Independent Reading in the Exploratory Spanish Classroom: Who Is Missing From the Picture of “Typical” Second Language Reading Development?

Abstract

In the United States, research on reading difficulties is predominantly carried out by scholars who project findings on L1 English reading difficulty to generalized difficulty in learning a second language (L2; e.g., Galuschka et al., 2020; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020; cf. Sparks, 2023). This research extrapolation creates a negative feedback loop (Sparks, 2016; Wight, 2015) in which more students with reading and learning difficulties are excluded from L2 study (see Ciòe-Peña, 2020; Ritz & Sherf, 2021) and are, as a result, understudied. This dissertation aims to address this issue by conducting a series of paired case studies with American L1 English early elementary learners of Spanish as they participated in an independent reading task tracking their L2 reading development over time within an Exploratory L2 program (Pufahl & Rhodes, 2008, 2011). Participants were aged seven to eight years old and received approximately 700 minutes of task-based (Ellis & Shintani, 2013) L2 instruction over the course of an L1 eight-week summer camp. Participants were video-recorded selecting and reading L2 books aloud (framed as a bilingual “storytime” task). Participants’ reading sessions were coded for accuracy (word and syllable decoding) and each participant diagnosed with a learning difficulty (N = 4) was analyzed in comparison to a typically developing reader (N = 4) of comparable background to illustrate differences in L2 reading development over the course of the summer camp’s Exploratory L2 Spanish program. Results for case participants were triangulated with academic reports to shed additional light on their L1 reading accuracy. An analysis of the participants’ book selection behaviors indicated that those with learning difficulties selected books that were more—and more variably—difficult (Edmunds & Bauserman, 2006; Merga & Roni, 2017) and that L2 book selection strategy instruction may be needed. Though the participants with learning difficulties did not decode their selected L2 books with as much accuracy as their typically developing peers did, their decoding errors patterned in similar ways, indicating that their instructional needs manifest in the same focal areas as their typically developing peers. Pedagogical and research implications are discussed in relation to error loci to inform future work with young, beginner L2 learners with learning difficulties.