Bilingualism, Biliteracy, and Learning to Read: Interactions Among Languages and Writing Systems

By Ellen Bialystok, G. Luk, Ernest Kwan. 2005

557 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Four groups of children in first grade were compared on early literacy tasks. Children in three of the groups were bilingual, each group representing a different combination of language and writing system, and children in the fourth group were monolingual speakers of English. All the bilingual children used both languages daily and were learning to read in both languages. The children solved decoding and phonological awareness tasks, and the bilinguals completed all tasks in both languages. Initial differences between the groups in factors that contribute to early literacy were controlled in an analysis of covariance, and the results showed a general increment in reading ability for all the bilingual children but a larger advantage for children learning two alphabetic systems. Similarly, bilinguals transferred literacy skills across languages only when both languages were written in the same system. Therefore, the extent of the bilingual facilitation for early reading depends on the relation between the two languages and writing systems.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee6712cba52840691eaabdbe55052d231c456439

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Citations in the corpus

What Defines Language Dominance in Bilinguals? (2019, background): “Whether or not a bilingual has literacy skills in both languages, as well as whether or not the writing systems are similar or different, also plays a role (Bialystok et al. 2005).”
Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children (2009, background): “The numbers are not equal because some studies included several groups of bilingual children and only one group of monolingual children (e.g., Bialystok, Luk & Kwan, 2005) and other studies examined only bilingual children (e.g., Luk & Bialystok, 2008).”
Bilingualism, Language Proficiency, and Learning to Read in Two Writing Systems (2005, background): “The results of the English and Chinese PPVT tasks support the classification of the Canadian and Hong Kong groups as bilingual and second-language learners, respectively.”
The Interdependence Continuum: A Perspective on the Nature of Spanish–English Bilingual Reading Comprehension (2010, background): “Bialystok, Luk, and Kwan (2005) characterized the phenomenon well.”
Academic vocabulary and middle school English learners: an intervention study (2009, result): “Unlike EL students’ phonological and orthographic processing skills, which develop similarly to that of NS students (Chiappe, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley, 2002; Geva et al., 2000), EL students’ semantic knowledge of English is often less developed than that of their NS peers ( Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 200”