Longitudinal PRIMR data suggest pupils transferred literacy skills from English to Kiswahili, a direction opposite to that generally suggested by the Western literature.¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2015 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? In some skills, pupils transferred literacy skills from English to Kiswahili over time, which the authors describe as unexpected based on Western literature suggesting transfer in the other direction. → Piper 2015

Evidence¶

Piper 2015¶

Piper, B., Bulat, J., & Johnston, A. (2015). Reading Skill Transfer Across Languages: Outcomes from Longitudinal Bilingual Randomized Control Trials in Kenya and Haiti. SREE Spring 2015 Conference Abstract. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED562423

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Longitudinal analysis of the PRIMR tracer sample of Grade 1 pupils assessed in English and Kiswahili at baseline, midterm, and endline. The analysis suggests "pupils are transferring literacy skills from English to Kiswahili," hedged as holding only in some skills.

"The longitudinal analysis is able to determine how the language skills interact over time and across languages, and suggest that in so me skills, pupils are transferring literacy skills from English to Kiswahili. This is unexpected based on the Western literature, which generally suggests language transfer in the other direction."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Previous non-longitudinal analyses of the PRIMR dataset reported statistically significant impacts on English and Kiswahili outcomes, with impacts ranging from .3 to .5 standard deviations. — related
• The PRIMR literacy intervention had a positive impact on Kenyan pupils' literacy outcomes, including letter sound identification fluency, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and the percentage of pupils reading at the Ministry of Education benchmark, though not on all combinations of language, grade, and school type. — related