Reading Development and Achievement of 4th-Grade Hmong Students

Researchers and practitioners alike have noted that Hmong students in the United States do not achieve as well as their monolingual peers and other bilingual students. The current mixed-methods study is designed to describe reading development and achievement of 4th-grade Hmong students in one large, urban school district. This study explores the reading achievement of 4th-grade Hmong students through a quantitative analysis of standardized reading assessment scores; additionally, the researchers utilize a case study method to describe reading achievement in a classroom setting by studying cases of grade-level (achieving readers) and below-grade-level (struggling) readers. A protocol including reading and oral language assessment, interviews, and classroom observations is used to describe students' skills. The data were analyzed at the group level (collective case study) to describe patterns of achievement and at the individual level to create profiles of reading achievement.