Adolescent word reading in English as a foreign language

Abstract

The current study examined the proficiency of Israeli adolescents in reading single words in English, which is taught as a foreign language, and what language skills predict individual variability. Parallel measures of word reading, phonology, decoding, morpho-syntax and vocabulary in Hebrew and English were administered to 217 adolescents in 8th and 11th grade. Following 5-8 years of English as a foreign language instruction, participants achieved reading levels commensurate with those of third to fourth grade native English-speaking children. Decoding and vocabulary knowledge were significant predictors of single word reading across both orthographies. Morpho-syntactic knowledge predicted word reading only in Hebrew. Further, there was pronounced variability in the extent to which phonological awareness and vocabulary predicted word reading across languages. Low levels of reading performance underline the inherent challenge in achieving reading proficiency in the complex English orthography in a foreign language setting, with limited instruction time and suboptimal pedagogy. Decoding and vocabulary are identified as important universal processes in reading, whereas differences in other predictors support scriptdependent processes in reading as well.

Frequency and predictability effects in first and second language of different script bilinguals.

“…The results of the current study demonstrated less efficient reading in L2 than in L1 for intermediate proficiency bilinguals—both in bottom-up processing (lexical access) and in top-down processing (the ability to generate expectation). Importantly, this was the case even though the participants we tested had been studying their L2 for more than 10 years and were exposed to it on a daily basis, especially in the written form (see also Prior et al, 2020). This pattern suggests that the magnitude of word frequency effects is a marker of reading efficiency, associated with language use and proficiency (Brysbaert et al, 2017; Diependaele et al, 2013; Gollan et al, 2011) and that the magnitude of word predictability effects might be a marker of higher order reading efficiency, indexing compensatory processing (Stanovich, 1986).…”

“…More generally, the current results, which highlight the distinction between efficient reading in the L1 and L2, have important implications. On the downside, even readers who have achieved a high level of skill in the L1 are not guaranteed to reach equivalent levels of skill when studying a second language, especially if the L2 is very different from the L1 (Prior et al, 2020). On a more encouraging note, however, the current results suggest that to achieve efficient reading in an L2, individuals should strive to broaden their vocabulary knowledge and the rapid accessibility of mappings from form to meaning in that language.…”

“…Not all learners achieve efficient reading in the L2, even after many years of study (Prior et al, 2020). One important factor to examine is whether efficient reading in the L2 can recruit underlying skills that support L1 reading efficiency, or whether it is better understood as mostly language specific.…”

“…Specifically, we examine Hebrew-English bilinguals living in Israel, where English has a high status, is learned as a mandatory foreign language in a school setting from the third grade, and is widely present in the environment (for a review, see Shohamy, 2014). However, recent findings demonstrate that Israeli adolescents achieve English reading skills that are comparable with those achieved by native English speakers who are 6-8 years younger (Prior et al, 2020), a finding which might be at least partly explained by the typologically and orthographic distance between English and Hebrew. Hebrew is a Semitic language, characterized by a rich morphology, which consists of derivations of mostly tri-consonantal roots, as opposed to the linear and sequential morphology that characterizes English (Bick et al, 2011;Frost et al, 1997;Prior & Markus, 2014).…”

Application of EFL pedagogy based on cloud computing platform in online interactive teaching of foreign languages

“…Under the traditional teaching mode, the classroom is "teacher-centered", with teachers instilling one-way instruction on the podium and students passively accepting it at their desks, which gives people the impression that education is all about indoctrination. Under the blended teaching mode, teachers and students teach in information interaction, which makes people realize that learning is a kind of knowledge transmission rather than the process of knowledge instillation [10][11].…”