Assessing French reading skills of elementary French immersion students: Utility of DIBELS in Frenc

An area remaining relatively unexplored in immersion education is beginning reading. Few empirical research studies have examined the development of reading skills in a second language, especially in early French immersion programs.;This study evaluated three foundational French-language early reading measures. The measures are modeled on English early literacy measures and are recognized as strong predictors of later reading ability. The three measures developed for this study are: (a) facilite de segmentation du phoneme (French Phonemic Segmentation Fluency), (b) facilite de mots non-sens (French Nonsense Word Fluency), and (c) facilite en lecture orale (French Oral Reading Fluency). The purpose of the study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the three French-language curriculum-based reading measures and to examine the cross-language transfer of phonological awareness skills from English to French.;A total of 51 students participated in this study. The target population consisted of two second-grade classes of students enrolled in a partial French immersion program in the Pacific Northwest. No student spoke a language other than English as their first language. All students received French instruction for half of their school day from a French teacher and English instruction for the other half of their day from an English teacher. Students received core-curriculum content instruction in both languages. In this two-phase study, students were tested using DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) measures in English and using IDAPEL (Indicateurs dynamiques d'habiletees precoses en lecture) measures in French during two consecutive weeks in the fall and once again in the spring.;Findings indicate two IDAPEL measures, facilite de mots non-sens and facilite en lecture orale, are technically adequate for measuring the early French literacy skills of second-grade partial French immersion students. The last measure, facilite de segmentation du phoneme, as a measure of phonological awareness was not found to be a strong predictor of later French reading skills for this population of second grade French immersion students. Evidence indicates that subjects' English oral reading skills were strongly related to all other French oral reading skills including French nonsense word decoding, French oral reading fluency and French word identification.