The present study aimed to investigate the performance of bilingual/biliterate children on expressive vocabulary and morpho-syntactic skills and the extent to which home literacy activities (HLA) contribute to primary school Greek–English bilingual children’s performance on reading comprehension. Forty children attending Years 1 and 3 at an English primary school in the UK were assessed in language and decoding skills. After one school year, they were assessed in oral language skills, decoding, and reading comprehension in Years 2 and 4. The children performed better on all tasks at Time 2 than at Time 1, and the older children performed better than the younger ones. Their performance was better in the English tasks than in the Greek tasks. Greek morpho-syntactic skills and HLA were significant predictors of Greek reading comprehension, suggesting that children may use their morpho-syntactic knowledge to support their reading comprehension in their heritage language. Moreover, heritage language exposure through HLA can benefit literacy of the heritage language.
Papastefanou et al. (Mon,) studied this question.