Biliteracy and reading ability in children who learn Greek as a second language

ABSTRACT

The differences and similarities in the word recognition and reading comprehension skills of monoliterate Albanian-Greek (ML2), biliterate Albanian-Greek (BL2) and monolingual (L1) children in grades 3–6 were examined in two cross-sectional studies. Participants completed standardized and experimental tasks measuring cognitive, oral language and reading skills. The first study explored the effect of biliteracy on Greek word recognition taking into account the impact of oral expressive vocabulary in that language. 24 BL2 and 66 ML2 were compared to 78 L1 speakers in visual word recognition. It was revealed that the two groups of bilingual children differed in word recognition. In addition, it demonstrated that oral proficiency in the second language can play a key role in second language word reading. Study 2 examined the differences in reading comprehension skills of 21ML2, 13BL2 and 19L1 children. ML2 children performed proficiently on text comprehension as their monolingual peers. However biliterate Albanian-Greek children had poorer performance than their L1 peers.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocabulary
• word recognition
• reading comprehension
• bilingual children
• Greek

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kyriakoula Rothou is Adjunct Lecturer at Hellenic Open University. Dr. Rothou's research examines language, cognitive skills and literacy in monolingual and bilingual children and reading difficulties.

Ianthi Tsimpli is a professor in English and Applied Linguistics at University of Cambridge. Dr. Tsimpli's internationally known research examines bilingualism and multilingualism, first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language impairment.

Notes

1. According to the national curriculum, the teaching of English as a second language is provided in all Greek primary schools from grade 3 to grade 6 (3 h/week) and in a small number of state schools children are taught English as a second language from grade 1. The schools from which our participants were recruited provides English language teaching for 3 h/week from Grade 3.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the <European Union (European Social Fund – ESF)> and the <Greek national funds through the Operational Program ‘Education and Lifelong Learning’ of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: Thales. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund.Thales FP7 Project ‘Bilingual Acquisition & Bilingual Education: The Development of Linguistic & Cognitive Abilities in Different Types of Bilingualism’ (BALED)> under [Award No 85514].