| The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of speaking an English lexicon-based Creole on the reading comprehension achievement of children of Caribbean heritage. The participants consisted of 37 boys and 38 girls completing the third and fourth grades. Thirty-six who were of Afro-Caribbean heritage spoke an English Creole at home, and 39 who were of Afro-American heritage spoke American English. The measures used were Card 1 of the Thematic Apperception Test (Morgan & Murray, 1985) to gain a sample of spoken language, the Reading Comprehension subtest of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test Fourth Edition (MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2000), the Listening Comprehension subtest of the Wecshler Individual Achievement Test (1990), a test of naming speed (Lemoine, Levy, & Hutchinson, 1993), the Rapid Automatic Naming Test (Semel & Wiig, 1980), the Test of Phonemic Awareness (Yopp-Singer, 1988) and a measure of mothers' educational expectations. The study found that Caribbean Creole-speaking children were having significantly more difficulty with reading comprehension than their non-Creole counterparts in the third and fourth grades (p < .05). However, the significance of language group as a predictor in reading comprehension was marginal (p = .06). Phonemic awareness was found to add significantly to the variance in reading comprehension (r2 = .33, p < .05). These results suggest that teachers place emphasis on phonemic awareness training in the early grades for these children as one way of countering the marginal effects of the Creole on reading comprehension. They also highlight the role of parental expectations on reading comprehension achievement. |
