Reading Development in Italian Monolingual and Bilingual Children with a Migration Background

The present dissertation aims to investigate how monolingual and bilingual children with a migration background who are acquiring literacy in Italian perform in reading predictors and reading skills. The motivation behind this research stems from the challenges that this bilingual population faces when dealing with diagnoses of reading impairments. Unlike other bilingual groups, bilingual children with a migration background begin to be consistently exposed to the community language, also their language of formal instruction, upon entering kindergarten or school. Before that age, these children are mainly exposed to their family language, which is typically a minority language lacking official support or recognition in society. Such a fragile linguistic context, often accompanied by socioeconomic disadvantage, can lead these children to start formal schooling with an incomplete mastery of the language of instruction. Crucially, this low proficiency in turn affects the trajectory of literacy acquisition, causing bilingual children with a migration background to lag behind their monolingual peers. Consequently, this atypical reading development path can have significant implications for the diagnosis of reading impairments. In fact, using reading assessments standardised on monolingual populations – assessments that may not capture bilingual children’s linguistic vulnerabilities – can lead to overdiagnosis of reading impairments. Conversely, adopting a ‘wait-and-see’ approach, expecting spontaneous improvement in linguistic and reading skills, may result in underdiagnosis of reading disabilities and prevent children from benefitting from timely intervention. Adding to this complex scenario, very few studies have investigated linguistic and reading skills in bilingual preschoolers or beginning readers acquiring literacy in Italian. Previous research in other languages and with older populations has shown that specific metalinguistic skills are reliable predictors of subsequent reading acquisition, even in bilingual children. This is because, unlike literacy, these skills begin to develop early, even before the onset of formal reading instruction, as they are acquired spontaneously as part of typical language development. Furthermore, a detailed investigation of the socioeconomic context has proven essential for understanding school outcomes in bilingual children with a migration background. Building on these premises, three original studies are presented. Study 1 is a longitudinal study examining how preschool performance in pre-reading skills among monolingual and bilingual children with a migration background predicts later reading outcomes. Study 2 is an intervention study aimed at exploring the short- and long term effects of a didactic intervention focused on phonological awareness, administered to monolingual and bilingual kindergarteners. Finally, Study 3 analyses the profile of reading and reading-related abilities in monolingual and bilingual first graders, as well as the effects of phonological training on concurrent phonological and reading skills. Overall, the results presented in this dissertation confirm the relationship between preschool performance in language tasks and later reading skills. They also suggest that bilingual children at risk for reading impairment can be identified even before school entry, provided that metalinguistic and socioeconomic factors are adequately assessed. In addition, reading predictors with a central role in reading development (i.e., phonological awareness) can be effectively enhanced both in preschoolers and emergent readers, producing positive effects on both phonological and literacy skills.