The first study examined the development of reading, spelling and syntactic skills in
English speakers (L1) and children with English as a Second language (ESL) from
kindergarten to grade 3. This longitudinal study also investigated procedures for
identifying reading difficulties in the early grades of elementary school for both
English speakers and children with ESL. Reading, spelling, phonological processing,
syntax, lexical access and working memory skills were assessed in kindergarten.
Additional tasks were incorporated into the battery to assess cognitive and reading
processes in grade 3. By the end of grade 3, the L1 and ESL normally achieving
readers performed in similar ways on all tasks except on the spelling, arithmetic and
syntactic awareness tasks. The ESL normally achieving readers performed better
than the L1 on spelling and arithmetic tasks, however the L1 normally achieving
readers performed better than the ESL on the syntactic awareness task. Similar
cognitive and reading components predicted word reading and reading
comprehension in grade 3 for both language groups. The results show that learning
English as a second language is not an impediment to successful literacy learning,
and may even be an advantage. In the second part of this study we examine
whether the first language of children with ESL affected the reading, spelling and
syntactic awareness in English. Seven language groups, Chinese, Farsi, Slavic,
Japanese, Romance, Tagalog, and native English speakers groups, were compared
in a cross sectional study. This study included all the children with ESL in
kindergarten and grades 1, 2 and 3. The results demonstrated positive as well as
negative effects in spelling and syntactic skills, resulting from the transfer to English for members of different language groups. Differences across language groups
reflect the nature of the native language. Specifically, a positive transfer occurred
when the L1 grammar system was more complex than the L2 grammar system.
When investigating second language it is necessary to consider the native language
and effect on the acquisition of a second language.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14944 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Lipka, Orly |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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