This brief report summarizes the development and psychometric properties of German reading fluency passages as compared to English reading fluency passages for immersion language learners. Results indicated that scores from German language reading fluency passages alone were (a) somewhat less reliable than scores from English publisher-developed…

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French…

We focus here on the obstacles students face when learning to read in their second language, specifically in contexts where the second language is taught as a school subject or used as a medium of instruction (immersion). Qualitative studies in these areas have highlighted strategy deployment and approaches to constructing meaning as key variables…

This study investigated an emergent interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge in the prediction of reading comprehension among French immersion students in Grades 2 and 3. A group of 66 students were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, vocabulary, word reading…

Language immersion programs are becoming more available as a form of school choice in both private and public education in the United States and beyond. While there is research on the benefits of immersion education regarding overall intelligence, there is still much skepticism as to why parents would place their child in an immersion program vs.…

This study examines bi-literacy development among 60 children enrolled in an Italian-English dual language (DL) program in Southern California. Using a variety of measures including (1) oral reading fluency (ORF), (2) accuracy scores, and (3) standardized test for the assessment of reading (STAR) test's estimates of reading ability for English,…

Beth attends a New York City K-8, dual-language (Spanish/English) public school where 96% of the students qualify as low-income, based on participation in the federally funded lunch program. Early in Beth's 1st-grade year, she was classified as a struggling reader, based on district-wide assessments that identified academic deficits in such skill…

To determine whether students enrolled in one Ontario region's early French immersion (FI) programs developed English reading skills comparable to their non-FI peers, a monitoring process was begun in the first FI program year (grade 3) in which formal English instruction is given. The FI cohort and a control group matched for mental abilities and…