Comprehension monitoring in Chinese-English bilingual good and poor comprehenders

Abstract

 The present study was one of the few to investigate the relative contributions of comprehension monitoring to L1 and L2 reading among Hong Kong Chinese-English adolescents, and to examine the comprehension monitoring ability among poor comprehenders. Fifty-three grade 7 and grade 8 students were tested on cognitive ability, word reading, reading comprehension, and comprehension monitoring. We identified three unexpected poor comprehenders in English (PE), four unexpected poor comprehenders in both languages (PB) and four expected average readers (EAC) who were matched on non-verbal and verbal intelligence, word reading, working memory and executive function. Results revealed that L1 comprehension monitoring significantly contributed to L1 and L2 reading comprehension to a similar extent, while L2 comprehension monitoring contributes to L1 reading comprehension to a smaller extent. Poor comprehenders in English and in both languages exhibited significant weaknesses in identification of global inconsistencies in L1 comprehension monitoring task. These results refine our understanding on L1 and L2 reading comprehension, supporting the linguistic interdependence theory in explaining cross-language transfer of metacognitive skills. Results call for further investigation on the contribution of long-term working memory on reading comprehension among poor comprehenders.