Does the reading acceleration program improve reading fluency and comprehension in emergent bilingual children?

It has been suggested that the reading acceleration program (RAP) (Breznitz et al. in Nature Communications 4: 1486, 2013), in which participants are forced to read at a rate faster than their normal reading fluency rate, improves reading fluency and comprehension in alphabetic languages. However, its effectiveness has never been examined in emergent bilingual children’s reading. This study explored the impact of the RAP, administered over 12 sessions for 4 consecutive weeks on emergent bilingual children’s reading in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). Participants were 97 Grade 5 students in Mainland China, randomly assigned to one of four groups: (1) a group with accelerated paradigm in English first followed by Chinese; (2) a group with accelerated paradigm in Chinese first followed by English; (3) a group with non-accelerated paradigm in English first followed by Chinese; and (4) a group with non-accelerated paradigm in Chinese first followed by English. The online test battery included reading fluency and comprehension in both Chinese and English. The offline standardized Chinese and English test battery included rapid automatized naming, word reading fluency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Results showed pre-post improvement on both online and offline reading measures in the accelerated and non-accelerated groups. There was evidence of cross-linguistic transfer effect in the RAP intervention. Regardless of condition (accelerated or non-accelerated) children who received training in two languages outperformed those who received training in one language, who in turn outperformed those who did not receive any training targeting reading fluency. Results are discussed in terms of the RAP mechanism that improves reading fluency and reading comprehension in emergent bilingual children.