Group Differences in Other Oral Language Measures at t1

Listening Comprehension. At t1, the groups did not differ significantly in listening comprehension skill. Both groups were found to be performing within the average range in terms of scaled scores (Mono: 9.36; EAL: 8.29), but raw data showed a relatively low level of within-subject consistency. At t2, a number of children appeared to have difficulties with the CELF USP subtest: as discussed in Section 4.5.1, CELF USP listening comprehension passages change somewhat abruptly in dif-

ficulty level, and the relatively young age of the children attempting these more difficult passages at t2 was within the lower range of the CELF age band, which was ultimately reflected in children’s scaled scores.

The lack of a significant a monolingual advantage in listening comprehension here is not supported by other studies of similarly-aged EAL learners in England. For instance, in a cross- sectional study using the same CELF USP subtest, Babayi ˘git (2014a) found a significant mono- lingual advantage in performance using raw scores (d = 0.72), and Hutchinson et al. (2003) obtained a large and significant monolingual advantage of d = 1.60 on an audio-recorded version of the NARA by the end of the longitudinal study in Year 4 (age 8-9). Similarly, significant mono- lingual advantages were obtained by the studies of Burgoyne and colleagues (2009; 2011a) also using the NARA in this way, albeit of a smaller magnitude (d = 0.45 to 0.54). There is some work to suggest that open-ended listening comprehension assessments may disadvantage children with lower levels of oral language competency (McKendry & Murphy, 2011; discussed further in Chapter 8). This speaks to a wider point regarding the oral English language proficiency of EAL learners in the present study, which, as discussed in Section 4.5.1 above, appeared to converge more closely with that of their monolingual peers compared to patterns reported in previous stud- ies. Indeed, it is important to note that EAL learners in Hutchinson et al. (2003), Burgoyne et al. (2009; 2011a), and Babayi ˘git (2014a) also performed significantly below their monolingual peers in other aspects of oral language including vocabulary and grammar. Therefore, the relatively better-developed English oral language skills of the EAL learners in the present study may have served to improve their performance in listening comprehension.

Expressive Grammar. Expressive grammar was measured through children’s ability to pro- duce complete, error-free sentences about stimulus pictures in the CELF FS subtest. There was a moderate though non-significant monolingual group advantage in expressive grammar at t1 (g = 0.56). However, as children attempted slightly different subsets of items on the FS subtest ac- cording to their age, an additional analysis using only the 17 commonly attempted items at each time point was also conducted. In this analysis, the fixed effect of group did reach statistical sig- nificance (Model 5.1; Table 4.11), providing more robust evidence of a monolingual advantage. In both models, however, the absolute group difference was small, at 2.15 points for FS raw score and 2.60 for the 17 commonly attempted items. Scaled scores indicate that while the monolingual group tended to score within the average range, the EAL group was performing below age-related expectations (Mono: 7.39; EAL: 5.71) and indeed, relatively more children in the EAL group did reach discontinuation criteria on this assessment.

As reflected in the CELF FS scoring manual, productive use of target words in this assessment requires knowledge of transitivity (e.g. knowing that gave requires three arguments and knowing the relationship between these arguments), polarity (e.g. correct use of negation with unless and neither ), and clausal structure and dependency (e.g. coordination and subordination using and, or and because; correct placement of although, instead, unless and however in relation to other, dependent clauses). However, the fact that errors not related to the target word are also penalised in this test means that it does not necessarily provide an indication of how able examinees are to apply such rules to the specific words and constructions in question. For example, at t1 one child’s response for the word and was: Me and my wife was raking up some soil. Despite the fact that this child correctly employed and as a coordinating conjunction between two noun phrases, the

agreement error (was) reduces the score from 2 to 1 and is thus not a reflection of understanding of coordination per se. For this reason, performance on the CELF FS will be interpreted as a more general measure of expressive grammar skill in this study, i.e. not one relating solely to the target vocabulary employed.

The trend for a monolingual advantage in expressive grammar found here is supported by other studies in the literature employing different measures of morphosyntactic skill, including sentence repetition tasks (Babayi ˘git, 2014a; Droop & Verhoeven, 2003; Komeli & Marshall, 2013), sentence production tasks (Geva & Farnia, 2012; Silverman et al., 2015), oral cloze tasks (Chi- appe & Siegel, 1999; Lesaux et al., 2006; Lesaux & Siegel, 2003) and picture judgement tasks (e.g. the TROG; Hutchinson et al., 2003). Again, however, the magnitude of monolingual-bilingual group differences found in these studies is considerably larger than that found here: for instance, d = 1.13 on the Recalling Sentences subtest of the CELF (Babayi ˘git, 2014a), up to d = 1.70 on the TROG (Hutchinson et al., 2003), d = 0.93 on the CELF FS subtest (Silverman et al., 2015), and up to d = 1.89 on a measure of morphological knowledge (Droop & Verhoeven, 2003). Again, it appeared that the two groups of children in the present study were more closely matched in their English oral language skills compared to studies enumerated above. Unlike for vocabulary breadth, it is difficult to determine whether this closer convergence was due to the monolingual group performing lower than expected, or the EAL group performing higher than expected, as standardised scores are typically not reported. Despite this modestly proportioned group discrep- ancy at t1, however, it is important to note that expressive grammar continued to be a challenging domain for EAL learners throughout the study, in both oral and written modes of expression, as discussed further in Sections 4.5.3 and 4.5.7.