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Technical report on change in language abilities of students enrolled in the McMaster English Language Development (MELD) program
Abstract
Using a large longitudinal database, this report investigated gains in English language skills in a sample of 340 adult second language learners. All participants were enrolled in the McMaster English Language Development (MELD) program, a university-level English bridging program at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada). Two cohorts of students were administered a battery of English language skill tests at the beginning and end of the 8-month program. The test battery included assessments of passage reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge and phonological processing. Eye-movements were recorded during the reading comprehension assessment. The study found across-the-board gains in phonological processing, vocabulary depth, vocabulary breadth, reading fluency and reading comprehension. In particular, the magnitude of increases were substantial for phonological awareness and phonological memory. Furthermore, incoming vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness each uniquely contributed to reading comprehension and reading fluency outcomes at the end of the program. Results have implications for English language instruction in university-level bridging programs. The report recommends assessing phonological awareness early in the program in order to identify students who may fall behind in developing vocabulary knowledge and reading proficiency.
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We investigated the word-reading development of adult second-language
learners of English. A sample of 70 (Mandarin or Cantonese) Chinese-speaking students enrolled in a university-level English bridging program at a Canadian university silently read passages of text at the beginning and end of the program while their eye movements were recorded. At each timepoint, we also administered a battery of tests that measure key component skills of secondlanguage reading (phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge, and listening comprehension). We found longitudinal changes in lexical processing for long words in early (refixation probability and gaze duration) and late (go-past time and total reading time) eye movement measures, indicating a shift from a sublexical to a holistic word-processing strategy. We found the largest gains in sublexical processing among students with stronger phonological awareness upon entry to the program and students who acquired more vocabulary than their peers during the program. We interpret the results of this study as evidence of a transition from a lexical processing strategy that is heavily reliant on phonological decoding to word-reading behavior that is more actively engaged in higher order cognitive processes, such as meaning integration. This research offers novel insights into predictors of reading skill in postsecondary English-language bridging programs.
Based on the analysis of 190 studies (18,573 participants), we estimate that the average silent reading rate for adults in English is 238 words per minute (wpm) for non-fiction and 260 wpm for fiction. The difference can be predicted by taking into account the length of the words, with longer words in non-fiction than in fiction. The estimates are lower than the numbers often cited in scientific and popular writings. The reasons for the overestimates are reviewed. The average oral reading rate (based on 77 studies and 5,965 participants) is 183 wpm. Reading rates are lower for children, old adults, and readers with English as second language. The reading rates are in line with maximum listening speed and do not require the assumption of reading-specific language processing. Within each group/task there are reliable individual differences, which are not yet fully understood. For silent reading of English non-fiction most adults fall in the range of 175 to 300 wpm; for fiction the range is 200 to 320 wpm. Reading rates in other languages can be predicted reasonably well by taking into account the number of words these languages require to convey the same message as in English.
Although international students experience lower attainment at university than home students (Morrison et al., 2005), reasons are poorly understood. Some question the role of language proficiency as international students come with required language qualifications. This study investigated language and literacy of international students who successfully met language entry requirements and those of home students, matched on non-verbal cognition, studying in their native language. In a sample of 63 Chinese and 64 British students at a UK university, large and significant group differences were found at entry and eight months later. Furthermore, language and literacy indicators explained 51% of variance in the Chinese group’s grades, without predicting the home students’ achievement. Thus language proficiency appears predictive of academic outcomes only before a certain threshold is reached, and this threshold does not correspond to the minimum language entry requirements. This highlights a systematic disadvantage with which many international students pursue their education.
Research has shown that general vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Milton & Treffers-Daller, 2013), academic vocabulary
knowledge (e.g., Townsend et al., 2012) and general intelligence (e.g., Laidra et al., 2007) are good predictors of academic achievement. While the effect of these factors has mostly been examined separately, Townsend et al (2012) have tried to model the contribution of general and academic vocabulary to academic achievement and find academic vocabulary knowledge adds only marginally to the predictive ability of general vocabulary knowledge. This study, therefore, examines further factors as part of a more extensive predictive model of academic performance, including L1 vocabulary knowledge, L2 general and academic vocabulary knowledge, and intelligence (IQ) as predictors of overall academic achievement among learners of EFL. Performance on these measures was correlated with Grade Point Average (GPA) as a measure of academic achievement for undergraduate Arabic L1 users (N = 96). The results show positive significant correlations between all the measures and academic achievement. However, academic vocabulary knowledge shows the strongest correlation (r = .72) suggesting that the pedagogical use of this list remains important. To further explore the data, multiple regression and factor analyses were performed. The results show that academic and general vocabulary knowledge combined can explain about 56% of the variance in students’ GPAs. The findings, thus, suggest that, in addition to L1 and L2 vocabulary size, and IQ, knowledge of academic vocabulary is an important factor that explains an additional variance in learners’ academic achievement.
In the past few decades, the number of Chinese students pursuing higher education abroad has increased rapidly and steadily. According to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS, 2013) nearly a fifth of all international mobile students in the UK were Chinese in 2010. Compared to studying at home universities in China, it is rather challenging for these students to study abroad. Apart from the high tuition fees for international students, the living expenses in the UK are about 50% higher on average than in China (NUMBEO, 2014). Besides these significant costs, Chinese international students are also facing other challenges such as a language barrier, homesickness and possible culture shock.
Study failure is a major concern for these international students. An early and accurate detection of international students at risk of study failure will be beneficial to both students themselves and the host universities. Many factors other than language ability, such as appropriate learning strategies in the new learning environment, motivation, general acculturation ability and intelligence, are important to international students’ academic achievement. However, there is a consensus among researchers that English language ability is the most important factor for academic achievement (Graham, 1987; Bellingham, 1993; Johnson & Ngor, 1996; Reid, Kirkpatrick & Mulligan, 1996; Volet & Renshaw, 1996; Briguglio, 2000; Brooks & Adams, 2002; Lee & Greene, 2007). We therefore focus on English language ability in the present study.
This paper presents a corpus of sentence level eye movement parameters for unbalanced bilingual first language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading and monolingual reading of a complete novel (56 000 words). We present important sentence-level basic eye movement parameters of both bilingual and monolingual natural reading extracted from this large data corpus.
Bilingual L2 reading patterns show longer sentence reading times (20%), more fixations (21%), shorter saccades (12%) and less word skipping (4.6%), than L1 reading patterns. Regression rates are the same for L1 and L2 reading. These results could indicate, analogous to a previous simulation with the E-Z reader model in the literature, that it is primarily the speeding up of lexical access that drives both L1 and L2 reading development. Bilingual L1 reading does not differ in any major way from monolingual reading. This contrasts with predictions made by the weaker links account, which predicts a bilingual disadvantage in language processing caused by divided exposure between languages.
Reaction times (RTs) are an important source of information in experimental psychology. Classical methodological considerations pertaining to the statistical analysis of RT data are optimized for analyses of aggregated data, based on subject or item means (c.f., Forster & Dickinson, 1976). Mixed-effects modeling (see, e.g., Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008) does not require prior aggregation and allows the researcher the more ambitious goal of predicting individual responses. Mixed-modeling calls for a reconsideration of the classical methodological strategies for analysing rts. In this study, we argue for empirical exibility with respect to the choice of transformation for the RTs. We advocate minimal a-priori data trimming, combined with model criticism. We also show how trial-to-trial, longitudinal dependencies between individual observations can be brought into the statistical model. These strategies are illustrated for a large dataset with a non-trivial random-effects structure. Special attention is paid to the evaluation of interactions involving fixed-effect factors that partition the levels sampled by random-effect factors.
More and more students study outside their own countries and by 2020 a rise to 7 million international students is predicted world-wide. The present study investigates the level of language proficiency that is necessary for international students to study successfully at universities in English-speaking countries and how this proficiency can be measured. Standardized tests such as the International English Language Test System (IELTS) or the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) are carefully developed and constantly scrutinized by the research community, and they provide a valid cut-off point for entry to university, but they do not seem to be good predictors of study success on their own. This is mainly due to the fact that most students who enter universities with these tests have similar scores which leave researchers with a truncated sample where correlations between these test scores and study success, e.g. marks obtained after one year, are necessarily low. The present study investigates alternative measures of language proficiency that can predict the study success of international students. In a longitudinal study with 74 international students a battery of language tests was used at the beginning of the academic year to predict the average marks that the students obtained at the end of the academic year. Several multiple regressions show that between 33% and 96% of the marks can be predicted with tests based mainly on vocabulary knowledge. The findings of the present study have implications for decisions on admission criteria and for language support provision in addition to subject specific learning. There may be many factors other than language proficiency that influence study success of international students such as cultural factors, motivation and familiarity with the subject area. However, our findings indicate that language proficiency and especially vocabulary knowledge is the key factor that explains in some cases almost entirely the final marks that the students achieve.
The present meta‐analysis examined the overall average correlation (weighted for sample size and corrected for measurement error) between passage‐level second language (L2) reading comprehension and 10 key reading component variables investigated in the research domain. Four high‐evidence correlates (with 18 or more accumulated effect sizes: L2 decoding, L2 vocabulary knowledge, L2 grammar knowledge, first language [L1] reading comprehension), and six low‐evidence correlates (L2 phonological awareness, L2 orthographic knowledge, L2 morphological knowledge, L2 listening comprehension, working memory, metacognition) were included in the study. For the four high‐evidence correlates, a series of moderator analyses were also carried out to examine the effects of age, L2 proficiency, L1–L2 script and language distance, and measurement characteristics. The results showed that L2 grammar knowledge (r = .85), L2 vocabulary knowledge (r = .79), and L2 decoding (r = .56) were the three strongest correlates of L2 reading comprehension. The six low‐evidence correlates had moderate‐to‐strong mean correlations, with L2 listening comprehension being the strongest correlate (r = .77) and metacognition (r = .32) being the weakest correlate. Age, some measurement characteristics, and L1–L2 language distance were found to be significant moderators for some reading components.
A FRAMEWORK for conceptualizing the development of individual differences in reading ability is presented that synthesizes a great deal of the research literature. The framework places special emphasis on the effects of reading on cognitive development and on "bootstrapping" relationships involving reading. Of key importance are the concepts of reciprocal relationships-situations where the causal connection between reading ability and the efficiency of a cognitive process is bidirectional-and organism-environment correlation-the fact that differentially advantaged organisms are exposed to nonrandom distributions of environmental quality. Hypotheses are advanced to explain how these mechanisms operate to create rich-getricher and poor-get-poorer patterns of reading achievement. The framework is used to explicate some persisting problems in the literature on reading disability and to conceptualize remediation efforts in reading.
It has been claimed that the first language (L1) optimal listening rate (LR) is comparable to the reading rate (RR) of college students if the material is relatively easy (e.g., Hausfeld, 1981). However, it is questionable whether these two rates are comparable for second language (L2) learners who have not had the same amount of exposure to spoken English as L1 learners. This study seeks to find the answers to this question by establishing and examining the relationship between the LR and RR of 56 Japanese college students of English at different proficiency levels. Experimental results showed that optimal LRs and RRs are also similar among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. However, a majority of the less proficient learners in the study encountered considerable difficulty in listening comprehension. Consequently, it was difficult to estimate their optimal LRs. Important pedagogical implications for English teaching and learning are discussed.
A simple view of reading was outlined that consisted of two components, decoding and linguistic comprehension, both held to be necessary for skilled reading. Three predictions drawn from the simple view were assessed in a longitudinal sample of English-Spanish bilingual children in first through fourth grade. The results supported each prediction: (a) The linear combination of decoding and listening comprehension made substantial contributions toward explaining variation in reading comprehension, but the estimates were significantly improved by inclusion of the product of the two components; (b) the correlations between decoding and listening comprehension tended to become negative as samples were successively restricted to less skilled readers; and (c) the pattern of linear relationships between listening and reading comprehension for increasing levels of decoding skill revealed constant intercept values of zero and positive slope values increasing in magnitude. These results support the view that skill in reading can be simply characterized as the product of skill in decoding and linguistic comprehension. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the simple view for the practice of reading instruction, the definition of reading disability, and the notion of literacy.
In 1984, Jacobson, Follette, and Revenstorf defined clinically significant change as the extent to which therapy moves someone outside the range of the dysfunctional population or within the range of the functional population. In the present article, ways of operationalizing this definition are described, and examples are used to show how clients can be categorized on the basis of this definition. A reliable change index (RC) is also proposed to determine whether the magnitude of change for a given client is statistically reliable. The inclusion of the RC leads to a twofold criterion for clinically significant change.
Researchers interested in studying change over time are often faced with an analytical conundrum: Whether a residualized change model versus a difference score model should be used to assess the effect of a key predictor on change that took place between two occasions. In this article, the authors pose a motivating example in which a researcher wants to investigate the effect of cohabitation on pre- to post-marriage change in relationship satisfaction. Key features of this example include the likely self-selection of dyads with lower relationship satisfaction to cohabit and the impossibility of using experimentation procedures to attain equivalent groups (i.e., cohabitants vs. not cohabitants). The authors use this example of a nonrandomized study to compare the residualized change and difference score models analytically and empirically. The authors describe the assumptions of the models to explain Lord’s paradox; that is, the fact that these models can lead to different inferences about the effect under investigation. They also provide recommendations for modeling data from nonrandomized studies using a latent change score framework.
This study modelled reading comprehension trajectories in Grades 4 to 6 English
language learners (ELLs = 400), with different home language backgrounds, and
in English monolinguals (EL1s = 153), and examined an augmented Simple View
of Reading model. The contribution of Grade 1 (early) and Grade 4 (late) cognitive,
language and word-level reading to Grade 6 reading comprehension was examined.
The reading comprehension trajectory was non-linear in ELLs but linear in EL1s.
Syntax predicted consistently rate of growth in reading comprehension. ELLs
consistently underperformed EL1s on reading comprehension. Word-level reading
and all components of language (vocabulary, syntax and listening comprehension)
remained stable predictors of Grade 6 reading comprehension. Grade 1 phonological
awareness, naming speed and working memory predicted reading comprehension
in Grade 6, as did Grade 4 phonological short-term memory. Results support an
augmented Simple View of Reading that includes cognitive, word-level and language
components, and underscore the importance of considering developmental changes
in the constructs.
Data sets and errata are available on ResearchGate. The book is available from Sage: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/longitudinal-data-analysis-for-the-behavioral-sciences-using-r/book234770
The findings of 2 studies call into question the theory that limitations in working memory pose a lower limit to reading rate under conditions designed to elicit prose recall. Study 1 investigates 3 presentation rates for college students to determine effects of imposing reading speeds below and above "optimal" reading rates. The results indicate that although efficiency increases with reading rate, prose retrieval decreases. Contrary to predictions of this lower limits theory, the slowest rate generated an increase in prose retrieval and a high rating of desirability by readers. Study 2 addresses some questions generated by the first study regarding text complexity, text length, and working memory resources and involves young and older adult readers. Due to a reduction in working memory resources of older adults, a slow presentation rate should have an even greater debilitating effect on older adults. This hypothesis was not confirmed.
This paper provides an introduction to mixed-effects models for the analysis of repeated measurement data with subjects and items as crossed random effects. A worked-out example of how to use recent software for mixed-effects modeling is provided. Simulation studies illustrate the advantages offered by mixed-effects analyses compared to traditional analyses based on quasi-F tests, by-subjects analyses, combined by-subjects and by-items analyses, and random regression. Applications and possibilities across a range of domains of inquiry are discussed.
A large data set was analyzed to reinvestigate the hypothesis that phonological memory, but not phonological sensitivity, accounts for significant variation in young children's receptive vocabulary, against the view that both phonological memory and phonological sensitivity are manifestations of a latent phonological processing ability. Data from 5-year-old preschool children revealed a unitary phonological processing factor underlying phonological memory and phonological sensitivity performance. With age and performance IQ effects controlled, phonological memory was no more strongly associated with receptive vocabulary than was phonological sensitivity. Overall, results were broadly consistent with the latent phonological processing factor account.
Verbal and non-verbal learning were investigated in 21 8-11-year-old dyslexic children and chronological-age controls, and in 21 7-9-year-old reading-age controls. Tasks involved the paired associate learning of words, nonwords, or symbols with pictures. Both learning and retention of associations were examined. Results indicated that dyslexic children had difficulty with verbal learning of both words and nonwords. In addition, analysis of the errors made during nonword learning showed that both phonological errors and general learning errors were distributed similarly for the reading groups. This suggests that nonword learning in dyslexics is slower, but not qualitatively different from normal readers. Furthermore, no differences were found between the dyslexics and age-matched normal readers on non-verbal learning. Long-term retention of the learned visual-verbal associations (both words and nonwords) was not impaired in dyslexic children as compared to normal readers. Finally, phonological awareness ability was assessed. Dyslexics performed worse than age-matched normal readers, but similar to reading-age controls.
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