Comprension lectora en ingles a traves del lexico en sujetos minoritarios y mayoritarios bilingues de tercer grado de escolaridad convencional

The objective of this non-experimental, quasi-experimental and comparative research was to determine the reading comprehension in English through vocabulary among native minority language students (Embera Cham indigenous group) and Spanish as a second language, compared to majority language students (Spanish) and having a bilingual education, both subjects in third grade in a conventional primary school. The instruments to matching the sample population were: firstly, the general information questionnaire and a non- verbal intelligence test: Raven's Progressive Matrix (1993); secondly, the adaptation of the reading comprehension test: Progressive Linguistic Complexity (CLP) test from Alliende, Condemarn and Milicic (1991). Finally, the fieldwork was carried out in a conventional public primary school in Armenia, Quindio. The results suggested that the native language minority children performed better on the test. The study concludes that although being bilingual does not guarantee optimal performance in reading comprehension tasks, it does help improving cognitive skills and operations involved in the process of decoding texts, such as word recognition and its association with the concepts stored in memory.