Reading comprehension in L2 Italian: connecting psycholinguistic research and pedagogical practice

The results of national evaluations (INVALSI, 2019; 2021) show that second-generation immigrant students often obtain lower scores than their native peers at tasks that involve reading comprehension and the use of advanced Italian language skills. These difficulties have consequences also on the educational experience of these students who tend to obtain lower grades and face higher drop-out rates. The present study aims to shed light on the origins of these comprehension difficulties. To this aim we carried out an experimental study that involved 109 pupils attending 4th and 5th grade of primary school. Among the participants, there were 61 language minority bilingual and 48 monolingual students. We analysed a series of linguistic and non-linguistic abilities that are considered potential predictors of reading comprehension, i.e., general cognitive abilities, decoding skills, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar. Among these measures, the two groups significantly differed only in vocabulary knowledge, confirming what emerged in previous studies with bilingual pupils. To identify which ability could more efficiently predict reading comprehension in the two groups, we conducted a Random Forest analysis. The results showed that, while vocabulary was the only predictor for monolingual students, the bilinguals’ performance was modulated also by receptive grammar, word decoding speed, and general cognitive abilities. These findings suggest that reading comprehension for bilingual students is affected by a less automatised access to lexical and grammar knowledge with respect to that of their native peers and that, consequently, text comprehension is likely to be more cognitively taxing for this population. Furthermore, our results highlight the relevance of lexical knowledge to achieve advanced reading comprehension skills, especially for bilingual students who tend to obtain lower scores in this domain. Vocabulary is acknowledged to be a key element that connects local and global comprehension processes, as suggested by the Reading Systems Framework (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). Since grammar knowledge turned out to play a significant role in reading comprehension for bilinguals, we decided to examine on-line processing of specific complex structures (i.e., object relative clauses and passive voice). Using three Self-Paced Reading Tasks (SPRT), we explored three research questions concerning on-line language processing to verify whether there were behavioural differences between groups. We examined: (i) how morphological information that can facilitate the interpretation of sentences is processed; (ii) how the presence of pragmatically implausible situations can influence processing; and (iii) whether semantic violations affect processing. The analysis of reading times revealed that both groups followed similar processing patterns, but monolinguals obtained significantly higher scores in terms of accuracy. This seems to be consistent with Hopp’s Fundamental Identity Hypothesis (Hopp, 2007; 2010; 2014), suggesting that non-native processing is quantitatively different from native processing and, thus, requires greater cognitive effort. These results have also pedagogical implications because they highlight the importance of implementing teaching activities that support students in the development of a richer and more efficiently organised vocabulary and grammar knowledge. We tried to develop a teaching intervention aimed at developing the ability to use their grammatical skills in order to understand and produce meaningful language, instead of limiting language teaching to the presentation of a series of abstract rules to be practiced in formal exercises. Finally, we also carried out a series of experimental activities that aimed to practice the ability to make inferences, a skill employed during global processing. All the didactic activities developed and tested during the intervention aimed to stimulate the students’ metalinguistic awareness and encourage peer-to-peer interactions.