Learning to read a second language is fundamentally different from learning to read a first language. Unlike children, adult second language (L2) learners have limited knowledge of their new language but may already have fluent reading skills in their first language (L1). These reading skills develop differently based on characteristics of the orthography, such as the amount of phonetic information and the consistency of the written unit-spoken unit correspondences. Good evidence exists that L1 orthography experience transfers and impacts L2 literacy skills, but the range of these effects, in different tasks for learners from different L1 types, are not well understood.
The overall goal of this dissertation project is to understand the influence that a learner's L1 orthography has on basic literacy skills and on how these skills are interrelated. In the first two studies, behavioral data will be collected on a set of language and literacy-related skills from native French, Hebrew, and Mandarin speakers. These languages were selected to represent three major orthography types: French, an alphabet; Hebrew, a consonant-based abjad, in which vowels are generally not written; and Mandarin, a character-based morphosyllabary. Participants will complete measures of phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, word recognition, pseudoword decoding, reading comprehension, and English proficiency. The primary goal is to investigate the impact that L1 has on the phonological unit size at which speakers have greatest awareness, and the extent of their lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge. Another goal is to explore the interrelations among these skills and how they differentially contribute to word recognition and more general reading ability. In the third study, data will be collected on literacy skills from adult ESL classroom learners to examine these skills in a classroom setting, rather than in a laboratory, and to test the effectiveness of an instructional intervention designed to boost students' strategies for dealing with unfamiliar words.
