Dynamic Interaction Between Text Characteristics, Order and Time of Assessment on Bilingual Student Reading Efficiency in Spanish and in English

In this study, we examine the dynamic interaction between (a) text characteristics such as genre, number of multisyllabic words, order of texts, and time of assessment (i.e., beginning, middle, or end of the school year), and (b) student fluency described here as text reading efficiency (TRE; Kim et al., Citation2021) in Spanish and in English. TRE is operationalized as words read correct per minute (WCPM). Participants were 817 s grade Spanish native speakers attending different types of bilingual programs. To examine the interaction of text characteristics and TRE, we first equated texts and then ran a series of mixed effects models. We also examined text characteristics descriptively. Findings indicated that, in general, text characteristics, order of texts, and different timepoints had a significant effect on students' TRE. Although a clear pattern of differences between texts within and across languages did not emerge, regardless of language, students read fewer words in texts in the beginning of the year than in the middle and at the end of the year. Spanish texts included more multisyllabic words than did English texts, which could explain, in part, lower WCPM in Spanish than in English.