In multilingual sub-Saharan African countries, many children attend school and learn to read in a language that they do not speak at home. This mismatch between home and school language may contribute to poor learning outcomes, including low literacy rates. Bilingual education that includes a local language of instruction has become more prevalent in an effort to improve primary school children's learning. Indeed, high-quality bilingual programs are associated with favorable language, literacy, and learning outcomes (Berens et al., 2013;Bühmann & Trudell, 2007;Takam & Fassé, 2020). Yet, little is known about how home and school language environments support skilled reading in multilingual communities with low literacy rates. In this study, we assessed primary school children's (N = 830) French and local language (Abidji, Attié, Baoulé, Bété) phonological awareness, vocabulary, and oral language comprehension skills and French reading skills. Further, we explored differences in quality between monolingual French and bilingual local language-French schools that may contribute to differences in children's language and literacy performance. We found that bilingual local language-French homes were associated with better language outcomes than local language-only homes, reflecting advantages associated with early bilingual exposure. On the other hand, monolingual French schools were associated with better language and literacy outcomes than bilingual local language-French schools. We found that monolingual French schools were of higher quality than bilingual schools, likely contributing to the discrepancies in language and literacy results. Our results emphasize the importance of monitoring program quality to allow children to reap the benefits associated with bilingual education. Educational Impact and Implications StatementThe present study suggests that bilingual home environments (French-Ivorian language) are advantageous for children's spoken Ivorian language skills and for their French literacy skills. However, children from monolingual French schools had better spoken language and literacy skills overall than children from bilingual schools. Monolingual schools had access to better resources and greater support, indicating that high quality education is important for children's literacy outcomes.

Children around the world learn to read across radically different educational systems and communities. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter the fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying literacy skills in French, the official language for primary education. Previous studies have often linked performance in statistical learning tasks with differences in children’s and adults’ literacy outcomes, mainly in Western and high-income educational contexts. We asked whether Ivorian children’s individual differences in emergent second language literacy skills and analogous first language skills could also be explained by their performance in non-linguistic visual statistical learning (VSL). Across three iteratively-developed tasks, 157 children in rural communities surrounding the Adzópe region in Côte d’Ivoire completed a VSL task on touchscreen tablets. We found strong group-level evidence that children exploited the statistical regularities in the image sequence to decrease their response times, but in a post-test, their discrimination between valid and invalid sequences did not exceed chance. Overall, their responses were slower than U.S. children completing a similar task (Qi et al., 2019), and these individual differences in processing speed both confounded statistical learning and predicted second language emergent literacy skills. Moreover, the weak correlation to analogous skills in their first language further suggests that this task did not measure the same skills for the Ivorian children as in previous samples. We recommend adaptations to the statistical learning paradigm that may improve its generalizability across the wider global population.

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Few standardized language assessments are adapted to different cultural and linguistic contexts to assess children’s first language (L1) abilities. We introduce the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit for measuring phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness in the Abidji, Attié, and Baoulé languages of Côte d’Ivoire. Six hundred and three primary-school children (age 4–14) completed language assessments in their L1 and French. The toolkit provided a reliable and comprehensive assessment of children’s language abilities. We observed age- and grade-related increases in all subtest scores. Still, children scored higher in their L1 compared to French, highlighting the need for language assessments in a bilingual’s two languages to achieve an accurate measure of children’s language abilities. The ability to benchmark children’s scores relative to age- and grade-norms are discussed in the context of language of instruction education policies as well as the potential use of age- and grade-norms in identifying children with language impairment and/or children who are at risk for reading difficulties due to poor language skills.

Dans les zones rurales de Côte d'Ivoire, les communautés pauvres, dépendant des productions agricoles de rente sont confrontées à l'épineux problème de l'éducation de leurs enfants dans une langue autre que la langue maternelle. Cette étude s'appuie sur la justification théorique de l'opportunité d'une éducation préalable en langue locale. En outre ; elle s'interroge sur les compétences linguistiques avérée des enfants débutants les différents grades primaires en langue maternelle. Nous présentons les résultats d'une nouvelle évaluation linguistique pour les enfants du primaire utilisant une batterie de tests adaptés à l'environnement ivoirien. Ainsi, (600) enfants (âge: 4-14 ans, M = 9.61 SD = 2.09; grades: CP1: n = 114; CE1: n = 232; CM1: n = 220) issus de 11 écoles dont 5 écoles bilingues (langue maternelle et français; n = 228) et 6 écoles primaires monolingues (Français, n = 338) ont participés à cette étude. Les test d'évaluation inspirés de EGRA et WJ III et IV sont composés des activités de conscience phonologique (PA: identification, élision initiale / finale, segmentation), de conscience tonémiques (TA: appariement), vocabulaire (synonyme, génération d'antonymes) et compréhension orale en langues Abidji, Attié et Baoulé. Les résultats obtenus ne relèvent aucune différence significative entre individu de l'échantillon excepté au niveau de l'âge (F(1,8)=37.47, Wilk's Λ=0.637, p<.001), et le grade (F(2,8)=14.739, Wilk's Λ=0.668, p<.001) . Les courbes de centiles permettent de déterminer si un enfant est à égalité avec ses pairs du même âge dans chaque sous-test.

Access to literacy is critical to children's futures, but formal education may be insufficient for fostering early literacy, especially in low-resource contexts. Educational technologies used at home may be able to help, but it is unclear whether or how children (and families) will use such technologies at home in rural communities, particularly in low-literate families. In this paper, we investigate these questions with a voice-based literacy technology deployed with families in 8 rural communities in Côte d'Ivoire for 4 months. We use interviews and observations with 37 families to investigate motivations, methods, and barriers for rural families' engagement with a literacy technology accessible via feature phones. We contribute insights into how families view digital literacy as a learning goal, leverage networks of supporters, and over time, transition from explicit to implicit support for children's learning.

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