.