Orthographic learning and self-teaching in a bilingual and biliterate context

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine self-teaching in the context of English as a foreign language literacy acquisition. Three groups comprising 88 sixth-grade children participated. The first group consisted of Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilinguals who had acquired basic reading skills in Russian as their first language (L1) and literacy and who were literate in Hebrew as a second language. The second group consisted of Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilinguals who had not learned to read in their native Russian but had acquired Hebrew as their first literate language. The third group consisted of Hebrew-speaking monolingual children who were literate in Hebrew. This design facilitated examining the effect of biliteracy and bilingualism on basic English reading skills. We hypothesized that due to the proximity between the Russian and English orthographies as opposed to the Hebrew–English “distance,” the Russian–Hebrew-speaking biliterate group who acquired basic reading and spelling skills in L1 Russian would have superior self-teaching in English as opposed to the two other groups. The standard two-session self-teaching paradigm was employed with naming (speed and accuracy) and orthographic choice as posttest measures of orthographic learning. Results showed that after 4years of English instruction, all three groups showed evidence of self-teaching on naming speed and orthographic recognition. The Russian–Hebrew-speaking biliterate group, moreover, showed a partial advantage over the comparison groups for initial decoding of target pseudowords and clear-cut superiority for measures of later orthographic learning, thereby showing self-teaching while supporting the script dependence hypothesis.