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Chapter 11 Learning to read in multilingual contexts Heather Winskel Abstract Learning to read fluently is an extremely important skill for all children to acquire. Many children are growing up in diverse bilingual or multilingual contexts and learn to speak and read in more than one language. It is crucial that children who are having problems in learning to read due to phonological difficulties are identified early, and that appropriate screening instruments are designed in their native language(s). Appropriate intervention programmes can then be implemented. In bilingual and multilingual children the situation is even more complex as they have to learn to read using different writing systems, often concurrently. As bilingual children can have different phonological awareness profiles in their two languages, it is desirable to assess children in both of the languages spoken. In relation to multilingual children, assessing phonological and reading skills becomes an even more complex task. The current chapter explores how children from diverse backgrounds, including children from bilingual and multilingual contexts, acquire phonological awareness and reading skills. First, research on reading acquisition in children from unilingual language backgrounds is examined, and then acquisition in bilinguals and evidence of cross-language transfer is reviewed. The implications for children living in multicultural and multilingual contexts are finally addressed. 1. Introduction to the “problem” of “cracking the code” Becoming literate is an extremely important skill to acquire, and children who fail to learn to read and write in general suffer the long-term consequences of this disability. It is critical that problems or delays in reading are detected early, so that appropriate intervention programmes can be implemented. However, literacy skills and their acquisition vary across languages and across printed forms of languages. It is therefore important that the assessment instruments used to screen children are developed in the child’s own language or languages. This is crucial for children learning to read different languages throughout the world, and in particular for children growing up in multilingual contexts where children learn to speak and read in more than one language.

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Learning to read in any language is basically a process of matching the visual symbols or orthography on the page to the sound system or phonology of the spoken language. Typically, the phonology of a language and the orthography that the language maps onto favour different sized segmentation units or grain sizes (Ziegler and Goswami 2005). Grain size refers to the lexical units that are converted into phonological structures when reading different orthographies, hence the size of the mapping unit can be for instance the phoneme, syllable or whole word (Frost 2006). For example, in some languages, such as Indonesian, Turkish or French, the syllable is a more natural segmentation unit than in English, which means that the syllable is more salient and accessible to map at that level onto the orthography (Cutler et al. 1986; Öney and Durgunoğlu 1997; Winskel and Widjaja 2007). When learning how to read, the child has to learn to “crack the code” of how the particular language maps onto its orthography. The child’s task is to find shared or common segmentation or grain size units that allow a consistent or reliable mapping between the orthography and phonology of the language (Ziegler and Goswami 2005). In a relatively transparent alphabetic orthography such as German, children are able to access and map the smallest grain size of graphemes onto phonemes within their first year of learning to read. In contrast, in English, a relatively irregular or nontransparent orthography, children can take several years to gain a similar level of competence (Goswami 2000, 2003). 2. The relationship between phonological awareness and reading Phonological awareness, the child’s awareness that spoken words can be broken down or manipulated into smaller units of sound, is one of the critical skills in the acquisition of reading in an alphabetic orthography (Adams 1990; Bradley and Bryant 1983; Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley 1993; Stanovich, Cunningham, and Cramer 1984; Tunmer and Nesdale 1985; Wagner, Torgesen, and Rashotte 1994). In turn, children who are having difficulties in learning how to read and write often have difficulties in phonological awareness tasks (Hansen and Bowey 1994; Snowling et al. 1986). In addition, and importantly, training phonological awareness skills has been found to facilitate reading acquisition (Bradley and Bryant 1983; Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley 1995; Byrne, FieldingBarnsley, and Ashley 2000; Hatcher, Hulme, and Snowling 2004; Hindson et al. 2005). Phonological awareness is typically assessed by testing children’s ability to perform mental manipulations on speech segments, for example by tapping out the number of syllables in a word, deleting the initial sound of a word or detecting similarities between words (McBride-Chang 1995). Previous research investigating phonological awareness has typically focused on unilingual language development, despite the fact that many children these days are growing up in multilingual environments. In reality, many chil-

Part 3. Learning to read in multilingual contexts

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dren learn to speak and read in more than one language. Cross-linguistic research indicates that the level of phonological awareness initially used in reading and spelling is shaped by the orthography to be learned and the phonology of the spoken language corresponding to that orthography (Goswami 1999). Quite a complex picture emerges when we consider the task of the bilingual or multilingual child learning to speak and read in more than one language, as they have to learn to map different phonological and orthographic systems, often concurrently. 3. Bilingual and multilingual language and literacy acquisition Individuals who speak and use two languages on a regular basis are often referred to as being bilingual. However, it is important to note when studying bilingualism that there are difficulties in defining and classifying bilingualism, and that the degree of bilingualism varies along a continuum (Bialystok, McBrideChang, and Luk 2005). An important distinction used in relation to bilingualism is sequential and simultaneous bilingualism. Simultaneous childhood bilingualism refers to a child acquiring two languages at the same time from birth, for example when the parents speak two different languages (Baker 2006). In contrast, sequential bilingualism occurs when for example a child learns one language at home then goes to school where a different language is learnt. Again there are no exact boundaries. However, because of the way the individual has acquired the language, they are often more dominant in one language than the other. An additional distinction is often made between bilingualism referring to the control over two linguistic systems, and second language acquisition referring to the process of acquiring a new linguistic system to an already acquired linguistic system. There is a growing interest in bilingual and multilingual language and literacy acquisition, and growing awareness of the importance of assessing children in one or more than one language spoken by the child. In addition, multilingual children are in general compared against monolingual norms rather than against multilingual developed norms, even though the populations are quite distinct. This chapter aims first to explore how children from diverse language backgrounds, in particular Asian languages, acquire phonological awareness and reading skills. Then research on reading acquisition in bilinguals and evidence of cross-language transfer will be reviewed. Finally, I will examine how the implications of these findings impact on children living in multicultural and multilingual contexts.

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4. Recent research on reading development in Asian orthographies Research focusing on unilingual speakers of European alphabetic orthographies has found a strong association between phoneme awareness and reading and spelling ability (Bradley and Bryant 1983; Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley 1993; Goswami and Bryant 1990; Hulme et al. 2002; MacLean, Bryant, and Bradley 1987; Wimmer and Goswami 1994). A considerable amount of research has been conducted on literacy development in Indo-European languages, but much less research has been conducted on non-Indo-European languages. Examining diverse or typologically distinct languages and their orthographies allows us to examine universal and language-specific processes and explanations of reading development. Recent research on Asian languages has highlighted the syllable as an additional important processing unit when reading alphasyllabic or semisyllabic orthographies, which have properties of both alphabetic and syllabic scripts. For example, research investigating children acquiring Kannada, a semisyllabic Indo-Dravidian script, indicates that the optimal unit for beginners is the syllable, although more proficient readers and spellers can also manipulate phonemes (Padakannaya et al. 2002). Vaid and Gupta (2002) also interpreted their results on Devanagari, an alphasyllabic orthography widely used to represent Indian languages, as supporting a partly syllabic and partly phonemic level of segmentation. Indonesian provides an interesting case study as it uses the same Latinbased alphabetic script as English, but in contrast has a high degree of orthographic transparency. It is a multi-syllabic language, and the syllable is a highly salient unit in the spoken language, which has clear syllable boundaries. A range of tasks assessing different levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and pseudowords, and spelling stem and affixed words, were administered to 73 children in Grade 1 and subsequently one year later in Grade 2 (Winskel and Widjaja 2007). Results indicated that letter knowledge and the phoneme play a prominent role in learning to read and write in Indonesian, which concurs with research on other orthographically transparent languages, e.g. German and Turkish (Öney and Durgunoğlu 1997; Wimmer and Hummer 1990). It appears that the transparency of the language and the close correspondence between letter names and letter sounds facilitates access to the smallest grain size, the phoneme, in Indonesian beginner readers. However, additional language-specific features play a role, namely, the syllable and morpheme are salient units in Indonesian, and consequently are accessed and utilised by the child, particularly when reading and spelling challenging long, multisyllabic words. Another Asian language that forms an interesting comparison with alphabetic orthographies previously studied is Thai, as it has its own alphabetic orthography, which also has syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for


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some consonants (vowels are not always explicitly expressed and implicitly occur with some consonants). In addition, consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the study to be discussed, are that vowels can also precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence there is a mismatch between how the word is spoken and written, for example แตงโม /ɛːtŋoːm/ ‘watermelon’ is spoken as [tɛːŋmoː] (Winskel 2009). These types of misaligned words where the vowel operates within the syllable are termed Type 1 misaligned words. In addition, there are commonly used words where the initial vowel operates across syllables and these more severely misaligned words are termed Type 2 words, for example แมลง /ɛːmlŋ/ ‘insect’ is spoken as [m(a)lɛːŋ] (an implicit vowel (a) has been inserted). Other words with aligned vowels, where written and spoken order correspond, termed Type 3 words, were used as controls or comparisons, for example มะม่วง /mamuaŋ/ ‘mango’. As indicated by Vaid and Gupta (2002), this misalignment of vowels allows us to examine and make predictions on whether the phoneme or syllable is the more prominent processing unit when reading and spelling Thai. If Thai readers predominantly segment words at the level of the individual phoneme then they should be slower to name or recognize words whose spatial order is discrepant with the spoken order, i.e. the Type 1 (within syllable) and the Type 2 (across syllable) misaligned words, will be slower to name in comparison to the Type 3 aligned control words. On the other hand, if Thai readers segment words primarily at the syllabic level then it should not matter where the vowel is positioned as long as it occurs within the syllable, and we can expect that there will not be a difference in processing and reading measures for Type 1 (within syllable) and the Type 3 (control) words, and only if the vowel positioning crosses syllable boundaries is a processing cost expected as occurs in Type 2 words. Hence we expect performance on the more severely misaligned Type 2 (across syllable) words to be slower to process than Type 1 (within the syllable) misaligned words or Type 3 (control) words. In order to test these predictions, a range of experiments were conducted (Winskel 2009). Eye movements of twenty-four adults were monitored while reading words with and without misaligned vowels presented in sentences using eye tracking technology (EyeLink II tracking system). University students read 50 pairs of words with misaligned and aligned words matched for length and frequency embedded in same sentence frames. In a second experiment, forty adults rapidly named words from each of the word categories, and response latencies were recorded. In addition, data from forty children 6;6 to 8;6 years old in Grade 1 and Grade 2 reading and spelling comparable words was also collected and analysed for correct responses and types of errors. Results revealed a processing cost due to the more severely misaligned words where the vowel operates across the syllable, and give support for a predominantly syllabic level of

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segmentation rather than phonemic for reading and spelling in Thai adults and children. Similar syllable segmentation strategies found in beginner Thai readers were also reflected in the skilled adult readers, which gives support to the psycholinguistic grain size theory that there is an orthographic-specific reading blueprint laid down in childhood, which continues to influence the organisation and cognitive structure in skilled adult readers (Ziegler and Goswami 2004). The research on unilingual reading acquisition across diverse languages indicates that the different grain sizes favoured by different orthographies are shaped by both the phonological characteristics of the spoken language and the particular orthography it maps onto (e.g. Borzone de Manrique and Signorini 1994; Caravolas and Bruck 1993; Cheung et al. 2001; Cossu et al. 1988; Harris and Hatano 1999; Wimmer and Goswami 1990). These studies have relevance to bilingual and multilingual acquisition as children learning to read two or more languages may have to switch mapping strategy depending on the particular language and orthography they are learning to read, and reading strategies and behaviours from the first language may transfer to the second language. 5. Research on reading development in bilinguals Reading research has been dominated by studies conducted on unilingual speakers, but there are a growing number of studies investigating reading acquisition in bilinguals. However, it is important to note that most of this research has been conducted on sequential rather than simultaneous bilinguals. One of the first studies to investigate reading in bilingual children was conducted by Durgunoğlu, Nagy, and Hancin-Bhatt (1993) on Spanish-speaking children learning English as a second language in the USA. They found that phonological awareness and reading ability in Spanish, the first language (L1), predicted reading performance in English, the second language (L2). Since phonological awareness of L1 and L2 were significantly related, they concluded that phonological awareness is not a language-specific mechanism but a languageuniversal or general one. In contrast, Bruck and Genesee (1995) interpreted their findings on English-French bilinguals as supporting a selective rather than universal influence on the development of phonological awareness. They examined phonological awareness skills of bilingual children whose first language was English and second language was French in comparison with monolingual English-speaking children. Assessments were conducted in English only. They found that the bilinguals had more advanced levels of phonological awareness than the monolinguals in Kindergarten in the areas of onset-rime awareness. However by Grade 1, the pattern had altered and the bilingual and monolingual children had comparable scores. The bilingual group as a whole also demonstrated superiority on syllable awareness, which was attributed to the clearly defined syllable structure


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of French that transfers to English, the first language. These results indicate that learning a second language can influence the pattern of phonological awareness development in the first language. In a small study conducted in Sydney, Australia we found transfer from the first language to the second language in Spanish-English bilingual children (Berea 2005). Twenty bilingual Spanish-English children and a control monolingual English-speaking group were assessed on a range of measures of phonological awareness and reading ability in English. Selective advantages were evident as the preschool bilingual children had a heightened level of syllable awareness. However, no significant differences were found in the Grade 1 children. These findings demonstrate how the phonological structure of the native language can influence phonological awareness development in the second language. The bilingual preschooler’s advantage in syllable awareness corresponds to the phonological structure of Spanish language as Spanish has a very salient syllable structure in comparison with English (Jiménez and Ortiz 2000). It appears that Spanish speaking children detect the saliency of the syllable in the spoken language, which leads to an increased awareness of syllables and transference to their second language, English. These two studies on English-French and Spanish-English bilinguals indicate that there can be a selective bidirectional transfer of phonological awareness skills between the two languages spoken by bilinguals. Bialystok, Majumder and Martin (2003) found that Spanish-English bilinguals outperformed both Cantonese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on a phonological counting task, which was attributed to the greater relative transparency or regularity of Spanish orthography. Rickard Liow and Poon (1998) using a non-word reading task found that Singaporean children with Mandarin Chinese as their first language showed reliance on visual orthographic processes, whereas children with Bahasa Indonesia as their first language showed well developed alphabetic phonological awareness skills when reading English as their second language. This illustrates the influence of the first language on processing strategies used when reading the second language. These studies also indicate that in bilinguals, it is important to consider the characteristics of the orthographies the children are learning and their degree of relatedness (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, and Luk 2005). Theoretically, languages which have similar writing systems share common characteristics and are likely to operate at similar grain sizes, and consequently be more amenable to language transfer. For example two languages that share alphabetic orthographies are more likely to exhibit cross-language transfer than if one of the languages is written using an alphabetic orthography and the other with a logographic script.

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6. Assessing reading development in both languages spoken by bilinguals The studies so far reviewed compared phonological awareness in bilingual and monolingual children by testing only one of the languages spoken by the bilingual children. Loizou and Stuart (2003) assessed phonological awareness skills in both languages spoken by Greek-English and English-Greek bilinguals. They compared performance on these tasks with monolingual Greek and monolingual English children. The bilingual English-Greek children were born in England with Greek parents and the dominant language was English, whereas the GreekEnglish bilinguals were born in Greece and attended a pre-school where they were exposed to both Greek and English, and hence the dominant language was Greek. They found that English-Greek bilingual children outperformed monolingual English children but this was not replicated in the Greek-English bilingual children. They explained this “selective bilingual enhancement effect” in terms of children learning a second language, Greek, that is phonologically simpler than the first language, English. In addition, they found that English-Greek bilingual children performed significantly better than Greek-English bilinguals, in particular on phoneme awareness tasks, which suggests that phonological complexity of the bilingual child’s languages impacts on cross-language transfer. Other studies have investigated cross-language transfer when the scripts being learnt are significantly different and favour different grain sizes, for example the first language is either logographic or alphasyllabic and the second language is alphabetic (e.g. Chiappe and Siegel 1999; Gottardo et al. 2001; Nag 2007; Stuart-Smith and Martin 1997; Wang and Geva 2003). Gottardo et al. (2001) found that in a logographic orthography, Cantonese (L1) rhyme detection made a unique contribution to reading in the alphabetic second orthography, English. Stuart-Smith and Martin (1999) designed tests to assess a range of phonological awareness and reading skills in both languages spoken by PunjabiEnglish bilingual speaking children living in the UK. Punjabi is written using Gurmukhi orthography, which is an alphasyllabic script and has implicit vowels for all consonants. They found different phonological awareness skills were emphasised in the two different languages. In English there was an advantage on alliteration, rhyme judgment and phoneme segmentation; whereas in Punjabi there was an advantage for onset and coda isolation and phoneme blending (the child is required to identify a word when it is pronounced with each sound segment, e.g. r-a-t makes the word ‘rat’). Based on these results, Stuart-Smith and Martin (1997, 1999) argue that any proper assessment of bilingual children should be carried out in both languages, as assessment of phonological awareness in only one of the bilingual child’s languages may not necessarily predict the profile of phonological awareness across both languages.


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Recently, Mishra and Stainthorp (2007) investigated transference between Oriya, a language spoken in the Indian state of Orissa that has an alphasyllabic writing system, and English. Oriya orthography represents language at both phoneme and syllable levels. They assessed various levels of phonological awareness, word and pseudoword reading in both languages in 99 Grade 5 children. Approximately half of the children attended schools where they were first taught to read in Oriya in Grade 1 and then English in Grade 2. The other half of the children attended schools where they were taught first to read English in Grade 1 and then Oriya in Grade 2. They found a complex non-symmetrical cross-language facilitation effect between phonological awareness measures and reading dependent on the characteristics of the different orthographies of the languages being learned, and whether the first language was also the first literacy language. They found that in the children with Oriya as the first literacy language learnt, the syllable was a predictor of reading and pseudoword reading in Oriya, and the phoneme was not a significant predictor, even though the script represents language at both phoneme and syllable levels. However, when English was the first literacy language, awareness of Oriya phonemes contributed significantly to word and pseudoword reading in Oriya whereas the syllable did not. Furthermore, awareness of phonemes in English contributed to English word reading regardless of whether it was the first or second literacy language. So transference of phonological awareness skills across languages is affected both by the grain size used when reading the different orthographies and which orthography is learnt first. 7. Additional challenges to beginner readers in learning two writing systems Children often have the additional challenge of learning to read a language they are not very familiar with or fluent in, which creates additional problems for the learner. For example in many African countries, children have to learn to read a language that is not their home language, either another African language or a past colonial language, such as English or French. Research has shown that literacy acquisition is more likely to succeed if children are taught a language already known to them, rather than a language that the children meet for the first time when they go to school (Paran and Williams 2007; Pretorius and Mampuru 2007). In Botswana a major challenge for young children is to become biliterate in Setswana and English, which are the two official national languages. This involves learning to map the sounds of two very different languages concurrently onto the same Latin-based alphabetic orthography. Furthermore, children in general are fluent in Setswana (which is also not always their home language), but English is very much a language of the “school”. In a preliminary study, we investigated phoneme awareness, letter knowledge and reading words and pseudowords in 36 Grade 2 children in Setswana

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and English (Lekgoko and Winskel 2008). There was a complex, nonsymmetrical relationship between letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading ability in Setswana and English. Results revealed that letter knowledge in Setswana (which the pupils learnt a year before they learnt to read English) did not predict any cross-language reading of English words or Setswana words. Letter knowledge in English, however, was a good predictor both across and within language of word and pseudoword reading. This could be due to either the greater relative ease in mapping the Roman letters of the alphabet onto the sounds of English or to greater familiarity with the orthographic conventions of the English alphabet than Setswana alphabet. However, interestingly, awareness of the phonemes of Setswana, a language the children have been previously exposed to and are familiar with, plays an important role in both word and pseudoword reading in Setswana and pseudoword reading in English. Although the children already had oral language proficiency in Setswana, this did not automatically mean that the children would find all aspects of learning to read Setswana easier than learning to read English. In addition, this research indicates that as well as a positive transfer of phonological awareness and reading skills between languages, there is a potential source of confusion and cross-language interference for children concurrently learning to read two or more languages. Bialystok, McBride-Chang, and Luk (2005) assessed phonological awareness and word decoding skills in both English and Chinese in English-Chinese bilinguals, English monolinguals and Chinese children beginning to learn English. They found that the degree of transfer of these skills between languages was influenced by the children’s relative level of bilingualism or proficiency in the two languages and type of reading instruction received by the children. They also concluded that phonological awareness “is not a unitary skill but consists of unit-based components” dependent on the particular writing system being learnt (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, and Luk 2005: 588). Languages with different writing systems appear to activate different underlying processes used to read in the different systems, which sets limits on the transferability of these skills. Recent research using neuroimaging techniques has shown that there are shared regions as well as orthographic-specific regions of the brain activated in ChineseEnglish bilinguals when reading the two distinct orthographies (Perfetti et al. 2007). 8. Implications and conclusions It is extremely important that children in both monolingual and multilingual contexts become literate, and that problems or delays in reading are detected early using appropriately designed assessment instruments. Becoming literate in developing countries such as Indonesia, Thailand or Botswana, is exacerbated by the lack of educational and classroom resources available to assist and facili-


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tate literacy acquisition. It is important that children in these countries who are having problems in learning to read due to phonological difficulties are identified early. However, there is often a lack of appropriately designed assessment or screening instruments to identify children with phonologically-based reading difficulties, which have been developed in the child’s own native language. Often outdated English tests are used inappropriately to assess children’s skills. Designing appropriate assessments in the child’s native language is a complex task, as tests need to be adapted to suit the phonology and characteristics of the particular language, which may be quite different from English (Stuart-Smith and Martin 1999). Developing appropriate standardised tests in the home language is also a costly and time-consuming process. In relation to assessing phonological and reading skills in multilingual populations, there are other complex considerations to be taken into account, such as which language(s) to be selected for assessment. The children’s dominant language can be selected for assessment, and diagnosis can be made on that basis. However, researchers argue that this may not be sufficient or appropriate, and that there is a need to assess children in both literacy languages in bilinguals (this becomes an even more complex issue in multilingual children), as phonological awareness profiles may vary between languages (Stuart-Smith and Martin 1997, 1999). We also need to consider the languages being learnt by the bilingual or multilingual child, as positive transference is more likely to occur if the orthographies are similar and share common grain sizes (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, and Luk 2005). In addition, literacy acquisition is more likely to succeed if children are already familiar with the language that they are learning to read, rather than first encountering the language when they go to school. As the majority of research has been conducted on reading development in sequential bilinguals, it is important that additional research is conducted on simultaneous bilinguals and/or a comparison is made between reading development in these two types of bilinguals in the future. In conclusion, it is important that children are assessed for reading and language-related skills using appropriately designed instruments, so that early intervention programmes can be implemented. This includes assessments in the child’s own language(s), and comparing children against norms developed in the child’s own language(s), or in the case of multilingual children norms developed from the multilingual population rather than a monolingual population. References Adams, Marilyn J. (1990). Beginning to Read. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT. Baker, Colin (2006). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Berea, Gabrielle (2005). Phonological awareness and reading ability in bilingual Spanish and monolingual English children. Postgraduate Diploma dissertation, School of Psychology, University of Western Sydney. Bialystok, Ellen, Shilpi Majumder and Michelle M. Martin (2003). Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage? Applied Psycholinguistics 24: 27–44. Bialystok, Ellen, Catherine McBride-Chang and Gigi Luk (2005). Bilingualism, language, proficiency, and learning to read in two writing systems. Journal of Educational Psychology 97(4): 580–590. Borzone de Manrique, Ana María and Angela Signorini (1994). Phonological awareness, spelling and reading abilities in Spanish-speaking children. British Journal of Educational Psychology 64: 429–439. Bradley, Lynette and Peter E. Bryant (1983). Categorising sounds and learning to read: a causal connection, Nature 310: 419–421. Bruck, Maggie and Fred Genesee (1995). Phonological awareness in young second language learners. Journal of Child Language 22(2): 307–324. Byrne, Brian and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley (1993). Evaluation of a program to teach phonemic awareness to young children: A 1-year follow-up. Journal of Educational Psychology 85 (1): 104–111. Byrne, Brian and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley (1995). Evaluation of a program to teach phonemic awareness to young children: A 2- and 3- year follow-up and a new preschool trial. Journal of Educational Psychology 87: 499–503. Byrne, Brian, Ruth Fielding-Barnsley and Luise Ashley (2000). Effects of preschool phoneme identity training after six years: Outcome level of distinguished from rate of response. Journal of Educational Psychology 92(4): 659–667. Caravolas, Marketa and Maggie Bruck (1993). The effect of oral and written language input on children’s phonological awareness: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 55 (1): 1–30. Cheung, Him, Hsuan-Chih Chen, Chun Yip Lai, On Chi Wong and Melanie Hills (2001). The development of phonological awareness: Effects of spoken language experience and orthography. Cognition 81(3): 227–241. Chiappe, Penny and Linda S. Siegel (1999). Phonological awareness and reading acquisition in English- and Punjabi-speaking Canadian children. Journal of Educational Psychology 91(1): 20–28. Cossu, Giuseppe, Donald Shankweiler, Isabelle Y. Liberman, Leonard Katz and Giuseppe Tola (1988). Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children. Applied Psycholinguistics 9: 1–16. Cutler, Anne, Jacques Mehler, Dennis G. Norris and Juan Segui (1986). The Syllable’s differing role in the segmentation of French and English. Journal of Memory and Language 25(4): 385–400. Durgunoğlu, Aydin Y., William E. Nagy and Barbara J. Hancin-Bhatt (1993). Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness. Journal of Educational Psychology 85(3): 453– 465. Frost, Ram (2006). Becoming literate in Hebrew: the grain size hypothesis and Semitic orthographic systems. Developmental Science 9(5): 439–440. Goswami, Usha (1999). The relationship between phonological awareness and orthographic representation in different orthographies. In: Margaret Harris and Giyoo Hatano (eds.), Learning to Read and Write: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, 51–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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Goswami, Usha (2000). Phonological representations, reading development and dyslexia: Towards a cross-linguistic theoretical framework, Dyslexia 6: 133–151. Goswami, Usha (2003). Why the theories about developmental dyslexia require developmental designs. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(12): 534–540. Goswami, Usha, and Peter E. Bryant (1990). Phonological Skills and Learning to Read. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Gottardo, Alexandra, Bernice Yan, Linda S. Siegel and Lesly Wade-Woolley (2001). Factors related to reading performance in children with Chinese as a first language: More evidence of cross-language transfer of phonological processing. Journal of Educational Psychology 93: 530–542. Hansen, Julie and Judith A. Bowey (1994). Phonological analysis skills, verbal working memory and reading ability in second grade children. Child Development 65: 938– 950. Harris, Margaret and Giyoo Hatano (eds.) (1999). Learning to Read and Write: A CrossLinguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatcher, Peter J., Charles Hulme, and Margaret J. Snowling (2004). Explicit phoneme training combined with phonic reading instruction helps young children at risk of failure. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45: 338–358. Hindson, Barbara, Brian Byrne, Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, Cara Newman, Donald W. Hine and Donald Shankweiler (2005). Assessment and early instruction of preschool children at risk for reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology 97(4): 687–704. Hulme, Charles, Peter J. Hatcher, Kate Nation, Angela Brown, John Adams and George Stuart (2002). Phoneme awareness is a better predictor of early reading skill than onsetrime awareness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 82(1): 2–28. Jiménez, Juan E. and María del Rosario Ortiz (2000). Metalinguistic awareness and reading acquisition in the Spanish language. The Spanish Journal of Psychology 3: 37–46. Loizou, Maria and Morag Stuart (2003). Phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual English and Greek five-year-olds. Journal of Research in Reading 26(1): 3–18. Lekgoko, Olemme and Heather Winskel (2008). Learning to read Setswana and English: Cross-language transference of letter knowledge, phonological awareness and reading skills. Perspectives in Education. 26(4): 57–73. MacLean, Morag, Peter E. Bryant and Lynette Bradley (1987). Rhymes, nursery rhymes and reading in early childhood. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 33: 255–282. McBride-Chang, Catherine (1995). Phonological processing, speech perception and disability: An integrative review. Educational Psychologist 30: 109–121. Mishra, Ranjita and Rhona Stainthorp (2007). The relationship between phonological awareness and word reading accuracy in Oriya and English: A study of Oriya-speaking fifth graders. Journal of Research in Reading 30(1): 23–37. Nag, Sonali (2007). Early reading in Kannada: the pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading 30(1): 7–22. Öney, Banu and Aydin Y. Durgunoğlu (1997). Learning to read in Turkish: A phonologically transparent orthography. Applied Psycholinguistics 18: 1–15. Padakannaya, Prakash, D. Rekha, Jyotsna Vaid and R. Malatesha Joshi (2002). Simultaneous acquisition of literacy skills in English and Kannada. A longitudinal study. 13th World Congress of Applied Psycholinguistics (International Association of Applied Linguistics – AILA), Singapore. Paran, Amos and Eddie Williams (2007 (Editorial: reading and literacy in developing countries. Journal of Research in Reading 30(1): 1–6.

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Heather Winskel

Perfetti, Charles A., Ying Liu, Julie Fiez, Jessica Nelson, Donald J. Bolger. and Li-Hai Tan (2007). Reading in two writing systems: Accommodation and assimilation of the brain’s reading network. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10(2): 131–146. Pretorius, Elizabeth J. and Deborah M. Mampuru (2007). Playing football without a ball: Language reading and academic performance in a high-poverty school. Journal of Research in Reading 30(1): 38–58. Rickard Liow, Susan J. and Kenneth K.L. Poon (1998). Phonological awareness in multilingual Chinese children. Applied Psycholinguistics 19: 339–362. Snowling, Margaret J., Nata Goulandris, Maria Bowlby and Peter Howell (1986). Segmentation and speech perception in relation to reading skill: a developmental analysis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 41(3): 489–507. Stanovich, Keith E., Anne E. Cunningham and Barbara B. Cramer (1984). Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children. Issues of task comparability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 38: 175–190. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Deirdre Martin (1997). Investigating literacy and pre-literacy skills in Panjabi/English schoolchildren. Educational Review, 49(2): 181–197. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Deirdre Martin (1999). Developing assessment procedures for phonological awareness for use with Punjabi-English bilingual children. The International Journal of Bilingualism 3(1): 55–80. Tunmer, William. and Andrew Nesdale (1985). Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading. Journal of Educational Psychology 77: 417–427. Vaid, Jyotsna and Ashum Gupta (2002). Exploring word recognition in a semi-alphabetic script: The case of Devanagari. Brain and Language 81: 679–690. Wagner, Richard K., Joseph K. Torgesen and Carol A. Rashotte (1994). Development of reading-related phonological processing abilities: New Evidence of Bidirectional Causality from a Latent Variable Longitudinal Study. Developmental Psychology 30(1): 73–87. Wang, Min and Esther Geva (2003). Spelling performance of Chinese children using English as a second language: Lexical and visual-orthographic processes. Applied Psycholinguistics 24: 1–25. Wimmer, Heinz and Usha Goswami (1994). The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: Word recognition in English and German children. Cognition 51: 91–103. Wimmer, Heinz and Peter Hummer (1990). How German-speaking first graders read and spell: Doubts on the importance of the logographic stage. Applied Psycholinguistics 11: 349–368. Winskel, Heather (2009). Reading in Thai: The case of misaligned vowels. Reading and Writing 22(1):1–24. Winskel, Heather and Vivilia Widjaja (2007). Phonological awareness, letter knowledge and literacy development in Indonesian beginner readers and spellers. Applied Psycholinguistics 28: 21–43. Ziegler, Johannes C. and Usha Goswami (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic gram size theory. Psychological Bulletin 131(1): 3–29.