Acquisition of Literacy in Bilingual Children: A Framework for Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the research that contributes to understanding how bilingual children become literate is not able to isolate the contribution of bilingualism to the discussion of literacy acquisition for these children. This article begins by identifying three areas of research that are relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explaining the contribution of each, and associating each type of research with a skill required by monolingual children in becoming literate. Three prerequisite skills for the acquisition of literacy are competence with the oral language, understanding of symbolic concepts of print, and establishment of metalinguistic awareness. A review of the literature explores the extent to which these skills that influence literacy acquisition in monolinguals develop differently for bilingual children. The conclusion is that the relation between bilingualism and the development of each of the three skills is different, sometimes indicating an advantage (concepts of print), sometimes a disadvantage (oral language competence), and sometimes little difference (metalinguistic concepts) for bilingual children. Therefore, bilingualism is clearly a factor in children's development of literacy, but the effect of that factor is neither simple nor unitary. Since the publication of this article, our research has continued to explore the themes set out in this framework and provided more detail for the description of how bilingualism affects the acquisition of literacy. Two important advances in this research are the finding that some aspects of reading ability, notably phonological awareness, are rooted in general cognitive mechanisms and transfer easily across languages, whereas others, such as decoding, are more language dependent and language‐specific and need to be relearned with each new writing system ( Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005 ). Second, writing systems and the differences between them have a greater impact on children's acquisition of literacy than previously believed. Not surprisingly, this relation has been found for emerging ability with phonological awareness ( Bialystok, McBride‐Chang, & Luk, 2005 ) but, more surprisingly, has recently been shown to have a subtle influence on children's emerging concepts of print ( Bialystok & Luk, in press ). The interpretation that bilingualism must be considered in terms of both advantages and disadvantages has also been pursued in studies of cognitive and linguistic processing in adults. Recent research has shown that adult bilinguals display disadvantages on tasks measuring lexical retrieval and fluency ( Michael & Gollan, 2005 ) but advantages on tasks assessing cognitive control of attention ( Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004 ). This approach leads to a more detailed and, ultimately, more accurate description of how bilingualism affects cognitive performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".