Acceso usuarios
Dianne Macdonald
, Kathleen Hipfner-Boucher, Xi Chen
Families, educators, and professionals can struggle to decide whether bilingual children with reading impairment should read in an additional language. To that end, we examined the effect of biliteracy (reading in both the home and school language) on bilingual children with reading impairment. In this single subject design (SSD), six bilingual participants with reading impairment who attended French-only school participated in a parent-supported, home-based reading intervention (reading aloud with praise and error correction) in English. Connected-text reading in English; word- and nonword-reading accuracy, rate and fluency in both English and French were compared from a no-intervention phase (reading only in French) to an intervention phase (reading in French and English). Visual data inspection, as per SSD protocol, revealed no deceleration trends in word-reading, nonword-reading and connected-text reading accuracy scores in English. Only one older participant showed mild deceleration in French word-reading accuracy, with accompanying higher individual mean scores, during the intervention phase. Group mean word-reading and connected-text reading fluency levels were significantly higher during the intervention phase as compared to the no-intervention phase. Nonword reading, a hallmark of reading impairment, and word-reading rate were more variable across phases. Findings suggest biliteracy does not adversely impact word reading in either language.
