The Direct and Indirect Effects of Syntactic Awareness on French Reading Comprehension in French Immersion Students

This study investigated the direct and indirect effects of syntactic awareness on reading comprehension among sequential bilingual and trilingual students in French Immersion programs. We furthermore explored the mediational effects of word reading and vocabulary in both within-language models and cross-language models through structural equation modelling (SEM). Sixty-eight Grade two children (40 female, M age in months = 94.59, SD = 7 months) were administered an experimental syntactic awareness task in both English and French. They were furthermore administered a battery of reading-related measures. Results showed that English was a stronger predictor of French reading comprehension than French syntactic awareness due to the students’ oral language exposure in English. French word reading was shown to have a strong mediational effect in all models, while vocabulary had weak-moderate effects. This study confirms that syntactic awareness performance is intrinsically tied to age and development in bilingual children.M.A