Foreign Language Attainment of Children/Adolescents with Poor Literacy Skills: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Abstract

This systematic review investigated how successful children/adolescents with poor literacy skills learn a foreign language compared with their peers with typical literacy skills. Moreover, we explored whether specific characteristics related to participants, foreign language instruction, and assessment moderated scores on foreign language tests in this population. Overall, 16 studies with a total of 968 participants (poor reader/spellers: n = 404; control participants: n = 564) met eligibility criteria. Only studies focusing on English as a foreign language were available. Available data allowed for meta-analyses on 10 different measures of foreign language attainment. In addition to standard mean differences (SMDs), we computed natural logarithms of the ratio of coefficients of variation (CVRs) to capture individual variability between participant groups. Significant between-study heterogeneity, which could not be explained by moderator analyses, limited the interpretation of results. Although children/adolescents with poor literacy skills on average showed lower scores on foreign language phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and reading comprehension measures, their performance varied significantly more than that of control participants. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent group differences between the foreign language scores of children/adolescents with poor and typical literacy skills are representative of individual poor readers/spellers. Taken together, our results indicate that foreign language skills in children/adolescents with poor literacy skills are highly variable. We discuss the limitations of past research that can guide future steps toward a better understanding of individual differences in foreign language attainment of children/adolescents with poor literacy skills.

Disentangling dyslexia from typical L2‐learning in emergent literacy

“…Assessments at the symptomatic level focused on word reading and spelling. As expected, and in line with other studies (Peterson & Pennington, 2015;von Hagen et al, 2020) the literacy scores in L2 were low compared to L1-Con, but comparable to L1-Dys. However, these symptoms may be understood in different ways in the two groups, and assessment at the cognitive level is needed for further identification (Frith, 1999).…”

“…Studies focusing on foreign language learning (mostly English) in individuals with dyslexia have shown differences in both linguistic and brain measures (Helland & Kaasa, 2005; Helland & Morken, 2016; Ylinen et al, 2019). According to a recent meta‐analysis of foreign language learning in multilinguals with poor literacy skills more research is needed (von Hagen et al, 2020). A way of piloting this problem is to assess children with and without dyslexia whose first language (L1) is also their school language, and a matched group of multilingual children whose L1 is different from their school language, here labelled second language (L2) (for terminology, see The Council of Europe, 2007).…”