Participants and content forms

The third article partly examines the same children as Study 2 yet now investigates the 10-year-old 5^th graders’ language and reading

comprehension skills in Norwegian. The reduction of participants from Study 2 to Study 3 is caused partly by longitudinal dropouts due to participant relocations to other municipalities and partly by the

selection of participants for Study 3/denial of participation in Study 3.

The tests collected as part of The Stavanger Project were supplemented with additional tests to examine the research questions of Study 3. This was done at a stage where only the birth classes of 2006 and 2007 were 5^th. graders, thereby reducing the number of participants from the original study. As part of enrolling their children in The Stavanger Project, parents agreed to their children’s participation in group tests.

To allow additional individual testing, content forms were sent to the bilingual children in birth class 2006. Study 3 received more funding by the time the 2007 birth class became 5^th. graders. In 2017, content forms were sent to all bilingual learners in The Stavanger Project in the

birth class of 2007 and most monolingual pupils. The monolingual learners were invited to participate if they attended schools with bilingual peers already enrolled in The Stavanger Project. The wording of the content form sent to the parents of the 2006 birth class therefore differs from that of the content form sent to parents of children in the 2007 birth class (the information letters is presented in appendix 5).

This resulted in a sample of 301 participants: 91 bilingual and 210 monolingual learners. Data from 14 of the monolingual participants were dropped due to inadequate data quality on one of the individual tests, resulting in a total sample of 287. Sixty of the bilingual children had one native Norwegian-speaking parent, while 31 had no native Norwegian-speaking parents. Information on the timepoint for the start of attendance in ECEC institutions was missing for 17 of the bilingual children without native Norwegian-speaking parents. We can only conclude that since they were enrolled in The Stavanger Project, they must at least have started as two-year-olds. See Table 2 below for information on ECEC start for the early bilingual learners without a native Norwegian-speaking parent.

Table 2. Timepoint for start of attendance in ECEC institutions for pre-adolescent bilingual children without a native language-speaking parent.

Early bilingual learners without a native Norwegian-speaking parent (N= 31)

N

Started attending ECEC institutions as 1-year-old 8 Started attending ECEC institutions as 2-year-old 6

Missing data for start of ECEC attendance 17

Note. ECEC = Early Childhood Education and Care

3.3.2 Selection of measures

Measures used in Study 3 consisted of a combination of tests used for all the participants in The Stavanger Project and measures specially selected

for Study 3. This means that some of the measures, such as the measure for decoding skills and SES, were decided before my entry into the project, while others were selected based on prior research on language and reading development. There is a lack of standardized measures in Norwegian; thus, only two measures used in Study 3 are standardized and normed for Norwegian children: the vocabulary subtest from WISC-4 (Wechsler, 2003) and the word-chain test (Høien & Tønnesen, 2008) (measuring decoding skills). Most of the other measures were adapted to Norwegian from English (Neale, 1997) or developed by employees at the Faculty of Educational Science, University of Oslo (Brinchmann, Hjetland, & Lyster, 2016). These measures have shown good psychometric qualities in prior studies of children at similar ages (Brinchmann et al., 2016; Hjetland et al., 2018; Lervåg, Hulme, &

Melby-Lervåg, 2018). Two tests required adaptation to be used in this study. The adaptations were theoretically driven.

The morphological knowledge test has previously been used in an intervention study in Norway where signs of a ceiling effect were detected after the intervention; the children were then 4^th graders (Brinchmann et al., 2016). In each item, children are presented with a sentence that includes a non-word and asked to identify the meaning of this non-word within a multiple-choice format. The non-word can be understood given knowledge of the meaning of the two morphemes combined into a new non-word. The test can be considered a test of derivational morphology (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). The test does not contain any misleading information and is therefore, according to Friesen and Bialystok’s (2012) argument, low in executive functions demand. The children are, however, required to form the meaning of a non-word based on their knowledge of derivational morphology. The linguistic demands of this morphological knowledge test seem based on face validity similar to the linguistic demands of the Wug test (Berko, 1958), which means that the linguistic demands are assumed to be rather high. To obtain normally distributed data, the test was supplemented with

new sentences containing more complex morpheme combinations. Most of the new, more difficult Norwegian morphemes originated from Latin or English.

The text cohesion vocabulary test has a cloze test format supplemented with a list of 4 alternative text cohesion words (Crosson et al., 2008). The children were asked to pick the text cohesion word out of 4 that would provide a meaningful sentence. In the Norwegian adaptation of the test, all sentence and text cohesion words were first translated into Norwegian by an associate professor employed by the University of Stavanger who is a specialist in English. She also has prior experience with test development. To match the difficulty level of the English and Norwegian versions of the test, some of the original translated text cohesion vocabulary was replaced. The replacement was performed in three steps.

First, the text cohesion vocabulary in each category (e.g., causal, contractive, additive, temporal and adversative) was matched to the number of items theoretically thought to measure categories of text cohesion vocabulary; in this way, the original distribution among the different categories held across the different language versions of the test. Second, the frequency level for each text cohesion vocabulary was examined in English and Norwegian. Direct matching of items to frequency levels was impossible across languages due to language differences between English and Norwegian. Frequency levels were therefore matched on the category level (e.g. contrastive text cohesion vocabulary) instead of the item level. Third, the associate professor who is a specialist in English modified the wordings of the text to ensure that the new Norwegian version was as close to the English version as possible yet in line with the requirements of good Norwegian language structure.

Both the morphological knowledge test and the text cohesion vocabulary test were piloted on 5^th graders in two schools in Sandnes municipality.

These two schools have large populations of bilingual pupils. In total, 310 pupils were included in the pilot study (280 monolingual/30

bilingual learners). Analysis of the data displayed normally distribution on both tests.

In addition to the tests, information on the parents of the bilingual participants in Study 3 was collected through a questionnaire (the parent questionnaire is presented in appendix 6).