Early Predictors of Biliteracy Development in Children in French Immersion: A 4-Year Longitudinal Study

English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that assessed accuracy as well as fluency. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine which English variables predicted Grade 3 outcomes and growth rates in English and French, and to determine the set of predictors that accounted for the most variance in outcomes and growth rates in English and French reading. The variables that predicted English reading development were consistent with studies of monolingual English children, even though participants were concurrently learning to read in French. Our findings provide evidence that at least some of the skills that play a role in learning to read are general cognitive and linguistic skills that transfer across languages. Phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, and grammatical ability in English were able to predict reading ability in French. In contrast, English receptive vocabulary was a language-specific predictor. These findings demonstrate that first-language measures can be useful in the early identification of children at risk for difficulty in learning to read in a second language.