Reading Comprehension in English-French Bilinguals: The Roles of Syntactic and Morphological Awareness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the roles of two types of metalinguistic awareness – syntactic and morphological awareness – in the reading comprehension of children enrolled in early Canadian French immersion programs. The first study investigated the contributions of syntactic awareness to concurrent reading comprehension within and across children’s first and second languages. Seventy-two emerging English-French bilingual children in Grade 3 completed measures of syntactic awareness, reading comprehension, word reading, and vocabulary in both languages, as well as a measure of nonverbal reasoning. Results revealed that French syntactic awareness made a significant unique contribution to French reading comprehension beyond controls. French syntactic awareness also contributed cross-linguistically to English reading comprehension after accounting for English controls, including English syntactic awareness. In contrast, no significant unique relations were found between English syntactic awareness and reading comprehension in either language beyond controls.The second study examined the development of morphological awareness, as well as its role in reading comprehension, in emerging English-French bilinguals. Using a longitudinal design, 115 participants were assessed in both languages on morphological awareness, reading comprehension, word reading, and vocabulary in Grade 2 and again in Grade 3. A measure of nonverbal reasoning was also collected. Results highlight the influence of phonological structure and cognate status on children’s development of morphological awareness in each language. Within-language results revealed that French morphological awareness contributed to concurrent French reading comprehension in both Grades 2 and 3 after controls, while English morphological awareness contributed to English reading comprehension in Grade 3 only. Longitudinally, Grade 2 morphological awareness predicted gains in Grade 3 reading comprehension within each language, beyond a stringent autoregressive control. Cross-language results indicated that French morphological awareness made significant contributions to English reading comprehension concurrently in Grade 3, and longitudinally from Grade 2 to Grade 3. In contrast, English morphological awareness did not contribute to French reading comprehension concurrently or longitudinally. Taken together, the findings of this dissertation add to our understanding of the roles of syntactic and morphological awareness in the reading comprehension of bilingual children. The findings underscore the importance of cultivating children’s metalinguistic awareness during the early stages of bilingual reading instruction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".