Factors related to English reading performance in children with Chinese as a first language: More evidence of cross-language transfer of phonological processing.

Abstract

Parallel measures of phonological, syntactic, and orthographic processing skill and reading were administered in English and in Chinese to 65 children whose 1st language (LI) was Cantonese and whose 2nd language (L2) was English. Phonological skill was correlated across L1 and L2. Phonological skill in both L1 and L2 was correlated with L2 reading and contributed a unique variance to L2 reading, even though the children's L1 was not written in an alphabetic orthography, whereas the 2nd language had an alphabetic orthography. This research adds to a growing body of evidence for cross-language transfer of phonological processing in L2 learning of English-as-a-Second-Language students.