HOW WELL DO THEY READ? BRIEF ENGLISH AND FRENCH SCREENING TOOLS FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS

We translated and report on the psychometric properties of English and French versions of two reading difficulties screening tools for junior/community college students.We administered the Adult Reading History Questionnaire-Revised (ARHQ-R) (Parrila, Georgiou, & Corkett, 2007) to 1889 students enrolled in compulsory language courses in English and French colleges in the language of instruction at the school.Eighty students (4%) self-reported a learning disability.We also administered English and French versions of the Test de lecture -preuve de comprhension (Institut de Recherche et d'valuation Psychopdagogique Inc., 2000) to 432 college students.We categorized all participants into adequate, poor and very poor readers based on each measure and examined scores of students with and without learning disabilities.Although there were significant differences among groups under regular testing times, extended time resulted in comparable reading comprehension scores for all groups.Recommendations based on the findings are made for research and practice.Reading difficulties are a substantial concern in North American postsecondary education.Indeed, many students with specific learning disabilities (LDs) have reading difficulties.Furthermore, learning disabilities are amongst the most common disabilities in Canada's junior/community colleges (Lavalle, Raymond, & Savard, 2012).The Learning Disabilities Association of Canada ( 2002) defines LDs as a number of disorders which may affect the acquisition, organization, retention, understanding or use of verbal or nonverbal information in individuals with otherwise normal intellectual abilities.The definition notes that LDs may interfere with the acquisition and use of one or more of the following: oral language (e.g.listening, speaking, understanding); reading (e.g.decoding, phonetic knowledge, word recognition, comprehension); written language (e.g.spelling and written expression); and mathematics (e.g.computation, problem solving).( Learning Disabilities Association of Canada, 2002, paragraph 3) A specific type of learning disability (LD), known as dyslexia, is manifested in reading difficulties related to decoding problems and comprehension difficulties (Couston, 2006).This is the most common learning disability everywhere, including Qubec (Mimouni & King, 2007;AQICESH, 2011).However, not all students who have poor readings abilities have an LD.Some students who have difficulty readinghave not yet mastered the language of instruction.Other poor readers may, in fact, have an undiagnosed LD (Harrison, Larochette, & Nichols, 2007;Mimouni, 2006).Another explanation may be that reading skills are normally distributed in the population.

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