Oral Reading Fluency Growth Across Languages for Immersion Students

Bilingual education programs, including immersion language programs, are rapidly increasing in U.S. schools. Although multi-tiered systems of support frameworks have been modified to include bilingual approaches, facets of data-based decision making such as expected reading fluency growth have yet to be fully explored in these contexts. This brief report describes oral reading fluency growth rates across languages for English-speaking German immersion learners across grades 1 (n = 143), 2 (n = 145), 3 (n = 202), and 4 (n = 201). These growth rates were compared to publisher-provided oral reading fluency growth rates for monolingual ELs. For English-speaking German immersion learners, oral reading fluency growth rates in English were initially substantially slower than oral reading fluency growth rates for monolingual ELs. However, English oral reading fluency growth rates increased such that immersion learners achieved similar levels of oral reading fluency in English toward the end of fourth grade. Oral reading fluency growth rates in German peaked in second grade, after which they slowed down considerably. Results suggest that for bilingual learners in diverse language learning environments, including additive ones such as immersion, and potentially subtractive ones such as transitional bilingual programs, local reading fluency growth rate norms are required to accurately identify students who are making expected reading growth.