Sequence of Reading Acquisition in Bilinguals

Introduction

There are three broad stages of learning to read in alphabetic systems for both monolingual and bilingual children. In the first, or pre-reading stage, children acquire awareness of text and preliminary ideas about how books are used and how words are represented in them. In the second, or decoding stage (sometimes called the “recoding” stage), children acquire the ability to recognize and read the basic forms of many simple words by determining the relation between alphabetic symbols and the sounds (either syllabic or phonemic elements) the symbols represent. Importantly, at the second stage, reading fluency is limited and insufficient to support learning about a variety of topics through independent reading. In the third, or fluent reading stage, children achieve a high level of proficiency, allowing them to learn from reading – in the prior stages children tend to be limited to learning about reading. For monolingual children learning to read in English, the pre-reading stage usually pertains to preschool ages, the decoding stage to kindergarten through second grade or so, and the fluent reading stage is in place by fourth grade or so.

In general, it can be said that bilingual children go through the three reading acquisition stages at roughly the same pace as monolingual children do. But there are several qualifications to make in regard to this claim: (1) there are important differences among orthographies (writing systems) across languages, and these differences can affect how the reading acquisition stages play out; (2) bilingualism can be simultaneous bilingualism from birth, can occur as second language (L2) learning in childhood or adulthood, can involve high proficiency command of two languages, strong command of one language with weaker command of the other and so on; these different forms of bilingualism play roles in how the stages of acquisition of reading emerge in each language; and (3) transfer of reading skills or reading prerequisites from one language to the other can help the bilingual learner (Cummins, 1984; Durgunoglu, 1998), but transfer can be limited or perhaps even reversed (to become interference between languages) if conditions associated with items (1) and (2) are not optimal to support transfer. It is only when we take account of items (1) to (3) that we can usefully investigate optimal methods of instruction for reading in bilingual children, whether the goal is reading in only one of the two languages or in both of them (“biliteracy”).

Key research questions related to how the sequenced stages of reading acquisition may be affected by bilingualism

1. What differences occur in learning to read across languages having different orthographies?
2. How is literacy or biliteracy acquisition affected by a child’s age of acquisition and/or proficiency in the spoken form of each of the two languages?
3. In what ways can transfer of knowledge or interference between languages play a role in literacy or biliteracy?
4. What are the optimal methods to ensure successful acquisition of reading in bilingual children?

Recent Research Results

Research on reading acquisition for different orthographies. Orthographies come in three basic types: alphabetic systems (e.g., Spanish), syllabaries (e.g., Arabic), and logographic systems (e.g., Chinese). These types correspond to three different “grain sizes” of morphophonological units in languages, roughly phonemes, syllables, and words (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). In alphabetic systems, each phoneme is nominally represented by a single symbol. Most alphabetic languages can be said to be relatively “transparent” – spelling is easy in these languages because the mapping between phonemes and symbols is consistent and essentially one to one, as in Turkish, Finnish or Spanish. English (ironically perhaps the world’s most widely read language) possesses a highly “opaque” alphabetic system, where the mapping is many to many and where spellings are extremely inconsistent (consider the rhyming pairs “sun” and “ton” or “laugh” and “gaff”). Consequently learning to decode and to spell in English is difficult. French orthography is also relatively opaque. Research has shown indeed that in general it takes children much longer to acquire decoding skills in English than in other European languages, and French, while more consistent than English, also trails many other languages in rate of decoding acquisition (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). In syllabaries, symbols correspond to syllables or to some aspect of syllables (consonants only, as in Arabic, for example), but special diacritic (superscript or subscript) options can be used to represent phonemic elements more completely, in which case syllabaries can function very much like alphabetic systems. In general, learning to decode in languages with syllabaries is similar to learning in languages with transparent orthographies. Logographic (or ideographic) systems (such as Chinese, for example), on the other hand, are very different, because their symbols (characters) primarily represent morphemes or whole words rather than consonants or vowels. In fact there is also notable syllabic/phonetic information in Chinese characters, and children do make systematic, though limited use of these properties in learning to read Chinese (McBride-Chang & Chen, 2003; Shu, Anderson, & Wu, 2000). Interestingly, reading instruction in China typically begins with a brief introduction to an alphabetic script for Chinese to help children start down the road to the more demanding task of dealing with the primarily character-based system. Learning to read and write in a primarily logographic system requires years simply to acquire (largely by rote) thousands of symbols needed to read basic words.

The key point here is that if a bilingual individual is to achieve literacy in either or both languages, the task may vary dramatically depending on what the two languages are. English clearly presents an especially challenging task, as does Chinese. For the English-Chinese bilingual the task must be daunting indeed because the languages (and phonological systems) are essentially unrelated, the writing systems have utterly different design, and the literacy acquisition tasks are both especially difficult to begin with. It is a testament to the flexibility of the human learning capacity that there exist many bilingual and biliterate English-Chinese individuals. Current research is actively investigating such cases precisely because they provide a view of such extraordinary contrasts in learning requirements (e.g., see  Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2005).

Research on biliteracy in children with different levels of proficiency and ages of acquisition of the two languages. Children who begin to learn their second language (L2) in school can be called “sequential bilinguals” and can become as proficient in speaking L2 or even more proficient than they are in L1 within a few years (Collier, 1987). This is true whether they enter the L2 environment at early (kindergarten or 1st grade) or late elementary school (say 5th or 6th grade). Children who have learned both languages from birth can enter school with substantial command of both spoken languages. It is possible for children to acquire biliteracy in both languages simultaneously, whether they are sequential or simultaneous bilinguals (Oller & Eilers, 2002). Clearly, however, the tasks are different for children depending on how old they are when reading instruction begins and their level of command of each spoken language. A common circumstance for children born to immigrant families in the USA and Europe is that they enter school at age 4-6 with home language (L1) command, but little or no command of the school language (L2). They often then are required to begin learning to speak and read in L2 at the same time. Little is known about the details of this process where children must learn to map phonemes to orthographic symbols in a language wherein they may scarcely know what the phonemes are. Studies of L2 phonological development in L1 Spanish children during early L2 English exposure seem to suggest relatively rapid acquisition (Goldstein, 2001), which may help to support early decoding skills in L2.  It has also been argued that acquisition of reading in either language is dependent upon the degree of syntactic and semantic knowledge that has been attained in each language (Geva, Wade-Woolley, & Shany, 1997). Without a threshold level of such knowledge, a child cannot, according to the reasoning, be expected to achieve advanced reading skills. Research on second language acquisition by L1 Spanish children in the USA suggests they succeed in four to five years in learning to speak and read in L2 English at levels that approximate monolingual levels of performance (Cobo-Lewis, Pearson, Eilers, & Umbel, 2002a). Thus it appears that all the prerequisites for reading can be acquired across the elementary years by children acquiring a second language in school.

Transfer and interference in biliteracy acquisition. Much of the research that has been conducted on early biliteracy has focused on possible transfer effects, that is, on ways that learning to read in one language may support learning to read in the other (e.g., Durgunoglu, 1998). Transfer appears to work most effectively when the two languages share concrete features such as the same alphabet (as is largely the case with English and Spanish). To the extent that the alphabets are mapped similarly to phonemes, and to the extent that there is some commonality in the phonemes themselves, children can simply import the knowledge acquired for decoding in one language to decoding in the other (MacWhinney, 1999). But transfer is unlikely (or less potent) in cases where the requirements of reading differ in concrete ways across languages, as for example, if the languages are both written alphabetically, but the symbols are different, as with English and Persian (Arab-Moghaddam & Sénéchal, 2001) or where the languages do not even share the alphabetic principle, as with English and Chinese (Muljani, Koda, & Moates, 1998). Further, transfer is much more likely to occur in the concrete domain of decoding than in more general aspects of reading that require advanced vocabulary and syntactico-semantic knowledge (Oller, Pearson, & Cobo-Lewis, 2007).  

There has been a paucity of research specifically directed toward reading acquisition on possible roles for interference, or negative transfer between the two languages. Interference clearly can occur in phonological acquisition, although it seems to be much more likely to occur in adult L2 learners than in children – this sort of interference results in foreign accent, and in general child learners appear able to largely overcome such accent (Flege, 1999). As for vocabulary knowledge, interference across languages in adult and child bilinguals for both oral and written tasks (the latter of which obviously have implications for reading) can be shown, for example, through response time measures. In general, it takes bilinguals a little longer to respond in vocabulary identification or reasoning than it takes monolinguals (Kohnert, Bates, & Hernandez, 1999; Kroll & de Groot, 1997; Kroll, Michael, & Sankaranarayanan, 1998). This delay can be interpreted as an indication that the bilingual mind has more work to do in finding words than the monolingual mind does. The bilingual simply has more words in memory among which to search, and the two languages of a bilingual inevitably interact rather than functioning totally independently. The bilingual delay in response time is sensitive in degree to the proficiency of the bilingual in each of the two languages (higher proficiency, less delay), and proficiency of course is often related to relative ages of sequential acquisition of the two languages.

Optimal instruction for bilingual literacy. There has been much discussion and research on how to teach children to read in L2 (e.g., Bialystok & Herman, 1999), but less on how to provide for biliteracy. Research on transfer has focused heavily on phonological awareness (PA) skills, the ability to consciously recognize, identify and manipulate phonological units such as syllables, consonants or vowels (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989; Tunmer, Herriman, & Nesdale, 1988).  Here, considerable evidence supports the idea that PA skills are indeed relatively transferable across languages (Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993). Further, since PA is believed to play an important role in decoding, even in primarily logographic languages, the assumption is that PA training may be a way to enhance reading skills and transferability across languages. In addition a “scaffolding” hypothesis is being entertained, based on the possibility that learning to decode in a transparent alphabetic system such as Spanish may help the learner to acquire decoding skills in a more opaque system such as English. The idea has some empirical support (Cobo-Lewis et al., 2002a; 2002b), but is also appealing because it makes intuitive sense – decoding can be learned very quickly for a transparent alphabetic system (Turkish children, for example, appear to do it in a matter of months), and the learner may thus acquire confidence that principles of decoding work. Thereafter, the attempt to learn decoding in a more inconsistent and difficult system such as English may seem less daunting, and the learner may be more patient with the process of acquisition. Thus, research is pursuing the possibility that biliteracy training should take advantage of scaffolding the learning of decoding for English upon the learning of a language with a transparent orthography.

Conclusion

Direct research on the sequence of reading acquisition in bilingual children has been relatively rare. Conducting such research is complicated because bilingual children vary in so many ways. They can differ in terms of the languages they speak, their proficiency in each of the languages, and the kinds of phonologies and writing systems that pertain to each of the languages.  All these factors play roles in how the sequence of reading acquisition can occur. For children who begin elementary school learning to speak and read in a new language, the empirical evidence suggests that reading acquisition starts off slower than in monolinguals, but that the pace accelerates in the bilinguals, and they approximate monolingual levels by the end of elementary school.

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