Untitled

Abstract

This study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 56 bilingual Arab-Canadian children age's 9-14. English was their main instructional language, and Arabic was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program in Toronto where they were taught to read and write Arabic. The children were administered word and pseudo-word reading, language, and working memory tests in English and Arabic. The majority of the children showed at least adequate proficiency in both languages. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudo-word reading working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The poor readers in Arabic had lower scores on all linguistic tasks, except the visual task. There were no significant differences between bilingual English Arabic children and monolingual English-speaking children on the reading, language, and memory tasks. However, bilingual English Arabic children who had reading problems in English had higher scores on English pseudo-word reading and spelling tasks than monolingual English-speaking children with reading disabilities, probably because of positive transfer from the regular nature of Arabic orthography. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of language reading skills in both languages--Arabic and English--despite the different nature of the two orthographies.

Learning Difficulties in First and Second Language: Preliminary Results from a Cross-linguistic Skills Transfer

“…underperformed in the L2 spelling and their spelling age was lower than their chronological age. It is widely assumed that students with poor spelling skills in L1 will probably show poor spelling skills in L2 (Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 2002;Alsaawi, 2015;Cummins, 1979Cummins, , 1981Kahn-Horwitz, Shimron, and Sparks, 2005). Furthermore, even if there is a difference in the orthographic depth of L1 and L2, there are correlations in the performance of spelling skills for both languages (Deacon et al, 2009) and when there are spelling problems in an L1 with shallow orthography, spelling problems will occur in the L2 with deep orthography (Akamatsu, 1999).…”

“…who have problems and struggle in decoding skills in L1 are likely to struggle in the same skills in L2. Furthermore, decoding skills rely heavily on phonological skills and there is sufficient evidence that phonological skills in L1 are highly correlated with phonological skills in L2 (Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 2002. Of course, we must also bare in mind that both phonological development and processing rely on the cumulative language exposure (Haman et al, 2017).…”

“…Studies have shown that the linguistic components which are very useful in predicting spelling performance in a second language are the spelling and phonological awareness in a first language (Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, Humbach, & Javorsky, 2008). Also Abu Rabia & Siegel, (2002) claim that a positive and significant relation exists between spelling skills of children whose first language is Arabic (shallow orthography) and second language English (deep orthography).…”

“…There are several studies in the literature that confirm the transfer of linguistic skills between different languages, from Arabic to English (Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 2002;Al-Tamimi & Rabab'ah, 2007), from Hebrew to English (Geva & Siegel 2000), from English to French (Deacon, Wade-Woolley, & Kirby, 2009), from Russian to English (Abu-Rabia & Sanitsky, 2010), from Spanish to English (Ramí rez, Chen, Geva, & Kiefer, 2010), from Persian to English (Nassaji and Geva, 1999), from Chinese to English (Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003). Those studies documented that skills like vocabulary and syntactic awareness or phonological skills can be transferred from one language to another.…”

The Impact of Native Language Use on Second Language Vocabulary Learning by Saudi EFL Students

“…Merrill Swain and Sharon Lapkin (2000), quotes Cummins in their article that research examining the relationship between native language (L1) and second language use in the context of bilingual education for minority language children (see Cummins, 1981Cummins, , 1993Abu-Rabia, 2002) makes it quite clear that the development and maintenance of the L1 supports the development of the second language. This leads to the seeming paradox that the more use made of the L1, the higher becomes the learners' L2 proficiency.…”