Reading development in bilingual pupils

Abstract

The subjects are a group of bilingual pupils in 3rd grade. They live in an area dominated by Norwegian, but their parents have chosen Sámi as their first language in school. The pupils communicate in Sámi with one or both parents, the teacher, classmates during lessons, and in some cases other family members. In play, both in their neighbourhood and school, the children use Norwegian. Earlier research has showed that bilingualism for some groups has a positive effect on education, for other a negative effect. The motivation for this study is to describe the language environment and the pupils' reading competence in the context described above. The most of the children manage decoding rather well, and the decoding mistakes are of the same types in both languages. There is a connection between decoding proficiency and understanding of the text, but this is complex. The reading comprehension for all the children was at least twice as good for Norwegian texts compared with Sámi texts, for some of the children more than three times better. There was a clear connection between the children's language environment and their comprehension of the texts from school books written for the class level.