Understanding Bilingual and Second Language Readers

In response to the drawbacks of low second language literacy, researchers and communities have established several interventions to build bilingual children's second language literacy.

Every child's home environment is different:

Dialects spoken at home can affect literacy
- Dialects are usually associated with a certain identity or social prestige/connotation that can affect the child's perception of the language through the dialect
- Written vs. Spoken Language
  - Often there are vocabulary differences as well as phonological differences (in how certain sounds are pronounced/sounded)
  - This may lead to confusion when what the child is used to hearing does not match up to what is written on the page or what sounds specific letters usually correspond to.
Bilingualism can influence initial literacy-learning
- As bilingual children are learning two languages at once, they tend to make more initial mistakes as they are multitasking the learning of both, often uttering their first words later than their monolingual counterparts
  - But don't worry! Bilingual children are known to make more errors during early literacy-learning at first, but later develop twice as fast to catch up.
  - Only consult help if their literacy skills are still not at the same level as their monolingual peers after a few years (Insert Table)

The most important thing you can provide for your child is a home with a rich language environment—whether monolingual or bilingual, that is the best thing you can do to prepare your child for literacy!

Stages of Bilingual Literacy Development

What is Second Language Literacy?

Second language literacy is the ability to read and write in the native language of a person’s adopted country. For example, learning to read and write in English in the USA when English is not one’s first language is considered second language literacy.

Without achieving second language literacy, children will perform worse in school, will have more problems communicating, and will have lower career prospects, so it is important to examine interventions that may be helpful in improving second language literacy.

Bilingual acquisition of languages with different scripts

Acquiring languages that have distinct scripts appears to be difficult, as it seems to take more work and effort for children to learn and master the different scripts. Bilingual children must:

a) differentiate the sounds, rhythms, and phonological patterns for their two languages;

b) develop vocabularies for both languages.

For instance, alphabetic scripts and logographic scripts are very different from each other. Examples of alphabetic scripts are English and German. Examples of logographic scripts (featuring “characters”) are Chinese and Japanese.

1. Would acquiring two languages with different scripts (e.g. English and Chinese) put a strain on children’s cognitive resources?

The answer is: Not necessarily! Studies have found very inconsistent results in the domain of how much acquiring languages with two different scripts put a strain on children's cognitive resources. This shows that "script similarity" does not affect a child’s learning of the languages.

2. Is your child at a disadvantage in terms of hearing and learning sounds (i.e. phonological awareness) if he or she only speaks a language with a logographic script, and has no background of an alphabetical script?

Studies show that children who only learn a logographic script are just as aware of subtle mispronunciations and are able to discriminate sounds just as well as those who learn an alphabetic script.

The conclusion: do not be afraid to encourage language learning of different scripts. The acquisition of languages with different scripts will not hinder your child’s language learning.

For more information on bilingual literacy interventions, click here.

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