Children's Multilingual Text Comprehension

EasyChair Preprint 13850

Abstract

My new book on Multilingual Text Comprehension (Schönpflug, 2023) provides a framework and a state-of-the-art overview of the research in this cognitive area and discusses developmental and educational aspects. The volume presents own research on the assessment of listening comprehension of bilingually (L1 German, L2 English) schooled fourth graders who recalled a story presented in L1 or L2 either in the same or the other language. The results revealed superior L1 compared to L2 comprehension, however the L1 advantage was restricted to L1 text and not to L1 recall conditions. The advantage of L1 over L2 text comprehension is associated with superior construction of global coherence while comprehension processes of L2 texts indicated constrained coherence construction by remaining at the level of local coherence.
The empirical test of a multilingual model of text comprehension revealed that for L1-dominant but not for balanced bilingual students, inference making mediated the relationship between language conditions and comprehension in a specific way: Crosslingual text/recall conditions impeded the mediating function of inference making.
Educational interventions should encompass enforcing L2 competence and teaching strategies for inference making to advance construction of global coherence.

Keyphrases: Development of multilingual text comprehension, Local text coherence, Multilingual text comprehension, Theoretical model of multilingual text comprehension, global text coherence

@booklet{EasyChair:13850,
  author    = {Ute Schönpflug},
  title     = {Children's Multilingual Text Comprehension},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 13850},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}