This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
1.6 Bilingualism – Part 1
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
An overview
Writing systems; models of reading acquisition (the ‘decoding’ and ‘direct’ paths); the importance of automatization; bilingualism
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
Now we are going to talk about the relationship between bilingualism and
dyslexia, although I have to say to start with there
are not many studies relating (the) two topics,
so we are going to first talk about bilingualism and then dyslexia.
In (a) nomadic society where traveling and migration
are exploding bilingualism is certainly the rule rather than the exception.
So we cannot consider literacy acquisition and
dyslexia without contextualizing them within the bilingual context.
However it is very difficult to study bilingualism because there are many issues
to solve around bilingualism which makes it very difficult to study.
Just think about how all the possible situations of bilingualism from migrants,
(a) family who migrates from one country to another and then suddenly their children
go to school in another language and learn to read and write in another language;
the submersion setting, where in (a) multi-lingual country,
a child from one linguistic group is going to go to
a school from another linguistic group;
the immersion programs which are very famous in Canada and the US, and
also in Europe now where all the children speak the same native language and
at school learn to read, and spell and write in a second language;
the learning of a second language at school
etc, etc.
The number of bilingualism situations is infinite.
There is also the diversity of pairs of language
which are being put together in a bilingual person.
For example English and French are much more similar than say English and Chinese.
This makes it very difficult to make generalizations from a single study
and to draw (up) general rules for bilingualism.
There (have) been two approaches for the study of bilingualism.
One is the contrastive analysis of the two languages, for example, proposed by Odlin,
which consists in looking at the nature and
extent of the transfer defined as the influence resulting from
the similarities and differences between a target language and
any other language acquired before, perfectly or imperfectly.
The second approach is called the 'Universal grammar approach',
represented mainly by Chomsky,
where it is postulated that structure(s) of the second
language are acquired through universal rules - universal
principles - which are not influenced by the structure of the first language.
In fact, these two approach(es),
which may seem contradictory are in fact complementary.
Some mistakes can be explained by the contrastive analysis
of both languages and others are generalizations and
simplifications specific to the second language.
But these two approaches are not sufficient to explain all the aspects of
acquisition of a second language.
One of the domains which has been studied quite extensively by McKinney
is the acquisition of the syntactic structure,
and he showed that the parameters are initially positioned to
correspond to the parameters of the first language to be subsequently
modified to correspond to the parameters of the second language.
Also, the salient features of the syntactic structure of the second language
are easier to acquire compared to the less salient features.
Regarding phonological structure, the influence of the first language is also
evident,
perceiving and producing phonemes ... ... ... which are not present
in the first language and notoriously difficult for second language learners.
One of the typical example(s) is the acquisition of the contrast between
'l' (as) in 'lay', and 'r' (as) in 'ray', by Japanese speaker(s) learning English.
In fact in Japanese there is no such contrast, so 'l' and
'r' are liquid consonants, and in Japanese there is only one consonant
which is sort of between 'l' and 'r'.
Nuria Sebastian Galles and her team have studied Catalan-Spanish
bilinguals and Spanish-Catalan bilinguals
who were exposed to the second language before the age of four and even three.
She was able to show that these bilinguals were not mastering completely
the contrast which did not exist in their native and their first language.
So for example what they did is an experiment where Catalan-Spanish and
Spanish-Catalan bilinguals had to distinguish between minimal pairs
containing either the short 'o' or the long 'o'.
An equivalent, in English, would be the contrast between 'cut' and 'coat'.
In Catalan, you have that pair and
in Spanish you only have the long 'o' and not the short 'o'.
And what they found out is that
the Catalan-Spanish were completely able to do the task,
whereas the Spanish-Catalan Spanish dominant bilinguals,
who were exposed to Catalan at the age of three or four were treating these two -
were unable to make a distinction between the two members of the pair.
Regarding the principle of binding the oral language to the written language,
difficulties are observed more often when one language is not alphabetical,
for example Chinese, and the other is alphabetical, for example English,
than when both languages are either not alphabetical or alphabetical.
When both scripts are alphabetical and when one is more transparent than the other
children seem to be able to capitalize on the transparent writing system
to decode regular words and pseudowords in the less transparent language.
This is a very interesting study conducted by Linda Siegel and
collaborators who showed that Portuguese-English
poor readers were actually better than English native
monolingual poor readers at reading pseudowords and at spelling.
And they made the hypothesis that
this was because Portuguese is much more transparent than English and so
the children were able to use the phonological recoding strategy and
to practice the phonological recoding route which we saw is
extremely important in reading and to transfer those abilit(ies)
to the writing of the pseudoword in English.
Conversely, the overuse or
the use of this phonological recoding root is obviously detrimental for
the reading of irregular words, where this route relate(s) to regularization errors.
Researchers have also looked at language activation in monolingual situations,
the question being, do bilinguals activate their two languages when they
are in a situation where they are required or asked to activate a single language.
In the old days researchers
believed that bilingual individuals were able to switch
off completely one language when dealing with the other language and vice versa.
We now know that the picture is much more complex than that
because many studies have shown that bilingual adults and
children seem to activate both languages even when they are not asked to,
both at the orthographic level and at the phonological level.
For example in their unilingual dsylexical decision task in English (where)
the participant has to say whether a string of letter(s) is a word or not a word,
Dutch-English bilinguals took longer to reject Dutch word(s)
compared to pseudowords although the task was solely done in English.
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