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Abstract
This study aims to examine the relationship between bilingual experience and children's development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness. To capture both universal and language-specific bilingual effects, the study included four groups of participants: English-speaking children from a general education programme, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking children from a Spanish–English dual-language programme, and Chinese-speaking children from a Chinese–English dual-language programme. Findings from the analyses of teacher talk and measures of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness show that certain aspects of morphological awareness, such as the ability to decipher derived words, were likely to be affected by both instruction and cross-language transfer, while others, such as cognate awareness, appeared to develop through mere exposure to two languages despite the absence of explicit instruction. Furthermore, morpho-syntactic awareness was mostly enhanced through greater emphasis on explicit instruction of morpho-syntactic knowledge; such effect was moderated by the syntactic complexity of teacher talk. These findings suggest that instead of typological distances of the languages, a constellation of factors uniquely characterises bilingual classroom experiences. The linguistic complexity of teacher talk and instructional emphasis may influence children's development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation post-doctoral fellowship and an Early Career Grant from Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation awarded to Li-Jen Kuo. We are grateful to Ying Li, Edith Pacheco, Kelsie Baab, Melissa Naso, Georgina Jaquez, Chih-Ping Lo, Huei-Hsiung Chen, Wan-Chen Chang, Chia-Hui Kao, Yu-Ting Huang, Cheng-tzu Huang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, and Yi-Chien Wu for their assistance with data collection. We also thank the students, teachers, and administrators who so graciously participated in or facilitated this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Chinese can be a collective term referring to all the languages spoken in China. In the remainder of this paper, we will use Chinese to refer to Mandarin-Chinese, the official languages spoken in China and Taiwan.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tae Jin Kim
Dr Tae-Jin Kim is an instructor at New Garden English School in Taiwan. Her research interests are in the areas of bi-literacy development, bilingualism, Chinese character acquisition, and language instruction. She has publications in Contemporary Educational Psychology and Reading Development and Difficulties in Monolingual and Bilingual Chinese children.
Li-Jen Kuo
Dr Li-Jen Kuo is an associate professor of literacy at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD degree in Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in the areas of biliteracy development, cognition and instruction. She was a 2008–2010 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral fellow.
Gloria Ramírez
Dr Gloria Ramírez is an associate professor at the Faculty of Human, Social and Educational Development at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, Canada. Her research examines language and literacy development in children from diverse language backgrounds, disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and experiencing difficulties with literacy. She also investigates effective methods for teaching reading to children from these vulnerable populations. Her recent work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, Reading and Writing, Topics in language Disorders, and Journal of Learning Disabilities.
Shuang Wu
Shuang Wu is a PhD student in ESL at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include bilinguals' early writing development and bi-literacy acquisition.
Yu-Min Ku
Dr Yu-Min Ku is an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of Learning and Instruction and the Center for Teacher Education at National Central University, Taiwan. Her current research focuses on understanding children's vocabulary acquisition and literacy development and improving elementary reading instruction.
Sharon de Marin
Sharon de Marin is a PhD student in Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include literacy acquisition in a second language and/or with students with specific learning disorders, and behaviour and academic achievement.
Alexis Ball
Dr Alexis Ball is a research analyst and field coordinator at the Office of Research, Evaluation and Policy Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research interests are in the areas of literacy and multilingualism, multiculturalism, and methodology for reading instruction across writing systems. Recent work has been published in the International Journal of Educational Development, Thresholds and the Colombian Journal of Bilingual Education.
Zohreh Eslami
Dr Zohreh R. Eslami is an associate professor of ESL Education at Texas A&M University. Her research interests are in the areas of. She has published numerous journal articles in journals such as Intercultural pragmatics, System, ELT Journal, Modern Language Journal, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, and Bilingual Education Journal. Her current research interests include L2 literacy in content areas, task-based language teaching and technology, instructional and intercultural pragmatics, cyber-pragmatics, linguistic politeness, and second language teacher education.