The ultimate goal of reading is to construct text meaning based on visually encoded information. Essentially, it entails converting print into language and then to the message intended by the author. It is hardly accidental, therefore, that, in all languages, reading builds on oral language competence and that learning to read uniformly requires making links between a language and its writing system. As a system of communication, moreover, languages vary in their meaning-making conventions and methods of signaling those conventions. Writing systems also vary in what they encode and how they end it. It is thus essential to clarify how reading subskills-and their development-are altered by the properties of a particular language and its writing system. A small but growing body of evidence suggests that systematic variations do exist in literacy learning and processing in diverse languages.These variations have critical implications for theories of second language (L2) reading because, unlike first language (L1) reading, it involves two languages. The dual-language involvement implies continual interactions between the two languages as well as incessant adjustments in accommodating the disparate demands each language imposes. For this reason, L2 reading is crosslinguistic and, thus, inherently more complex than L1 reading. To deal with these complexities, L2 reading research must incorporate three basic facts about reading development in both theory formation and empirical validation: (a) reading is a complex, multifaceted construct, comprising a number of subskills; (b) the acquisition of each subskill necessitates distinct linguistic knowledge; and
This critical volume, provides an in-depth analysis of second language reading's multiple dimensions. The paperback edition describes the complexity of reading and explains how reading differs in a first and second language. The book is broad in scope, covering all major aspects of the reading process and synthesizing all current reading research. The author provides a cross-linguistic orientation, explaining how first and second languages can mutually facilitate one another. This important volume offers strategies for enhancing literary acquisition, second-language learning and bilingual processing, and will serve as a valuable guide for graduate students, professors, researchers and foreign language teachers.
Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with a nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. IntroductionDifferent writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping (DeFrancis, 1989;Perfetti, 1999). An alphabetic system selects phonemes, a syllabary system selects syllables, and a logographic system, traditionally considered, selects morphemes or words to represent spoken language. The effect of these systemic differences on the cognitive processes of reading has been the focus of research that focuses on the contrast between Chinese and English (Perfetti, Liu, & Tan, 2002). Chinese, usually considered a logographic writing system, maps a printed character to a corresponding monosyllabic morpheme. Because this mapping reflects a unit of pronunciation (the syllable) as well as a unit of meaning (the morpheme), Chinese can be characterized as a morpho-syllabic writing system (DeFrancis, 1989;Mattingly, 1992;Perfetti & Zhang, 1995). However, its contrast with an alphabetic system remains sharp. The Chinese writing system does not possess the segmental structure that is basic to alphabetic writing systems. The principle of phonological assembly that, in alphabetic systems, allows larger (syllable and word) units to be assembled from letter-phoneme mappings, e.g. /k/-/ae/-/t/ is assembled to make /kaet/, cannot apply in Chinese reading.An additional interesting difference between Chinese and most alphabetic s...
This study investigated the effects of L1 processing experience on L2 morphological awareness. Preliminary cross-linguistic comparisons indicated that morphological awareness in two typologically distinct languages, Chinese and English, differs in several major ways. Based on the comparisons, three specific hypotheses were formulated: compared with learners with a typologically similar L1 background, Chinese learners of English as an L2 would be less sensitive to intraword structural salience, less efficient in structural analysis, and more adept at integrating word-internal (morphological) and word-external (context) information. These hypotheses were tested empirically with two groups of adult L2 learners of English with contrasting L1 backgrounds (Chinese and Korean). The data demonstrated that virtually no difference existed between the two ESL groups in their intraword structural sensitivity, and that, although Chinese learners were notably slower than Korean learners in performing intraword structural analysis, they were far more efficient in integrating morphological and contextual information during sentence processing. Viewed collectively, these findings seem to suggest that L1 processing experience influences the development of L2 morphological awareness in specific and predictable ways.
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