The Role of Comprehension Monitoring in Predicting Reading Comprehension Among French Immersion Children

Abstract

ABSTRACT Purpose This study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children’s first and second language predicts reading comprehension. Method Children’s ability to detect inconsistencies in orally presented stories was measured by response to a judgment question about whether the story made sense and by the identification of the inconsistency within the story. The participants included 115 English-French bilingual children (M ageGrade2  = 7.8 years) recruited from a French immersion program in Canada. Results In each language, two regressions were carried out to examine the contribution of comprehension monitoring to reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3, and one regression was computed to examine the contribution of Grade 2 comprehension monitoring to Grade 3 reading comprehension. The concurrent results revealed that, in Grade 3, children’s comprehension monitoring was a unique predictor of reading comprehension in English and French. 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. 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.