Issues in Applied Linguistics

This paper addresses some of the challenges which bilingual children transitioning to literacy in English may face when asked to answer reading comprehension questions which involve the interpretation and synthesis ofinformation about story characters' thoughts or feelings. Understanding of a character's perspective may depend on inference, rather than lexical content presented in a text Alternatively, prompt-questions may be framed such that lexical story content is required in the answer Such questions involve cognitive/ metapragmatic tasks related to linguistic competence in written English, as well as an understanding of the different types of knowledge associated with academic writing.