The Relationship Between Cognate Awareness and English Comprehension Among Spanish—English Bilingual Fourth Grade Students

Abstract

Second language (L2) learners are, to varying degrees, represented in enrollment percentages in school districts around the world. Immigration trends in the United States, Canada, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and other countries have been on the rise for decades, and educators the world over are pressed to incorporate the linguistic needs of L2 learners with the more general curricular requirements that align with expecta tions of literacy achievement in their respective countries. In recent years, efforts have been afoot to understand processes of literacy development among bilingual learners, particularly in the arena of cross-linguistic transfer, so that instruction might be better tailored to meet the distinct linguistic needs of bilingual children. Although it appears clear that, for alphabetic languages, skills such as phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and word reading are quite robust in transferring between languages that share a common alphabet (e.g., Spanish and English, Spanish and French, English and Dutch), the extent of transferability for skills such as vocabulary knowledge is far less clear (Proctor, August, Carlo, & Snow, 2006). It is widely accepted that vocabulary knowledge plays an important role in first language (LI) and L2 reading achievement (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Proctor, Carlo, August, & Snow, 2005), yet research is only just beginning to show that depth of vocabulary knowledge (e.g., morphological awareness) can leverage LI literacy skills in the service of L2 reading comprehension. One component of lexical depth is cognate recognition. A cognate is a word that shares similar orthographic and semantic characteristics in two languages, such that the spelling and meaning of a word and its cognate are highly similar. For example, rapid and rdpido are Spanish-English cog nates, and escuela, ecole, and escola are Spanish-French-Portuguese cog nates. Cognate recognition maybe especially useful for LI-literate students who are reading academic L2 texts, because high frequency conversa tional words in Spanish, such as rdpido, are often low frequency academic