Literacy Development in Canadian French Immersion Students: The Role of Oral Language

The overarching goals of this dissertation were to examine the extent to which lower-level oral language skills facilitate phonological awareness and to investigate the importance of higher-level oral language skills in the development of reading comprehension among children enrolled in Canadian French immersion programs. The first study investigated how lexical restructuring can stimulate children’s phonological awareness in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Sixty-two emerging English (L1) – French (L2) bilingual children were taught new English and French word pairs differing minimally in phonological contrast. The results indicated that lexical specificity in English at the beginning of Grade 1 mediated the relationship between English vocabulary and English phonological awareness both concurrently and longitudinally. Furthermore, a longitudinal relationship was established among French vocabulary, French lexical specificity, and French phonological awareness at the end of Grade 1. Notably, cross-language transfer from English was a better predictor of development in French phonological awareness, especially for words that contained phonological contrasts common to both languages. The second study was designed to understand the extent to which second graders’ comprehension monitoring predicts reading comprehension in the third grade. The ability to monitor one’s comprehension was assessed by the proficiency to detect internal inconsistencies in orally presented stories among 115 emerging bilingual children. The concurrent results revealed that in Grade 3, children’s comprehension monitoring served as a unique predictor of reading comprehension within English and French, over and above the contribution of word reading and vocabulary. This relationship was not observed in Grade 2. Moreover, the longitudinal analyses indicated that Grade 2 children’s comprehension monitoring in English made a significant contribution to English reading comprehension in Grade 3, even after controlling for word reading, vocabulary, and the autoregressor variable. However, this relationship was not established in the L2. Overall, the results from this study lay the groundwork for the development of screening measures that can be used by educators to support phonological foundations of literacy. Furthermore, the findings suggest there is a need to include support for higher-level language skills, such as the ability to monitor one’s comprehension, in the early stages of bilingual reading instruction.Ph.D

The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender by French as a Second Language Learners Enrolled in French Immersion

In Study 1, the relationship between morphophonological cues and gender assignment in French was examined among a group of 148 French L2 children (M = 114.66 months, SD = 19.69). Study 2 investigated gender-marking ability in French among a subset of 27 children from the first study (M = 120.74 months, SD = 16.14). In the determiner task, participants assigned the indefinite article unMASC or uneFEM to pseudowords whose endings were typically masculine, feminine or neutral. In the picture task, children pointed to the picture of a female or male Martian that best personified each spoken pseudoword. The results provided evidence that correct gender assignment improved across grade. More ending-consistent responses were given to feminine endings than to masculine endings. Children whose L1 marked gender were better at gender-marking in French than children whose L1 did not mark gender. Finally, there was evidence of a default subclass for gender-neutral nouns.M.A

The role of comprehension monitoring in predicting reading comprehension among French immersion children

Purpose. This one-year longitudinal study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children’s first (L1) and second (L2) language predicts reading comprehension. Method. Children’s ability to detect inconsistencies in orally presented stories was measured by children’s response to a judgement question about whether the story made sense, after each one, and by the identification of the inconsistency within the story. The participants included 115 children (MageGrade2 = 7.8 years, SD = 0.3) recruited from an early French immersion program in Canada. Results. We computed a series of linear regression models, two in English and two in French. The concurrent results revealed that, in Grade 3, children’s comprehension monitoring was a unique predictor of reading comprehension in English and French, over and above the contribution of word reading and vocabulary. This relationship was not observed in Grade 2. Notably, the longitudinal analyses indicated that Grade 2 children’s comprehension monitoring in English made a significant contribution to English reading comprehension in Grade 3, over and above key control variables. However, this relationship was not established in French. Conclusions. These results promote a call to include support for higher-level oral language skills during the early stages of bilingual reading instruction