The influence of learning a second language in primary school on developing first language literacy skills

This article focusses on whether the learning of L2s can benefit literacy skills in L1 – improving phonological awareness and/or improving literacy. The authors describe previous evidence, highlighting that much previous works focusses on L1 benefitting L2 acquistion rather than the reverse. Quantitative analysis was undertaken to investigate with a sample size of 120 primary school children learning French or Italian. Results showed that there was a benefit to L1, particularly for those learning Italian with the more transparent phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The authors also discussed the nuances within their findings.
This study investigated whether learning a second language (L2) has a facilitative effect on first language (L1) literacy and whether there is an advantage to learning an L2 with transparent graphene-phoneme correspondences. One hundred and fifty Year 3 children were randomly assigned into one of three groups:  L2 Italian, L2 French, and control. Children were pretested on measures of English (L1) spelling, reading and phonological processing. The L2 groups then received 15 weeks of L3 instruction in Italian or French, respectively. The L2 groups outperformed the control group on post-test measures of English reading accuracy and different aspects of phonological processing. In addition there was an advantage for the L2 Italian group as their scores were higher than the L2 French group on English reading accuracy and phonological processing.

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