Effects of Bilingual Letter Sound Knowledge and Word Automaticity in Spanish and in English on Reading Comprehension for First Grade Bilingual Students

We examine the strength of the relation between letter sound knowledge, word reading, and reading comprehension in Spanish and in English for 1,010 bilingual first grade students learning to read in both languages in the United States. Students were assessed in both languages on multiple beginning reading measures and on reading comprehension in Spanish and in English at the end of the year. Findings from structural equation modeling indicated that the best model fit for the bilingual data was w