Learning to read in English: Phonological and reading abilities of monolingual English and bilingual Zulu (L1) speaking children

Abstract

Bilingual Zulu-English speaking children in South Africa have spoken, but neither written proficiency nor formal literacy support in Zulu (L1), and yet are required to acquire L2 English reading skills through English-only literacy instruction. Little research exists on how the presence of a spoken-only Zulu (L1) could influence the English (L2) reading acquisition process. This study investigated the reading skill of 100 monolingual English (EL1) and 100 bilingual Zulu-English (EL2) Grade 3 learners by measuring their phonological, word reading, and reading comprehension abilities in English. Phonological tasks were correlated with reading measures in English, but significant differences were found on all of the measures between the EL1 and EL2 groups. This supports the use of phonological measures to determine reading success in monolingual English and Zulu-English bilinguals. However, different phonological awareness skills were found to predict reading ability in the EL1 and EL2 groups. These differences relate to differences in the orthography of the languages. The implications of these findings are considered in relation to; L2 reading development education in South Africa, and, using phonological measures across different cultural-linguistic groups to predict reading achievement.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• cross-language transfer
• phonological awareness
• orthographic transparency
• reading development