Reading comprehension skills and syntactic comprehension skills of bilingual children: From a linguistic perspective

Abstract

This study investigates the reading comprehension and syntactic comprehension skills of bilinguals. It is considered that bilinguals have cognitive, neural and social advantages as they have a rich linguistic environment. Studies suggest that bilingual children have better metalinguistic awareness and show cognitive advantages compared to monolinguals. In this study reading comprehension skills and syntactic comprehension skills were evaluated in 14 bilingual English-Turkish and 18 monolingual Turkish children. To evaluate reading comprehension skills, the ‘Reading Comprehension Scale’ and to evaluate syntactic comprehension, ‘Grammatical Judgment Test’ were used. Attitude questionnaire was used to evaluate the bilinguals’ attitudes towards the Turkish language. The results of this study revealed that in the reading comprehension scale monolingual group performed better than the bilingual group in reading texts. Within bilingual group comparisons, the mean scores revealed that the bilingual group had the best test scores in narrative and explanatory texts, followed by scientific texts and poetry. Syntactic comprehension evaluations revealed that bilinguals have difficulties in detecting the grammaticality of word constructions. Attitude Questionnaire revealed that most of the bilingual children have a negative attitude towards the Turkish language. The difficulties of reading and syntactic comprehension skills bilinguals display are usually associated with the environment they live in. It has been found that bilinguals fail to comprehend complex sentences correctly in some settings. These findings led to the question whether bilinguals have learnt all of the complex syntactic properties of the grammatical system. Bilinguals’ limitations to access the language may cause difficulties in processing. This study tries to get a better understanding of the basis of bilinguals’ failure in reading and syntactic comprehension.