This two-year longitudinal study investigated Swedish L2 middle school students’ reading development and its relation to reported strategy use. Reading comprehension was measured on three occasions and strategy use was examined using the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) scale. The results show that student reading comprehension scores develop significantly over the last two years of middle school (grades 5–6). As expected, second-generation immigrant students score higher than first-generation immigrants, but the differences are not statistically significant. The study shows no gender-related differences in relation to reading strategy use. Boys and girls use strategies to a similar extent. However, good readers reported using all types of reading strategies, particularly global strategies, to a greater extent than poor readers. Interestingly, the reading achievement of boys was strongly correlated to the reported use of global strategies, while the reading achievement of girls was not correlated to strategy use at all. Implications of the study and suggestions for further research are discussed.
The overall aim of this thesis is to highlight the significance of reading strategies in developing multilingual middle-school students’ Swedish reading comprehension. Reading strategies are con-sidered from teaching, reading development and individual perspectives, and this compilation thesis comprises an introductory chapter and three articles. The three empirical studies are based on material collected at a school where around 95% of the students are multilingual. Overall, a Mixed Methods Research (MMR) approach was taken. The first substudy focuses on the teaching of reading strategies in three different subjects through observations of two multilingual classrooms as well as teacher interviews. The second substudy examines students’ reading development over two years, and its relation to their self-reported use of reading strategies. The third substudy in-vestigates the reading comprehension of eight multilingual students and their reflections on the use of reading strategies. The studied teachers have been inspired by the Reciprocal Teaching model, but the results indicate that these strategies (summarizing, predicting, clarifying, and questioning) are not always the ones students need in their own reading. In individual reading situations, stu-dents successfully tackled the vocabulary problems that arose when they read subject content by rereading sentences or paragraphs or drawing on their existing knowledge. Nevertheless, some stu-dents experienced difficulties comprehending the overall text content.