Acceso usuarios
Pamela Filiatrault-Veilleux
, Mackenzie Graves, Maureen Hoskyn
As the cultural and linguistic diversity within Canadian society steadily increases, there arises a need to gain a deeper understanding of early reading development in children within this context. To address this issue, the current study used a longitudinal design to evaluate whether intensive experience using languages represented by either alphabetic or logographic scripts in addition to English benefited rates of English reading development of 136 plurilingual children from kindergarten to grade 2. Participants were assigned to three groups that represented their experience with English and languages and writing systems in their homes and communities. The first group had intensive experiences with English and another Alphabetic writing system, the second group had intensive experience with English and a language represented by a Logographic writing system; and the third group used mostly English in their communicative interactions. Consistent with a script dependent hypothesis, the findings showed that word reading development from kindergarten to grade 2 was accelerated for plurilingual children with experience using English and another alphabetic language compared to children who spoke primarily English, or English and a logographic language. This reported benefit for English word reading did not appear to generalise to English reading fluently or reading comprehension.
