Children who are fluent speakers of two languages show a greater explicit knowledge of the structural components of their language (metalinguistic awareness). This study of 56 monolingual children in Melbourne receiving various forms of second language input within the school system has shown that the metalinguistic benefits from exposure to a second language that exist for bilinguals extends to children who have only very limited contact with second language. The results of this study also suggest that exposure to a second language results in a forward shift in the normal course of the development of word awareness, rather than some special increase in, or addition to, children’s skills.
The benefits of metalinguistic awareness that accrue from bilingualism are not dependent on the acquisition of some critical degree of competence in the second language language. The benefit to word recognition skills found for the children in the second language programme provides strong evidence for a causal role for at least one component of metalinguistic awareness in the development of reading skills. Short exposure to a second language in the education system does not produce children with a great command of a second language, it does provide them indirectly with other cognitive and educational benefits, for example the development of written word recognition which is part of reading acquisition.
This study examined whether the often-reported metalinguistic benefits of childhood bilingual- ism extend to children whose experience with a second language is considerably more limited, and if so, whether this metalinguistic advantage flows on to reading acquisition. Its purpose was to provide direct evidence of a causal role for metalinguistic awareness in reading acquisi- tion. The study focused on the developing word awareness skills of two groups of preparatory and grade 1 children: one group was strictly monolingual in English; the other, the “marginal bilingual” group, consisted of English monolingual who were participating in a second lan- guage program that provided I hour of Italian instruction each week. After only 6 months of instruction in Italian, the marginal bilingual children showed a significantly higher level word awareness than their monolingual counterparts. This advantage weakened across grade 1, as both groups approached ceiling levels of performance. Nonetheless, the initial advantage flows through to the first major step in reading acquisition, with the grade 1 marginal bilinguals showing significantly greater word recognition skill than the monolinguals, thus strengthening the argument for a causal role in reading acquisition for word awareness
Yelland, G. W., Pollard, J., & Mercuri, A. (1993). The metalinguistic benefits of limited contacts with a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 14, 423-444