Reading comprehension in Spanish by Quechua-Spanish bilingual children

This research analyzes data collected by the Young Lives project on childhood poverty. It addresses the effect of socio-demographic, individual, and linguistic variables–focusing on the latter–on reading comprehension in Spanish by 502 Peruvian Quechua-Spanish bilingual children aged 8 years. The regression model tested explained 46% of the variance found: beyond the effect of non-linguistic factors, receptive vocabulary–followed by listening comprehension and reading accuracy–played the most important role. The importance of specifically promoting vocabulary development in the classroom over skills related to decoding is underlined.