Profiling dyslexia in bilingual adolescents

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of whether difficulties with reading and writing in a second language learner stem from developmental dyslexia or from issues associated with second language acquisition. In line with a phonological explanatory model of dyslexia, phonological processing and reading (decoding at both word and text levels) were tested, using data from 10 Spanish–Swedish speaking adolescents whose teachers had identified them as possibly having dyslectic difficulties, and a matched comparison group of 10 Spanish–Swedish speaking adolescents with no reading difficulties. Unlike previous studies, this analysis takes into account results from both languages and uses a matched bilingual comparison group as the norm. Based on these results, a bilingual dyslexia continuum is proposed as an analytical tool to be used for the assessment of developmental dyslexia from a bilingual perspective. The systematized continuum offers various degrees of difficulty —from high indications of dyslexia to no indications of dyslexia—and the positioning along this continuum by the target group participants of this study provides examples of both over- and under-identification of dyslexia. Overall, a greater number of participants in the target group were under-identified rather than over-identified by the schools. An important insight of this study is that the positioning of bilingual participants on the continuum would have been different if the analysis had taken only one of the two languages into account. Furthermore, possible effects from differences between Spanish and Swedish orthographies and syllable structure were observed, as, in general, the participants read more accurately in Spanish. The present data also suggest that decoding processing might vary more in second-language learners with dyslexia compared to monolingual individuals with dyslexia.

Keywords::

• Dyslexia
• bilingualism
• reading

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported by a grant from Anna Ahlstr m and Ellen Terserus’ Fund and the Foundation of Queen Silvia’s Jubilee Fund for Research on Children and Handicaps. The author is particularly indebted to Professor Kenneth Hyltenstam for valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript and to Lamont Antieau for correcting and improving my English.

Notes

1) I would like to thank one anonymous reviewer for sorting out these three perspectives.

2) In the Swedish compulsory school, the municipality is obliged to offer and organize mother-tongue instruction for eligible students.

3) The point of departure was that the teachers did not have any instruments to assess dyslexia in these individuals but only ideas about what the observed difficulties could be caused by, based on their own experiences.

4) Based on the scales: 1 = intellectually superior, 2 = definitely above average in intellectual capacity, 3 = average, 4 = definitely under average in intellectual capacity, 5 = intellectually impaired (Raven, 1995). There were no Swedish norms available. (However, cf., the critique toward the use of non-verbal cognitive tests in studies on reading development in Siegel, 2008).

5) The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test was used as one test of oral proficiency (see Hedman, 2009). In this article, the results have been used for between-group comparisons of language dominance.

6) The aim was to choose what the most frequent names currently are. As they do not exist in any comparable databases, names from local school directories were chosen.

7) Based on the Spanish Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), see Alonso, Fernandez, and Díez (2011) and the Swedish Göteborg Spoken Language Corpus (GSLC), see Allwood, Björnberg, Grönqvist, Ahlsén, and Ottesjö (2000).

8) That is, low results on the same tests of phonological processing in both languages.

9) This assumption is based on the participants’ writing profiles, as well as their reading profiles and oral discourse profiles (Hedman, 2009).

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Appendix: Checklist and follow-up-questionnaire

A checklist of possible reading and writing difficulties (based on questionnaires developed by the Swedish Dyslexia Association* directed mainly towards schools and parents):

Table

A follow-up-questionnaire to teachers: