Improving early reading comprehension in Filipino-English bilingual children through oral language assessment and intervention in the Philippines

Abstract

This thesis extends our understanding of how bilingual children from low- and middle-income multilingual societies comprehend texts. Three studies systematically investigated the first and second language reading comprehension of Grades 1 to 3 Filipino-English bilingual children with three broad aims: (1) identify the cognitive and linguistic factors that contribute to early within-and cross-language reading comprehension; (2) determine how these factors classify students into different reading profiles; and (3) develop a multicomponent oral language intervention for poor comprehenders. Study 1 investigated the direct and indirect contributions of linguistic and cognitive skills to within- and cross-language bilingual reading comprehension. Structural equation modeling indicated that decoding and oral language made a significant direct contribution to within-language reading comprehension, while cognitive skills indirectly contributed via oral language to L1 Filipino and L2 English alike. Cross-linguistically, only within-language skills directly contributed to L1 and L2 reading comprehension, while L1 and L2 decoding skills indirectly contributed through the decoding skills of the other language. These results highlight the importance of decoding and oral language and emphasize the importance of language proficiency for cross-language transfer in languages with a short linguistic distance. Study 2 examined the reading profiles of Filipino-English bilingual children in early grade school and determined whether these subgroups differed in their reading performance. Latent profile analysis (LPA) results revealed two and three distinct groups in all grade levels of Filipino and English languages, respectively. Two consistent groups emerged in both languages: (1) a mixed deficit group with word reading and oral language difficulties; and (2) an average reader group with age-appropriate skills. In English, additional subgroups with poor oral language skills and below-average skills were identified. The co-occurrence of first and second-language reading comprehension difficulties was 15.22% to 53.13%, and these students were mostly in the mixed deficit group. These findings demonstrate that co-occurring reading difficulties may be due to general language difficulties, not less exposure to one language. Study 3 explored the efficacy of a multicomponent oral language intervention on the reading comprehension of Grades 1 to 3 Filipino-English bilingual children. Fifty-one participants with low comprehension in either first language (L1) Filipino, second language (L2) English, or both were identified from 342 students. The bilingual oral language intervention focusing on dialogic reading, vocabulary, morphology, and reading fluency was delivered in small groups of 3-4 for one hour each session over a period of 30 hours, with 15 hours conducted in Filipino and another 15 hours in English. The control group received business-as-usual classroom lessons. Compared to the control group, the intervention group exhibited significant gains in vocabulary-related measures in L1 and L2. However, no significant group effect was observed in reading fluency and reading comprehension in both languages. The intervention group demonstrated significant progress in reading fluency for English texts but not for Filipino texts. These findings suggest that bilingual oral language interventions improve L1 and L2 vocabulary and morphology and that different levels of language proficiency in L1 and L2 may not be as detrimental when supported with quality instruction.