The effects of bilingualism on learning to read English: evidence from the contrast between Urdu‐English bilingual and English monolingual children

Abstract

Learning to read in a shallow alphabetic orthography such as Urdu may depend primarily on phonological processing skills, whilst learning to read in a deeper orthography, such as English, may place more reliance on visual processing skills. This study explores the effects of Urdu on the acquisition of English literacy skills by comparing the reading, memory and phonological processing skills of bilingual Urdu-English and monolingual English children (7±8 years). The bilingual children had more difficulty in reading irregular English words, but were better at reading regular words and nonwords compared to the monolinguals. The poor performance of the bilingual children with irregular English words was linked to their poor visual memory skills, whilst their good performance with regular words and nonwords was related to the presence of enhanced phonological skills. The results demonstrate the transfer of first language skills to reading development in a second language. In English, first language skills can facilitate the development of either lexical or nonlexical routes to reading.

Reading Development in two Alphabetic Systems Differing in Orthographic Consistency: A longitudinal study of French-speaking children enrolled in a Dutch immersion program

“…The fact that the Dutch orthographic system, although much more transparent than the French one, still leads to developing the lexical procedure (at least after some reading experience) may also explain why our results are inconsistent with those reported by Mumtaz and Humphreys (2001). As a matter of fact, in that study, the negative transfer from the most consistent orthographic system (Urdu) to the least consistent one (English) was attributed to the greater reliance on non-lexical processing by bilingual children when reading irregular words in English, a procedure which led them to commit many regularisation errors.…”

“…Along with previous studies (Carlisle & Beeman, 2000;Da Fontoura & Siegel, 1995;D'Angiulli et al, 2001), these results suggest that beginning to read in a transparent orthographic system positively impacts on the development of phonological processes in the opaque orthographic system. However, Mumtaz and Humphreys (2001) observed a negative transfer, i.e., lower performances in the bilinguals than in the monolinguals, for English irregular words, which manifested itself through many errors consisting in regularisation. According to the authors, this was due to a greater reliance on non-lexical processing in the bilingual than in the monolingual children.…”

“…This discrepancy may be accounted for if the contrast between French and Dutch in terms of orthographic transparency were less important than the contrast between English and Urdu. Indeed, Urdu orthography strongly emphasises phonological rather than visual orthographic strategies, since the written symbols in Urdu vary visual forms depending on their position in a word (Mumtaz & Humphreys, 2001). Another explanation may be that in Mumtaz and Humphreys' study, English was the children's L2, and it is therefore difficult to separate the general effect of bilingualism from negative transfer.…”

“…Still, in a similar study conducted by D'Angiulli, Siegel, and Serra (2001) on Italian-English bilinguals, a positive transfer was reported both in skilled readers and in less skilled readers. Mumtaz and Humphreys (2001) reported both positive and negative transfer from a transparent orthographic system to an opaque one. Indeed, they observed that Urdu-English bilingual children from Grade 2 and Grade 3 outperformed their English monolingual peers in reading tasks involving English regular word and pseudoword.…”

The role of derivational morphology in the reading comprehension of Spanish-speaking English language learners

“…(e.g., Capps et al, 2005) and language minority learners in other industrialized countries (e.g., Aarts & Verhoeven, 1999;Abu-Rabia, 1998a, 1998bHacquebord, 1994;Mumtaz & Humphreys, 2001) and the prevalence of reading comprehension difficulties among these learners, there is little knowledge on which to base the development of instructional interventions to meet their needs (August & Shanahan, 2006). One essential step toward building an empirical foundation for effective interventions is to identify the componential skills that are sources of reading comprehension difficulties among these learners.…”