Assessment of reading comprehension of Berber-Spanish bilingual students at the end of Primary Education

Abstract

Reading comprehension is an essential ability for students to cope efficiently in and out of the classroom. In fact, this skill deficit is one of the factors that triggers school dropout. For that reason, this is one of the competences that are assessed in international programmes such as PISA or PIRLS, besides Spanish diagnostic evaluations. In the case of reading comprehension not in a mother tongue, the reading process is more complex, especially when the strategies that the reader uses in his mother tongue are not intermediary in his second language because of the differences between both languages, as in this research. Under the previous justification, this paper presents a descriptive study with Berber-Spanish bilingual students from a public school of Primary Education in the Autonomous City of Melilla (Spain), city with the lowest academic achievement rates according to different national diagnostic assessments. With an empirical-analytical methodology, an ex-postfacto design and in accordance with different personal variables, the students´ reading comprehension is assessed by means of the reading comprehension test ACL-6 inside its four dimensions (literal, propositive, interpretative and argumentative) and also according to the text typologies used (literary, expository and interpretation of data). Results demonstrate that the participants present a reading comprehension rate lower than expected according to their level; the comprehension level is similar in the different text types used; they present difficulties in every reading dimension, being the inferential or interpretative the least developed; there is a correlation between the reading skill and the sex, and the academic achievement in instrumental subjects, but there is no correlation related to the most frequently used language nor to the education level of their parents.

Keywords: Assessment of reading comprehension, text typology, bilingualism, Primary Education.