Language preference and its relationship with reading skills in English and Spanish

Abstract

A dearth of research has investigated the language preference of bilingual childhood populations and its subsequent relationship to reading skills. The current study evaluated how a sequential bilingual student's choice of language, in a particular environmental context, predicted reading ability in English and Spanish. The participants were Latino children ranging in age from 7 years, 5 months, to 11 years, 6 months, with 43% born in the United States. Results showed a relationship between a child's higher English language preference for media and for communication with others outside the family and better reading skills in English. Language preference differences predicted reading abilities better for English than for Spanish. Results suggested that sequential bilingual children's language preference may be a useful marker of English language (second language [L2]) facility and use that is related to their reading proficiency or influences the development of English reading skills in such bilingual children in the United States. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.The number of students who speak other languages than English is vastly increasing in today's U.S. schools. Although much is known about what influences monolingual English children's ability to read, much less is known about what factors influence bilingual children's early reading development, particularly when a major portion of the reading instruction is in English. Because the largest bilingual school age population in the United States are those children who speak Spanish and are being schooled in English, understanding predictors of English reading development in this population is of growing importance.Spanish is considered to have transparent or shallow orthography (i.e., written language) that has a consistent mapping between its phonemes and graphemes. There is only one pronunciation for consonants and one grapheme-phoneme association for vowels in the Spanish language (Gottardo, 2002). In addition, differences exist within types of orthographies. Goswami, Gombert, and Fraca de Barrera (1998) noted that the most efficient strategy for children learning to read a very transparent orthography is initially to rely on letter-by-letter decoding. Although reading in this manner means that longer words are read at a slower pace, the consistency of the relationship between the graphemes and phonemes makes this initial method accurate on a regular basis and leads to fluent approaches.When the transparency of the language is more opaque, such as in French and English, children are confronted with variable or multiple orthographic-phonological relationships and are consequently less accurate at reading pseudowords or new words when they are unfamiliar. Goswami and associates (1998) noted that children who speak both English and French thus seem to cope with the ambiguity of the spelling-sound relationships by coding orthographic-phonological relations in terms of large spelling patterns, such as rimes.Researchers have also noted that phonological awareness ...

The nature of Spanish versus English language use at home.

“…Spanish-speaking families likely mix their use of Spanish and English in different situations and with different people (Brenneman et al, 2007;Duursma et al, 2007). Overall language use in a home could range from exclusive use of Spanish, through varying degrees of mixed use, to exclusive use of English.…”

“…The Brenneman et al (2007) study included only items for the child's spoken language, not the lan-' The survey also included 13 activity items, including language for reading, activity frequencies, and number of books in the home.…”

A Desire to Return to the Country of Birth as a Function of Language Preference: An Empirical Study with Iranian Immigrants in the United States

“…The findings of this study confirmed the research hypothesis concerning a desire to return to the country of birth as a function of preference in using native language in a survey. This was expected because language preference is the primary indicator of acculturation (Clement, 1986; Kenney, 2002; Shahim, 2007) and is also associated with language proficiency (Brenneman, Moris, and Israelian, 2007; Chesterfield, Chesterfield, and Chavez, 1982) and ethnic identity (Lanca, et al, 1994; Noel, Pon and Clement, 1996; Romero et al, 2004; Shahim, 2007). Our findings are in agreement with the report that maintenance of the native language is essential for maintaining ethnic identity and cultural values (Shibata, 2000).…”

“…It is obvious that proficiency in the language of the host country facilitates communication and interpersonal relationships. It has been shown that language preference and language proficiency are closely associated among immigrants (Brenneman, Morris, and Israelian, 2007; Chesterfield, Chesterfiled, and Chavez, 1982). Also, preference to use English language among immigrants predicted their social and cultural integration (Remennick, 2004).…”

Design and Standardization of a Speech and Language Screening Tool for Use among School-Aged Bilingual Children in a Minority Language Setting

“…Several studies have used the frequency of use in each language to establish dominance (Mayer-Crittenden et al 2014;Pearson, Fernandez, and Oller 1993;Pearson et al 1997). Brenneman, Morris, and Israelian (2007) as well as Fritz (2011), on the other hand, used the child's preferred language as evidence of language dominance. In Northern Ontario, a recent study identified children as being monolingual (French only) when they were exposed to less than five hours of input in their second language (English) and francodominant (mainly French speaking) if they were exposed to 24.4 hours per week in their second language (English).…”