Analizando procesos cognitivos y de lectura en niños hispanoparlantes que aprenden inglés como segunda lengua y niños canadienses de habla inglesa

Authors

Juan E. JiménezSalto de línea Universidad de La Laguna. Facultad de Psicología. Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación. La Laguna. Tenerife, España.Salto de línea Salto de línea Linda S. Siegel Salto de línea University of British Columbia. Vancouver, Canadá.Salto de línea Salto de línea Isabel O’ShanahanSalto de línea Universidad de La Laguna. Facultad de Educación. Departamento de Didáctica de la Lengua y la Literatura. La Laguna. Tenerife, España.Salto de línea Salto de línea Silvia MazabeSalto de línea University of British Columbia. Vancouver, Canadá

DOI

10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2011-358-080

Abstract

Analyzing Cognitive and Reading Skills in Spanishspeaking English-language Learners and English-speaking Canadian Learners

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the cognitive processes and reading skills of Spanish-speaking English-language learners. A sample of English-speaking Canadian learners and Spanish-speaking English-language learners was selected from different Canadian schools in the Vancouver district of British Columbia. We examined both the cognitive and word-reading skills of English-speaking learners in the primary grades. For this purpose, we administered measures of linguistic proficiency (i.e., vocabulary and syntactic awareness), working memory, phonological awareness and word-reading skills to English-speaking Canadian learners, and parallel measures in English and Spanish to Spanish-speaking English-language learners. We also explored the cognitive and word-reading skills of children who had been exposed to a firstlanguage orthography such as Spanish spelling, which is more transparent and regular than that of English, their second language. We hypothesized that there would be a positive transfer of cognitive and linguistic processes from L1 to L2 in word-reading skills development, if no significant differences were observed among native English speakers and Spanish-language learners in the L2 measurements. There were no significant differences between the Englishlanguage learners and the native English speakers in measurements of phonological awareness and word-reading skills. However, a difference was found in one measurement, sight wordreading efficiency. Additionally, English-speaking Canadian learners performed better than Spanish-speaking English-language learners on measurements of vocabulary and syntactic awareness. Our findings seem to support the linguistic interdependence hypothesis. Reading skills in both languages are significantly related, and there are no significant differences between groups in phonological and word-reading skills when the measurements used are based on accuracy.

Keywords

Word-reading skills, second-language acquisition, linguistic proficiency, phonological awareness, working memory, bilingualism, vocabulary, syntactic awareness