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The importance of phonological and phonemic awareness in L2 reading is less well
established. Nonetheless, a number of studies in recent years have provided some suggestive
evidence. Durgunoglu, Nagy, and Hancin-Bhatt (1993) investigated the factors influencing the
word identification performance of Spanish-speaking beginning readers. They found that
phonological awareness in Spanish was significantly correlated not only with the number of
common English words read but was also highly correlated with performance on two transfer
tests, English-like pseudoword reading and English decoding. Interestingly, neither Spanish nor
English oral proficiency correlated with performance on the transfer tasks. The authors concluded
that there was evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of phonological awareness, and that this
helped in second-language word recognition. Cisero and Royer (1995) also found evidence of
cross-linguistic transfer of phonological awareness skills among kindergarten and first-grade
English- and Spanish-speaking students. Furthermore, their data indicated a developmental
progression from simpler to more complex skills—that is, from syllable awareness to onset-rime
awareness to phonemic awareness. Studies on other bilingual populations with different native
and second languages—for example, Turkish and Dutch (Verhoeven, 1994), English and French
(Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999)—also showed a significant relationship
between phonological awareness in one language and word recognition or word reading skills in
another. This even held true for students learning English whose first language had a
nonalphabetic orthography such as Cantonese (Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley, 2001).
The research on phonological awareness suggests that, for L2 students who are already
literate, reading instruction should build on their existing phonological knowledge, and does not
have to be delayed until they are highly proficient in L2. L2 reading instruction should seek to
take advantage of students’ knowledge of L1 literacy, when it exists, because phonological
knowledge appears to transfer across languages. The degree of transfer is likely to be variable,
depending on factors such as individual differences, as well as the amount of overlap in the
linguistic and orthographic systems of the bilingual child’s two languages.
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Vocabulary
Vocabulary knowledge is crucial to reading comprehension in L1 (NRP, 2000), and there
is evidence that it is equally crucial to reading in L2. Garcia (1991) found that unfamiliar English
vocabulary was the major linguistic factor that adversely affected the reading test performance of
fifth- and sixth-grade Spanish-speaking students. In the case of bilinguals, how conceptual and
word knowledge (vocabulary) is represented in memory is still not well understood. Young
bilingual children growing up in dual-language homes are able to separate their two languages by
age 3 (Arnberg & Arnberg, 1992). It is believed that words in each language are stored in
separate lexical systems but that concepts are stored in a representation common to both
languages (Kroll & Sholl, 1992). Some evidence suggests that vocabulary knowledge does not
transfer well for kindergarten students learning dissimilar languages, such as Turkish and Dutch
(Verhoeven, 1994). For older Spanish-speaking children (Grades 4–6), Nagy, Garcia,
Durgunoglu, and Hancin-Bhatt (1993) found that a knowledge of cognates can facilitate
comprehension in the second language. Their study investigated the relationship between Spanish
vocabulary knowledge, the ability to recognize cognates, and English reading comprehension.
They found a significant transfer between knowledge of Spanish vocabulary and performance on
the English comprehension task. More important, there was an interaction between Spanish
vocabulary knowledge and recognition of cognates. Performance on English multiple-choice
items was highest in those cases in which the student both knew the word in Spanish and
recognized the English cognate.
The few studies on vocabulary transfer suggest that we should include instruction in
bilingual strategies for resolving unknown vocabulary, such as the use of translation, cognate
searching, and word substitution (Nagy et al., 1993; Garcia et al., 1998). The study by Nagy et al.
(1993) showed that students underutilized their knowledge of cognates. Instruction in cognate
recognition shows much potential as a means for enhancing Spanish-speaking children’s reading
comprehension in English. Instruction could highlight not just the concept of cognates for
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Spanish-speaking children but also other properties of cognates—notably, the degree of
orthographic similarity, false cognates, and a knowledge of derivational morphology of both
English and Spanish (Nagy et al., 1993). For children whose L1 is a non-cognate of English, there
is not a substantial body of research. We suggest that, in addition to word substitution and
translation strategies, explicit vocabulary instruction should also be emphasized. L1 research has
shown that explicit vocabulary instruction leads to gains in reading comprehension (Nagy &
Scott, 2000; NRP, 2000).
Comprehension
Current views of reading conceptualize comprehension as a complex cognitive process
whereby a reader actively interacts with a text to construct meaning (e.g., Harris & Hodges,
1995). Meaning is therefore influenced by the text and the reader’s prior knowledge. Prior
knowledge constitutes the “unseen” in reading (Bernhardt, 1991) because it is highly complex
and notoriously difficult to assess. Prior knowledge can be highly idiosyncratic and based on an
individual’s personal experiences, but it can also be shared knowledge, such as the implicit
cultural and cultural-historic knowledge of particular groups (Bernhardt, 1991; Gee, 2000).
Content or subject matter knowledge is another aspect of a reader’s prior knowledge, and all of
these overlap and interact during the reading process.
In general, U.S. researchers have found that bilingual children tend to know less about
topics included in second-language texts (Garcia, 1991; Jimenez, Garcia, & Pearson, 1996). The
same was true for a study conducted in the Netherlands, which found that Turkish and Moroccan
third-grade students performed significantly worse than Dutch children on texts emphasizing
Dutch culture (Droop & Verhoeven, 1998). Reading instruction needs to take into account that L2
learners have rich sources of knowledge but different linguistic or lexical representations of this
knowledge. Instruction should seek to build on L2 children’s knowledge and experiences—for
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