Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA). Results from Senegalese Primary School Students Learning to Read in French and in Wolof--Report for the World Bank

Liliane Sprenger-Charolles (1)

1 LPP - UMR 8242 - Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception

In international assessments (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [PISA-OECD] and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study-International Evaluation of Educational Achievement [PIRLS-IEA]), children's reading skills are not assessed before the fourth grade. For students who are poor readers, it is often too late by this time to carry out efficient and effective remedial instruction. Indeed, to be efficient, remedial instruction should be conducted as early as possible. In addition, most major assessments are only composed of reading comprehension tasks and do not take into account the level of word reading fluency (including accuracy and speed) and listening comprehension. However, research suggests that reading comprehension is associated with capacity in these complementary tasks. To complement existing international assessments, a new protocol, Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA)1 was developed to assess the main skills that are known to predict reading success within the early grades of primary school (first through third grades). During a workshop held in Dakar, Senegal, the EGRA protocol was adapted to the local context in French, translated into Wolof, and then pretested in several schools. As a result of the adaptation and pretesting process, the EGRA protocol was modified. The protocol used in Senegal includes two comprehension tasks (one written and one spoken), three tasks that assess accuracy and speed in reading high-frequency words (isolated or in context) and invented words (pseudowords), a spelling task, two phonemic awareness tasks, and one task assessing letter knowledge. As part of the EGRA protocol, a survey was conducted that asked questions about the students' cultural and linguistic environment and socioeconomic status (SES). The EGRA protocol was used to assess Senegalese students learning to read in French (502 children in the first, second, and third grades) and in Wolof (186 children in first and third grades). Three analyses were performed. One involved a comparison between the groups based on their SES and language used in learning to reading. In the second analysis, the pattern of correlations among the tasks was examined. Finally, a regression analysis was carried out to determine the predictors of reading skill level. The last two analyses indicated that in the two groups (Wolof and French), correlations between SES and various tasks were not significant and that SES does not contribute to variance in reading skills. This was also the case for phonemic analysis and the knowledge of letter names, although correlations between these tasks and the reading tasks were high. Correlations between the pseudoword and word reading tasks were very high, and the ability to read pseudowords was the only skill that explained variance in word reading (isolated or in context). Finally, correlations between reading and listening comprehension were very high, and listening comprehension was the only skill that consistently explained variance in reading comprehension. Comparisons within each group indicated that SES was significant only among children learning to read in Wolof. By contrast, having at least one parent who reads was significant only among children learning to read in French. In addition, comparisons between children learning to read in Wolof and those learning to read in French show that, for certain tasks involving spoken language, the former surpass the latter, whereas the opposite was noted for certain tasks involving written language. The role of the linguistic environment may explain these results. The higher scores in spoken-language tasks obtained by children learning to read in Wolof was probably because most of them speak Wolof at home, whereas few children in the other group speak French at home. On the other hand, the fact that these same children had lower scores in tasks involving written language may be because written Wolof is less developed than written French. This interpretation is reinforced by the lack of incidence of the parent's literacy status (reader or not reader) on the reading scores of the children learning to read in Wolof and by the fact that, in reading tasks, greater floor effects (score = 0) were noted among these children than among children learning to read in French. The significance of the role of the linguistic environment also emerged from a comparison between the results achieved by Senegalese children learning to read in French and the results from a similar assessment performed with Gambian children learning to read in English. In all the reading tasks, the scores of the Gambian children were lower than those of the Senegalese children. These results replicate those observed with monolingual children and suggest that it is more difficult to learn to read in English than in French, which may be explained by the fact that the relations between graphemes and phonemes are far less transparent in English than in French.

Domaines: Education; Linguistique; Psychologie

Liliane Sprenger-Charolles. Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA). Results from Senegalese Primary School Students Learning to Read in French and in Wolof--Report for the World Bank. 2008, pp.27. ⟨hal-00733603v2⟩