Reading comprehension and strategy use in fourth- and fifth-grade French immersion students

Abstract

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 immersion elementary students were assessed in English and French on (1) language proficiency measures, and (2) reported strategy selection during a reading comprehension task. Although students reported different strategy use in each language, similar strategies (e.g., inferencing and reliance on text structure) accounted for reading comprehension performance in English and French. These strategies explained unique variance in addition to language measures, suggesting that reliance on these strategies either reflects greater understanding of the text or enables the reader to better consolidate the text into memory for later retrieval.