Literacy Acquisition Trajectories in Bilingual Language Minority Children and Monolingual Peers with Similar or Different SES: A Three-Year Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Bilingualism and socio-economic status (SES) differentially affect linguistic and cognitive development. However, less evidence has been collected regarding their impact on literacy trajectories. The present longitudinal study evaluated the literacy development of language minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolingual peers with different SES. A group of LMBC with low-SES (n = 18) and monolingual peers with low (n = 18) or high (n = 14) SES were followed from 2nd to 5th grade through a set of tasks assessing decoding (words, nonwords, passage), reading, and listening comprehension, and spelling skills. The results showed that all groups achieved better performances over time in all measures, except listening comprehension. However, low-SES LMBC underperformed in spelling tasks compared to the monolingual groups. In reading comprehension, there was a time*group interaction that showed how low-SES LMBC reached similar performances of low-SES monolinguals in fifth grade, but both groups underperformed compared to the high SES monolingual group. The discussion is focused on the need for research and educational settings to consider the differential impact of bilingualism and SES. Bilingualism seems to be associated with a longer time in developing adequate spelling skills, whereas SES was the primary underpinning of the reading comprehension gap over time.

Empowering Educators to Sustain Reflective Teaching Practices: The Validation of Instruments

“…Therefore, we interpreted that the reading test was valid to measure students' reading comprehension achievement in Myanmar. The reason may be that all types of questions in the reading test are based on the prescribed reading text and its example questions for grade-9 students in Myanmar [56]. The confirmation of measurement invariance across the experimental and control groups indicates that the pre-/post-tests used in this study are equally valid and reliable for assessing reading comprehension achievement in both groups.…”

“…Reading is an essential skill for students that plays a vital role in the sustainability of their academic and professional development [56]. Therefore, there have been studies investigating the effectiveness of instructional strategies [57][58][59][60] on students' reading comprehension.…”

Home Learning Environment and Screen Time Differentially Mediate the Relationship Between Socioeconomic Status and Preschoolers’ Learning and Behavioural Profiles

“…Previous studies reported a negative impact of low SES on vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary growth [51,52], early literacy [53], early numeracy [54,55], and listening/ reading comprehension skills [56,57]. Also, disparities in children's well-being and mental health concerning SES emerged [58].…”

Socioeconomic status, linguistic skills and language background differentially relate to preschoolers’ emotional and behavioural profile

“…In addition, greater economic and social freedom might have repercussions on how resources shape experience and, therefore, on subjective experience (Kraus et al, 2012). We already know from the literature that SES has an impact on children's linguistic skills: for example, vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary growth, syntax and language learning process (Hoff, 2003(Hoff, , 2006Levine et al, 2020), as well as literacy skills (Bonifacci et al, 2022;Bonifacci et al, 2020) are known to be negatively affected by lower levels of SES.…”