Cognitive Skill Transfer in English Reading Acquisition: Alphabetic and Logographic Languages Compared

Wael Shakkour

doi:10.4236/ojml.2014.44048

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review published studies regarding acquisition of English as a second or foreign language by students of different linguistic backgrounds, in light of the English language’s opaque alphabetic orthography. This review focuses on the contribution of first language cognitive skills (orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness) in native speakers of languages with alphabetic and logographic orthographies, to English second-language reading skills (word reading and reading comprehension), to better understand the contribution of cognitive reading skills in alphabetic and logographic languages to the acquisition of English reading skills as a second language. The author examines findings in the context of second-language learning theories, and two contradictory hypotheses in particular—the linguistic interdependence hypothesis and the script-dependent hypothesis. The author finds that no consensus can be indicated as to the contribution of most native-language skills in alphabetic vs. logographic languages to the acquisition of second-language or foreign-language English reading, or even whether or not they are language-specific (script-dependent). The exception is phonological awareness in alphabetical orthographies (but not logographic orthographies) which received a consensus among researchers supporting its transfer from the native language to English as a second or foreign language.

Highlights

English is one of the most important languages in the world (Liu, 2009; Liu & Chu, 2010)
The purpose of the present review is to evaluate the research on the contribution of the cognitive reading skills in orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness in alphabetic vs. logographic L1, to English L2 reading abilities, in order to understand compare the contribution of cognitive reading skills in alphabetic and logographic L1 to English L2 reading acquisition
The research reviewed here is examined in the context of two basic hypotheses describing L1-L2 transfer: the interdependence hypothesis (IH), which proposes that Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency is transferred from one language to another (Cummins, 1979, 1981), and the Script Dependent Hypothesis (SDH), which suggests that L1 reading efficiency does not necessarily influence reading abilities in a second language (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Lindgren, Dernzi, & Richman, 1985)

Summary

Introduction

English is one of the most important languages in the world (Liu, 2009; Liu & Chu, 2010). The segmental phoneme (distinguishable speech sounds) is the most important unit in learning to read alphabetic languages. Even though different scripts can be used, such as Latin or Semitic, they share the essential feature that the graphemes represent phonological segments. This contrasts, for instance, with syllabaries, such as Korean, which establish correspondences between graphemes and consonant-vowel groups. The relationship between grapheme and phoneme is direct and simple: The correspondence between a letter and its sound is one to one and readers rely more on sub-lexical phonological units for decoding words. The decoding of words cannot rely entirely on the matching of letters to sounds; the reader relies more on a visual orthographic reading strategy of whole-word recognition (Frost, 1994; Katz & Frost, 1992; Wang & Geva, 2003)

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