Advantages of Bilinguals Over Monolinguals in Learning a Third Language

Abstract

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom Russian was their native language and Hebrew was their second language and a control group of native Hebrew speakers. The participants were administered cognitive and metacognitive linguistic tests: IQ, reading strategies, syntactic judgment, orthographic choice, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness tests. In addition, language knowledge tests were also given: Vocabulary, word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension. The MANOVA procedures indicated stronger English skills among the native Russian speakers than the native Hebrew speakers on almost all measures. However, both groups showed similar proficiency on the Hebrew measures. Our findings give more support to the notion that knowledge of several different orthographies enhances rather than diminishes L1 and L2 proficiency. The results are discussed in light of across-language transfer, the orthographic depth hypothesis, and the psycholinguistic grain-size theory. INTRODUCTIONThis study is an investigation of the contribution of mastering two different orthographies prior to learning English as a foreign language (FL) compared to mastering one orthography.Israel provides an ideal setting for conducting such a study because of the multiplicity of languages and orthographies represented there. In addition to the many Israeli-born native speakers of Hebrew, Israel absorbed more than one million Russian immigrants in the early 1990s. These families tend to maintain their children's basic Russian academic skills. These children learn Russian in their homes and in extracurricular activities and learn Hebrew as their second language (L2) from the society and through their daily schooling. They start learning English in grade 3, with other Israeli children who know only Hebrew.Salim Abu-Rabia is Professor of reading and language acquisition at the University of Haifa. He obtained his PhD from OISE-University of Toronto 1993. He has published extensively in various language topics, including the psycholinguistics of reading Arabic, reading and reading disabilities, bilingualism and multiculturalism, and reading in different orthographies.Ekaterina Sanitsky is a doctoral candidate at the University of Haifa. Her research interests are bilingualism and reading in different orthographies.There is ample evidence that bilingualism provides an academic advantage over monolingualism. This study extends information about the academic benefits of more than one language by investigating whether bilingualism contributes to triligualism compared to the contribution of monolingualism to bilingualism. Three different orthographies are under study here: Hebrew, Russian, and English.The literature on bilingualism indicates ling...

Cognitive Skill Transfer in English Reading Acquisition: Alphabetic and Logographic Languages Compared

“…Their findings indicated that speech perception and phonological awareness are important predictors for reading in English among both students groups. Similar findings were revealed regarding phonological awareness transfer in language pairs German-English (Mann & Wimmer, 2002), Dutch-English (Timmer & Schiller, 2012;Morfidi et al, 2007), Farsi-English (Arab-Moghaddam & Sénéchal, 2001;Gholamain & Geva, 1999), Finnish-English (Dufva & Voeten, 1999), French-English (Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999;Chiang & Rvachew, 2007), Italian-English (D'angiulli et al, 2001), Portuguese-English (da Fontoura & Siegel, 1995), and Russian-English (Abu-Rabia, 2001;Abu-Rabia & Sanitsky, 2010). The findings of all of these studies support Cummins's IH (1979, 1981.…”

L2 Reading Comprehension and Its Correlates: A Meta‐Analysis

“…In this study, we define decoding as a process during which a reader converts letters (graphemes) to sounds (phonemes) and, essentially, to language. When assessing decoding, researchers often measure how accurately (e.g., Abu‐Rabia & Sanitsky, ; Nassaji & Geva, ) or efficiently (i.e., fast and accurately; e.g., Jeon, ) readers read real and/or pseudowords. Because accuracy and efficiency scores are often interchangeably used as an index of decoding ability by L2 reading researchers, it is not uncommon for meta‐analysts to treat both accuracy and efficiency measures as representing decoding (Melby‐Lervåg & Lervåg, ; Melby‐Lervåg et al., ), and the present study also follows this approach.…”

“…Although certain subconstructs of phonological awareness operate across languages (see Branum‐Martin et al., ), our review of the literature revealed that, at least within L2 reading research, it is more often tested by a language‐specific instrument (e.g., an English phonological awareness test for English reading comprehension research). More specifically, some popular test tasks involve phonemic manipulation such as phonemic deletion, substitution, or blending (Abu‐Rabia & Sanitsky, ; Kieffer & Lesaux, ; Pasquarella, Chen, Lam, Luo, & Ramirez, ). The present study, therefore, reports the average correlation between such measures of L2 phonological awareness and L2 reading comprehension.…”

Pre-post Changes in Implicit Theories of Second Language Acquisition After a Successful Learning Experience

“…An alternate, more positive explanation is that participants who reported having studied more than one language showed little change in their implicit beliefs based on the successful laboratory learning experience precisely because they have more experience with languages, which in itself has been shown to be a positive contributing factor to subsequent language (specifically script) acquisition (e.g., Abu-Rabia and Sanitsky, 2010).…”