Chinese-English Biliteracy Development: Cross language and writing system transfer

Min Wang

Recent research on biliteracy development of children learning to read English, an alphabetic writing system from another alphabetic system such as Spanish has yielded consistent results on the strong facilitation between first (L1) and second language (L2) reading skills. This proposed study is intended to investigate biliteracy development of children learning to read English from an orthographically and typologically different writing system - Chinese. It will be of both theoretical and practical importance to understand if biliteracy development across writing system will show the same pattern of transfer as that within the same writing system. About 30 Mandarin speaking Chinese children will be followed through grade 2 and grade 3, tested once in the spring term of grade 2, and once in the spring term of grade 3 for their L1 and L2 language and reading skills. Key language and reading components to be examined include oral language proficiency, phonological processing, word identification, and reading comprehension. Parallel measures in L1 and L2 will be selected and experimental tasks will be designed for both L1 and L2. Children's non-verbal cognitive skills will also be tested. Children’s family language and literacy survey will also be carried out at each testing time. Both concurrent and cross-time predictive relationship between L1 and L2 language and reading skills will be analyzed. The specific skills that are transferred based on L1-L2 contrastive comparisons and those that are common to L1 and L2 will be identified. The factors that mediate literacy skills transfer will be located. Finally, the relationship between word identification skills and reading comprehension in L1 and L2 will be explored. These findings will provide insight into the interaction between universal and language-specific processes of biliteracy development and will also be beneficial for developing effective assessments and instructional programs for children learning to read English with a nonalphabetic L1 background.

About Min Wang

Dr. Min Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at the University of Maryland, College Park (starting from the Fall of 2002). Previously, she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh. She earned a B.Sc. in Psychology and an M.A. in Developmental and Educational Psychology from Hangzhou University, P.R. China. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Cognitive Science from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Dr. Min Wang’s research interests are in the area of language and reading development. Her research focuses on second language reading acquisition. Specifically, she is interested in how cross language and writing system differences impact learning to read in a second language.