Morphological Awareness, Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension 1 Title: The Domino Effect: Morphological Awareness, Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension in Chinese-English and Spanish-English Bilingual Children

Many North American children who are non-native speakers of English face the dual challenge of learning academic content and developing their second language simultaneously. Given the importance of reading in academic learning, proficiency in text comprehension needs to be developed rather quickly to ensure academic success. Research has shown that while English non-native speakers usually develop good English word reading skills, compared to native speakers of English, they are less able to comprehend text at their grade level (August, Carlo, Dressler, & Snow, 2005), a disadvantage that can negatively impact their academic performance. Nevertheless, some non-native speakers of English have already developed language and literacy skills in their home language. Several of the prerequisites for these skills (e.g., awareness of sounds) are similar across languages. It is therefore important to identify language skills from children’s first language (L1) that can facilitate their second language (L2) reading development. In Canada, this issue has been scarcely researched. One observation that has been made with native speakers of English is that the better they are at identifying the smallest units of meaning in words (i.e., prefixes, suffixes and roots), the better they are at acquiring vocabulary and comprehending text (Carlisle, 2000; Champion, 1997