Predictors of reading ability in English for Mandarin- speaking bilingual children in Singapore

Research on the reading skills of monolingual children has established a convergent skills model for acquisition involving context-free decoding, language comprehension, and visual and phonological processing. This study sought to identify the predictors of Primary One bilingual children's reading accuracy and reading comprehension in English. Eighty English-Mandarin-speaking girls (aged 6.5 years) attending Singapore schools were administered a battery of tests measuring phonological awareness (phoneme deletion), receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, short-term memory (digit span), reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that phonological awareness significantly predicts reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills. Reading accuracy significantly predicts reading comprehension. Receptive grammar significantly predicts reading comprehension, but not reading accuracy. Unlike studies conducted with monolingual children, memory and vocabulary were not predictive of reading accuracy and comprehension. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.