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September 2004 - present
August 2004 - October 2015
Publications
Publications (144)
This article describes an exploratory study of bilingual oral language profiles among a diverse group of students in Early French Immersion (EFI), in Ontario, Canada. Participants were 28 EFI students in Grade 4 (9–10 years of age). Oral language components were assessed with measures of comprehension (receptive vocabulary and following directions)...
The Arabic development of Syrian refugee children (N = 133; mean age = 9;4 at Time 1) was examined over 3 time periods during their first five years in Canada. Children were administered sentence repetition and receptive vocabulary tasks in English and Arabic, and information about age-of-arrival (AOA), schooling in Arabic and language environment...
This longitudinal, mixed-methods study reports on the development and implementation of an early phonological awareness screening and intervention program for struggling emergent readers in a French immersion school in Manitoba. The program was created by a professional learning community made up of the school administrator, teachers, and clinical...
Aims and Objectives
Increasingly, students who speak a minority language at home (minority-L1) enroll in Early French Immersion in Canada. A frequent question is the extent to which they develop academic abilities in English. Accordingly, this study asks: (a) Do a similar percentage of minority-L1 students meet provincial standards for academic ach...
Transcription is an important component of the writing process that affects the quality of children’s compositions. However, little is known about how transcription mode influences productivity or spelling accuracy, two word-level markers of compositional quality, among children learning to write in an additional language. To address this issue, we...
Background
The COVID‐19 pandemic created a unique learning experience, characterised by school closures and a shift to online learning. Research suggests that online learning during the pandemic negatively impacted the reading development of elementary school children. However, little is known about the challenges of learning a second language (L2)...
This longitudinal, mixed-methods study reports on the development and implementation of an early phonological awareness screening and intervention program for struggling emergent readers in a French immersion school in Manitoba. The program was created by a professional learning community made up of the school administrator, teachers, and clinical...
Canadian French immersion (FI) programs have increased in popularity due to the social and developmental benefits of English-French bilingualism. However, several studies have shown that FI programs do not provide equitable access to diverse students, nor do they provide adequate support to these students once they gain access to the program. To ex...
This study explored the academic achievement of students who speak a minority language (ML) at home (i.e., a language other than the official languages of Canada, English and French) and who have special education needs (SEN), in two educational programs that differed in language of instruction: English language of instruction (ELoI), and Early Fre...
Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are...
Canadian French Immersion (FI) programs have increased in popularity due to the social and developmental benefits of English-French bilingualism. However, several studies have shown that FI programs do not provide equitable access to diverse students, nor do they provide adequate support to these students once they gain access to the program (Barre...
Although age of acquisition (AoA) is frequently used when examining the endpoint of second language (L2) learning, it is rarely used to examine the initial phases of L2 acquisition. The present study provided a unique look at the role of AoA in early language and literacy acquisition in the L2 by a priori selecting two groups of Arabic-English spea...
This study investigated the extent to which comprehension monitoring in children’s first and second language predicts reading comprehension.
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 withi...
Limited research has been conducted on the literacy skills of Arabic‐speaking refugee children. This study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal roles of morphological awareness in Arabic word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 75 Syrian refugee children aged 6–13 years resettled in Canada were administered measures of nonverbal r...
The present study investigated the role of syntactic awareness in reading comprehension among English–French bilinguals learning French as an additional language in Canadian French immersion programs. We examined the direct effect of French syntactic awareness on French reading comprehension as well as the indirect effects mediated through French w...
We examined whether and how the degree of meaning overlap between morphologically related words influences sentence plausibility judgment in children. In two separate studies with kindergarten and second-graders, English-speaking and French-speaking children judged the plausibility of sentences that included two paired target words. Some of these w...
This study examines the contributions of syntactic awareness to reading comprehension, both within and across languages, in third-grade children learning French as a second (L2) or third language (L3). Participants were 72 non-francophone children enrolled in a Canadian French immersion program in which all academic instruction is in French. Childr...
Extensive research has demonstrated the importance of struggling reader identification in monolingual children Compton et al. (Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 327-340, 2010). However, very few studies have explored identification of struggling readers in bilinguals. The aim of this study was to investigate (1) the overlap of word reading di...
Orthographic knowledge is predicted to be central in the process of children’s reading development. We examined both the temporal order between orthographic knowledge and each of word reading and word spelling—effectively, which predicts which by including autoregressive controls— and cross-linguistic transfer between English and French for our eme...
First-generation refugee children often experience pre- and post-migration adversity and display high levels of mental health/wellbeing difficulties, but to date, research has not examined the impact of such factors on refugee children's L2 acquisition. Accordingly, this study examined the influence of externalizing and internalizing problem behavi...
This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English–French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children r...
Aims and objectives:
The study investigated narrative microstructure skills of Arabic-speaking immigrant children in Canada (N = 75; age range 7–12 years) with specific focus on diglossia and the lexical distance between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA). The study also tested the relationship between microstructure and macrostructure a...
This longitudinal study investigated how lexical restructuring can stimulate emerging bilingual children's phonological awareness in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Sixty-two English (L1)-French (L2) bilingual children (M age = 75.7 months, SD = 3.2) were taught new English and French word pairs differing minimally in phonological contr...
Best practices for teaching and learning online are now critical for successful literacy education in many classrooms due to the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. It was evident during the pandemic that pre-existing opportunity and achievement gaps widened significantly for students from diverse backgrounds. It is thus critical for teachers to...
Purpose
Our 1-year longitudinal study tracked the development of cognate awareness among second (L2) and third language (L3) learners of French in French immersion in Grades 1 and 2 to explore the impact of orthographic overlap and cognate status (true vs. false) on children's ability to recognize cognate relationships. We also assessed the impact...
This longitudinal study examined the relative contributions of word reading accuracy, word reading fluency and linguistic comprehension to reading comprehension from Grade 1 to Grade 2 in Canadian children who speak French as an L2. French is an opaque orthography but it is more consistent in how graphemes are mapped to phonemes than English. A tot...
Situated within the Simple View of Reading, this study examined the code-related (word
reading) and oral language (receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, narrative
production) skills that contribute to English and Arabic reading comprehension in two groups of Arabic-English bilingual children (7-9 and 10-12 years) living in an English major...
Jin Xue Xiaolan Hu Rong Yan- [...]
Miao Li
The present study examined the relationship between age of acquisition (AoA) and bilingual development for native Chinese children who learned English as a foreign language. A composite test measuring different aspects of language and cognitive skills in Chinese and English was administered on 85 Chinese native primary schoolers, who received bilin...
Research has shown that language and literacy skills in a first language (L1) are related to performance in a second language (L2) and that these relations are reciprocal. However, cross‐linguistic skills related to word reading are influenced by numerous factors. These include linguistic factors such as the specific language and literacy skills be...
This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6–13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse m...
Purpose
The value of shared reading as an opportunity for learning word meanings, or semantics, is well established; it is less clear whether children learn about the orthography, or word spellings, in this context. We tested whether children can learn the spellings and meanings of new words at the same time during a tightly controlled shared readi...
Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children’s reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge – of the features of print – to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual childr...
This study examined the sources of reading comprehension difficulties in English language learners (ELLs). The characteristics of ELL poor comprehenders were compared to their English as a first language (EL1) peers. Participants included 124 ELLs who spoke Chinese as an L1 and 79 EL1 students. Using a regression technique based on age, non-verbal...
This study investigated access to and outcomes of Early French Immersion (EFI) for students with special education needs (SEN) attending a large school board in Canada. Data analysis was carried out on: provincially mandated achievement test scores for all Grade 3 students with SEN participating over a three-year period ( n = 705) who attended eith...
The objective of our study was to investigate the acculturation experiences of Syrian refugee families in two contexts (Toronto, Canada, and Munich, Germany) 2 years postresettlement. Specifically, using qualitative methodologies, we examined acculturation orientation through the lens of parent and child minority and majority language use and prefe...
This study examined the oral language skills of grade-two anglophone children enrolled in French Immersion and English-stream programs. The study had two objectives: (a) to compare performance between the groups on measures of receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, and narrative production (i.e., structure and language) in English, and (b)...
Word reading is a fundamental skill in reading and one of the building blocks of reading comprehension. Theories have posited that for second language (L2) learners, word reading skills are related if the children have sufficient experience in the L2 and are literate in the first language (L1). The L1 and L2 reading, phonological awareness skills,...
Canada has resettled more than 57,000 Syrian refugees since 2015 (Government of Canada,
2017). However, little is known about refugee children’s language and literacy development. The present study evaluated Syrian refugee children’s performance on language
and literacy measures in English and Arabic, and examined whether the simple view of
reading...
This study investigated access to and outcomes of Early French Immersion (EFI) for students with special education needs (SEN) attending a large school board in Canada. Data analysis was carried out on: provincially mandated achievement test scores for all grade 3 students with SEN participating over a three-year period (n = 705) who attended eithe...
Research on the bilingual development of refugee children is limited, despite this group having distinct characteristics and migration experiences that could impact language development. This study examined the role of language environment factors, alongside age and cognitive factors, in shaping the Arabic as a first/heritage language and English a...
The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants included 287 Hong Kong Chinese children (167 third graders, 84 girls, mean age = 8.73, SD = .49, and 120 fourth graders, 45 girls, mean age = 9.93, SD = .51). Using structural...
This study collected interview data from parents of five children identified as having special education needs who were attending or had attended a French Immersion program in Toronto, Ontario. The experiences of these families were qualitatively analyzed to uncover critical themes surrounding experiences and beliefs around French Immersion enrolme...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:
We explored the advantage of bilingualism and the effect of linguistic proximity on the acquisition of determiner-noun agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology, in a French immersion setting. To our knowledge, third language acquisition literature has yet to provide evidence of a bilingual adva...
Pinyin is an alphabetic script that denotes pronunciations of Chinese characters. Studies have shown that Pinyin instruction enhances both phonological awareness (e.g., Shu et al., Developmental Science, 2008, 11, 171–181) and character reading (e.g., Lin et al., Psychological Science, 2010, 21, 1117–1122) in Chinese children. In the present study,...
This study examined overlap and correlates of poor reading comprehension in English and French for children in early French immersion. Poor comprehenders were identified in grade 3 in English and French using a regression method to predict reading comprehension scores from age, non-verbal reasoning, word reading accuracy, and word reading fluency....
The 1-year longitudinal study presented here examined the extent to which the ability to build phonologically specific lexical entries as a result of increasing vocabulary size predicts word reading via its impact on phonological awareness within and across languages in 62 emerging English (L1) and French (L2) Grade 1 children (M = 75.69 months, SD...
How the construct of vocabulary is defined remains unclear although multiple theories have been put forth. In light of the lack of empirical work investigating the dimensionality of vocabulary knowledge in Chinese, the present study investigated the factor structure of Chinese print vocabulary in a sample of 111 Taiwanese children in Grades 1 and 2...
According to the Componential Model of Reading (CMR; Aaron, Joshi, Gooden, & Bentum, 2008), reading comprehension can be explained by 3 domains—cognitive, psychological, and ecological domains. We examined the direct and indirect contributions of these 3 domains to reading comprehension in bilingual learners. Participants included 124 bilingual chi...
This chapter, based on a workshop, outlines the importance and benefits of using a student's first language to support their academic development in all areas. This chapter reviews language immersion programs, as well as the social context around refugee and immigrant students in Canada. We then discuss the typical timeline for second-language deve...
The purpose of the present study was to examine the predictive value of a dynamic test of English and French lexical specificity on at-risk reading classification in 13 at-risk and 44 not at-risk emerging English (L1)–French (L2) bilingual Grade 1 children (M = 75.87 months, SD = 3.18) enrolled in an early French immersion program in Canada. Lexica...
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 fluenc...
The self-teaching hypothesis (Share [1995]. Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55, 151–218) proposes that readers acquire word-specific orthographic representations during independent reading. We evaluate the generalisability of this theory to second language (L2) reading. In this context, we al...
Independent reading offers children opportunities to learn the spellings and meanings of words. Evidence to date shows that older children take advantage of these orthographic and semantic learning opportunities. We provided a much-needed test of whether young readers can acquire spellings and meanings of novel words through independent reading as...
The study examined the role of phonological awareness and morphological awareness in concurrent and subsequent oral vocabulary among Chinese–English bilingual children who learned Chinese as their heritage language and English as their societal language. Ninety-one Chinese–English bilingual children in kindergarten and Grade 1 who were recruited fr...
The purpose of the current study was to explore longitudinally the bidirectional cross-language effects between morphological awareness and vocabulary development across English and French over one year. Participants included 81 Grade 1 students and 75 Grade 2 students. All were non-native speakers of French, and demonstrated average English word r...
We discuss the cross-language relationships of phonological awareness, morphological
awareness, and vocabulary in the context of English and Chinese and also how these three constructs are related to word reading within and between the two languages. We focused on a series of studies that have examined Chinese and English monolinguals, as well as...
The concept of cross-language transfer is central in bilingual reading development. This is because researchers and educators search for the conditions that allow learning that takes place in one language to enhance learning in the other language (Perkins & Salomon, 1992). In the past, the research focus was primarily on cross-language transfer in...
L'objectif de cette étude était d'examiner le transfert inter-langue de la conscience syntaxique chez les enfants anglophones inscrits à un programme d'immersion française. Pour réaliser ce but, nous utilisons des analyses de médiation. Nous avons mesuré la conscience syntaxique avec une tâche de réorganisation de mots. Nous voyons que la conscienc...
This longitudinal study tested whether contributions of phonological awareness and morphological awareness to Chinese vocabulary and character reading measured one year later were similar for monolingual Chinese-speaking children in China and Chinese-English
bilingual children in Canada. Participants included 79 Canadian and 93 Chinese children in...
Around the world, children embark on learning to read in their home language or writing system. But does their specific language, and how it is written, make a difference to how they learn? How is learning to read English similar to or different from learning in other languages? Is reading alphabetic writing a different challenge from reading sylla...
We present two studies that examine the role of morphology in French spelling. In Study 1, we examined the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between inflectional awareness and derivational awareness and spelling within a sample of 77 children in a French immersion programme in Canada. Children completed a non-verbal reasoning measure and Fr...
These two studies examined the processes underlying English and Chinese word reading in Chinese–English bilinguals in relation to their experiences with their second language (L2), as determined by length of time in an English-speaking environment. Phonological awareness, morphological awareness and vocabulary measures were administered in English...
The present study examines the role of instruction in the development of reading and writing skills in Spanish as a heritage language during childhood. Sixty-six (n=66) Spanish heritage speakers in K-4 th grade participated in an 18-week Spanish intervention. The curriculum included the development of phonological awareness, reading fluency and acc...
This study examined the performance of Mandarin-speaking students in a K–Grade 4 50/50 Chinese/English bilingual program. The program was intended to facilitate students’ learning of English and their adjustment to English-medium instruction within the school context. The bilingual-program students were compared to students from Mandarin-speaking b...
The present study investigated the contribution of morphological and cognate awareness to the development of English and French vocabulary knowledge among young minority and majority language children who were enrolled in a French immersion program. Participating children (n = 75) were assessed in English and French on measures of morphological awa...
This longitudinal study investigated the predictors of word reading in English and French for 69 children in early total French immersion from first through third grade. The influence of phonological awareness, orthographic processing, and vocabulary in English and French on the achievement and growth of word reading in the 2 languages were evaluat...
This study investigates the within‐ and cross‐language relations between orthographic processing and spelling for children learning to read in languages that share the same Roman script: namely, English and French. We examined these relations in a group of 152 children attending grade 1 in a French immersion program. Measures of English and French...
The present study examined the language and literacy skills and their relations to each other in multilingual children, who have a broad range of oral and written language proficiency in each language that they “know”. Reading and vocabulary skills were tested in 50 Canadian children (ages 6–10 years) who were Urdu–English speakers, learning Arabic...
The main focus of this study was to refine our understanding of the link between English proficiency and mainstream acculturation in adolescent Chinese immigrants. The sample consisted of 112 adolescents in grades 7–12 living in urban areas in southern Ontario, Canada. English proficiency was assessed individually using standardised tests of vocabu...
This study investigates the contributions of semantic, phonological, and orthographic factors to morphological awareness of 413 Chinese-speaking students in Grades 2, 4, and 6, and its relationship with reading comprehension. Participants were orally presented with pairs of bimorphemic compounds and asked to judge whether the first morphemes of the...
This book represents concurrent attempts of multiple researchers to address the issue of cross-linguistic transfer in literacy. It includes broad spectrum of languages and reflects a new generation of conceptualizations of cross-linguistic transfer, offering a different level of complexity by studying children who are trilingual and even learning a...
This book represents concurrent attempts of multiple researchers to address the issue of cross-linguistic transfer in literacy. It includes broad spectrum of languages and reflects a new generation of conceptualizations of cross-linguistic transfer, offering a different level of complexity by studying children who are trilingual and even learning a...
This book represents concurrent attempts of multiple researchers to address the issue of cross-linguistic transfer in literacy. It includes broad spectrum of languages and reflects a new generation of conceptualizations of cross-linguistic transfer, offering a different level of complexity by studying children who are trilingual and even learning a...
Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of G...
The present study investigated the associations of visual-spatial attention with word reading fluency and spelling in 92 third grade Hong Kong Chinese children. Word reading fluency was measured with a timed reading task whereas spelling was measured with a dictation task. Results showed that visual-spatial attention was a unique predictor of speed...
This study explored components of language comprehension (vocabulary, grammar, and higher-level language) skills for poor comprehenders in French immersion. We identified three groups of bilingual comprehenders (poor, average, and good) based on English reading performance and compared their language comprehension skills in English L1 and French L2...
A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at three time-points: Pre-kindergarten (3 to 4 years, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years, n = 97), and...
Educators and researchers increasingly recognize the impact of language policies on bilingual education. The present study examined the similarities and differences in how the teachers and principals in two different contexts, a Mandarin-English bilingual program in a Canadian kindergarten and elementary school and a Russian-Hebrew bilingual presch...
In this paper, we report two studies that compared the development of English and French language and literacy skills in French immersion students identified as native English speakers (EL1) and English language learners (ELLs). In Study 1, 81 Grade 1 EL1s and 147 ELLs were tested in the fall and spring terms of grade 1. The EL1 and ELL children ha...
The relationships among first language (L1) and second language (L2) phonological awareness and reading skills were examined in English L2 learners with a variety of L1s, specifically Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese (maximum
N
= 252). Longitudinal and concurrent relations between word reading and subcomponents of phonological awareness (i.e., syll...
The current intervention study investigated the sustained effectiveness of phonological awareness training on the reading development of 16 children in French immersion who were identified as at-risk readers based on grade 1 English measures. The intervention program provided children from three cohorts with supplemental reading in small groups on...
This article examines the impact of early intervention on struggling readers in the French immersion context in Ontario, where children receive instruction exclusively in French, their second language. For three consecutive years, reading risk assessment was undertaken with Grade 1 students in English, their stronger language at the beginning of th...
The body of literature on narratives of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) is growing. However, little is known about the narrative abilities of bilingual preschool children with SLI and their patterns of growth.
To determine the similarities and differences in narrative abilities between preschoolers with and wi...
This study examined the relation between the performance in a visual search task and reading ability in 92 third-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. The visual search task, which is considered a measure of visual-spatial attention, accounted for unique variance in Chinese character reading after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary...
The present study investigated factors influencing the ability to decompose multimorphemic words in French in non-francophone children educated in French. In particular, we focused on the effects of two word features: English-French cognate status and base frequency. We also examined the effect of child language background (English first language (...
This study examined the within-language and cross-language relationships between orthographic processing and word reading in French and English across Grades 1 and 2. Seventy-three children in French Immersion completed measures of orthographic processing and word reading in French and English in Grade 1 and Grade 2, as well as a series of control...
This study investigated the relationship between L2 oral narrative morphosyntactic quality and L2 reading comprehension in a sample of 81 students enrolled in a Canadian French immersion program in Grade 1. Measures of French narrative generation and reading comprehension were administered concurrently. The proportion of utterances in the narrative...
This study examined cross-language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in
Spanish–English and Chinese–English bilinguals. Participants included 51 Spanish–English and 64
Chinese–English bilinguals. Both groups of children completed parallel measures of phonological
awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, a...
The present study was designed to examine concurrent and longitudinal cross-linguistic transfer of phonological awareness and morphological awareness at two levels, the construct level and the reading level. We investigated whether phonological awareness and morphological awareness measured in one language are related to the same constructs measure...