Predictors of English spelling in bilingual and monolingual children in Grade 1: the case of Cantonese and Tagalog

Abstract

In order to examine the effect of the home language on the spelling development in English in children who are learning English as a second language (ESL learners), it is best to directly compare groups of ESL learners from various home language backgrounds. This study compared the oral language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling performance of Tagalog–English bilingual, Cantonese–English bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking children in Grade 1. The bilingual children had lower scores than the monolinguals on measures of oral proficiency, but demonstrated similar or better performance on most phonological awareness, reading, and spelling tasks after controlling for vocabulary size in English. A series of moderated regression analysis revealed that although phonological awareness was associated with English spelling performance regardless of language background, the associations between specific spelling tasks and related underlying skills seemed to differ across language groups.

Keywords:

• Cantonese
• ESL learners
• oral proficiency
• phonological awareness
• reading
• spelling
• Tagalog

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was funded by a UBC Hampton Fund Research Grant to the first author, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Graduate Scholarship to the second author. We would like to thank all the participants and their teachers and parents. We would also like to acknowledge Stephanie Clare and Krista Wales for their assistance in the collection, coding and scoring of the data. Finally, we would like to thank Linda Siegel, Nenagh Kemp and May Bernhardt, who commented on previous versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Throughout the paper, we use Chinese to refer to the written language. When we cite other sources, we refer to the spoken Chinese language, usually either Cantonese or Mandarin, as described in the original article.

2. The BC Performance Standards have been developed by the BC Ministry of Education for voluntary use in schools and are intended as a resource to support ongoing instruction and assessment.