scholarly journals IMPACT OF READING ALOUD ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF MULTILINGUAL CHILDREN

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-28
Author(s):  
Amina A. Siddiqui ◽  
Hina Fatima Nazir

Objective Language acquisition accounts for comprehension, interpretation, and expression of all languages in the child’s repertoire. An experimental study consisting of multilingual children between 3:6 and 4:2 demonstrated the impact of reading aloud on language acquisition of L3 in the first six years of life. Children in the study spoke Pushto as first language (L1), Urdu as second language (L2). English was introduced to them as third language (L3), on joining a local school. The proficiency and correlation between the acquisition of L3 via reading out loud and its impact over a period of time on linguistic skills to be assessed, and to obtain data for the effectiveness of the activity to enhance language acquisition of an individual exposed to multiple languages. Method Two experimental groups consisting of three children each were instructed by two speech-language therapists and one group was excluded of targeted stimulus. A monthly assessment was completed for the six month duration of the study to determine change in receptive and expressive language skills in L3. Conclusion All children showed an average increase of 16 vocabulary words in L3. Moreover, study revealed an increase in structure and complexity of utterances. The study revealed a strong correlation between linguistic exposure through reading aloud to children and their overall language development. The study reflects that multilingualism enhances overall language and speech development and simultaneously aids in literacy skills.

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Gillian Wigglesworth ◽  
Melanie Wilkinson ◽  
Yalmay Yunupingu ◽  
Robyn Beecham ◽  
Jake Stockley

Phonological awareness is a skill which is crucial in learning to read. In this paper, we report on the challenges encountered while developing a digital application (app) for teaching phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Dhuwaya. Dhuwaya is a Yolŋu language variety spoken in Yirrkala and surrounding areas in East Arnhem Land. Dhuwaya is the first language of the children who attend a bilingual school in which Dhuwaya and English are the languages of instruction. Dhuwaya and English have different phonemic inventories and different alphabets. The Dhuwaya alphabet is based on Roman alphabet symbols and has 31 graphemes (compared to 26 in English). The app was designed to teach children how to segment and blend syllables and phonemes and to identify common words as well as suffixes used in the language. However, the development was not straightforward, and the impact of the linguistic, cultural and educational challenges could not have been predicted. Amongst these was the inherent variation in the language, including glottal stops, the pronunciation of stops, the focus on syllables as a decoding strategy for literacy development and challenges of finding one-syllable words such as those initially used with English-speaking children. Another challenge was identifying culturally appropriate images which the children could relate to and which were not copyrighted. In this paper, we discuss these plus a range of other issues that emerged, identifying how these problems were addressed and resolved by the interdisciplinary and intercultural team.


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER HOPP ◽  
MONIKA S. SCHMID

The open access copyright line contained within this page was not included in the original FirstView article or the print article contained within this issue. We sincerely regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.


Author(s):  
Maryam Jamali ◽  
Ali Akbar Jabbari ◽  
Mohammad Hasan Razmi

Abstract This investigation explored the impact of prior acquired languages in the acquisition of third language (L3) at initial stages. The required data were gathered via two groups of L3 learners: 27 learners of L3 French and 26 learners of L3 German during a grammaticality judgement task (GJT) and an element rearrangement task (ERT) to test the placement of noun adjuncts and attributive adjectives. Both groups had acquired Persian as the first language and English as the second language. The participants were assigned to two L2 proficiency level groups (intermediate and advanced). The findings revealed that L3 German participants outperformed L3 French learners in the attributive adjective placement in both tasks as well as the noun adjunct in the GJT task. The L3 groups showed similar levels of performance in the ERT noun adjunct task. Additionally, the effect of L2 level of proficiency was not significant. The results also indicated that the typological similarity of L2 English to German rather than French rendered a facilitative effect on task performance in the L3 German group and a non-facilitative effect in the L3 French group. This study provides evidence for the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) of L3 acquisition suggesting that L3 learners are influenced by the typological similarities of the previous languages they have already acquired.


2020 ◽  
pp. 026765832094103
Author(s):  
John Archibald

There are several theories which tackle predicting the source of third language (L3) crosslinguistic influence. The two orthogonal questions that arise are which language is most likely to influence the L3 and whether the influence will be wholesale or piecemeal (property-by-property). To my mind, Westergaard’s Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) is preferable to other theoretical models (say Rothman’s Typological Primacy Model) insofar as it is consistent with many aspects of L2/L3 phonological learnability that I am familiar with. Westergaard proposes a structure-based piecemeal approach to the explanation of third language acquisition (L3A). The model is driven by parsing and dictates that the first language (L1) or second language (L2) structure which is hypothesized to be most similar to the L3 structure will be the one to transfer.


2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 241-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edy Veneziano

This editorial introduction summarizes the background to, and contents of, a special issue devoted to children’s development of conversational skills and their relation to language acquisition and use. The centrality of conversation to language development is well recognized and this introduction identifies two key approaches to research: the impact of conversational processes on language acquisition itself, and the ways in which basic language skills are put to use in conversational interactions. The articles included in this issue were organized according to these themes and are outlined accordingly.


2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Spring ◽  
Kaoru Horie

AbstractThis study looks at the effect of one's first language type, as proposed by Talmy (2000) and Slobin (2004), on their second language acquisition. Talmy (2000) gives an account of languages as being either verb-framed or satellite-framed based on how path and manner of motion are encoded in motion events. Meanwhile, Slobin (2004) argues for a third language type, which he calls equipollently-framed. This study compares and contrasts the learning curves of equipollently-framed language (Mandarin Chinese) native speakers and verb-framed language (Japanese) native speakers as they learn a satellite-framed language (English). It examines not only the learner's pattern preferences, but also their manner of motion encoding preferences and deictic verb usage to show that there is a clear difference in how the two groups of learners acquire a second language of a different type from their own native language.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Olaug Strand ◽  
Knut Schwippert

The aim of the current study was to examine the associations between a child’s home language, home resources for learning to read and reading achievement. Whereas the role of a child’s first language in second language learning and literacy skills has shown contradictory results, there is an established body of empirical evidence documenting the relationship between home resources and academic achievement. The study was conducted to extend existing knowledge on the relative contribution of home language and home resources on reading achievement. Using data from the Norwegian participation in Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016, fifth grade, mean age 10.8 years (n = 4232), regression analysis reveals, overall, that home resources is more strongly related to reading achievement than a child’s home language. In the search for extended knowledge about the complex mechanisms behind achievement differences, we argue that several factors in addition to home language need to be considered, so that any initiative that is identified as effective to compensate for diversity will be beneficial for all students who need additional support in their reading development.


Author(s):  
Dorit Ravid

First-language acquisition of morphology refers to the process whereby native speakers gain full and automatic command of the inflectional and derivational machinery of their mother tongue. Despite language diversity, evidence shows that morphological acquisition follows a shared path in development in evolving from semantically and structurally simplex and non-productive to more complex and productive. The emergence and consolidation of the central morphological systems in a language typically take place between the ages of two and six years, while mature command of all systems and subsystems can take up to 10 more years, and is mediated by the consolidation of literacy skills. Morphological learning in both inflection and derivation is always interwoven with lexical growth, and derivational acquisition is highly dependent on the development of a large and coherent lexicon. Three critical factors platform the acquisition of morphology. One factor is the input patterns in the ambient language, including various types of frequency. Input provides the context for children to pay attention to morphological markers as meaningful cues to caregivers’ intentions in interactive sociopragmatic settings of joint attention. A second factor is language typology, given that languages differ in the amount of word-internal information they package in words. The “typological impact” in morphology directs children to the ways pertinent conceptual and structural information is encoded in morphological structures. It is thus responsible for great differences among languages in the timing and pace of learning morphological categories such as passive verbs. Finally, development itself is a central mechanism that drives morphological acquisition from emergence to productivity in three senses: as the filtering device that enables the break into the morphological system, in providing the span of time necessary for the consolidation of morphological systems in children, and in hosting the cognitive changes that usher in mature morphological systems in both speech and writing in adolescents and adults.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorota Gaskins

Abstract This diary study looks at the acquisition of early words in two bilingual sisters (0;9–2;03.22 and 0;9–1;09.13) exposed to English and Polish from birth. It examines whether their parents’ input recorded on video can explain the proportions of different types of words learnt. Their bias for social words is explained by these words being heard in isolation; that for nouns by competitive proportions of noun types heard in the input. Contrarily, the late acquisition of closed-class items is explained by their high usage rates as part of constructions. Meanwhile, high numbers of early verbs in both children’s Polish are explained by inflected Polish verbs being heard (a) in isolation and (b) at the beginning and end of utterances more frequently than their uninflected English counterparts. These results are discussed within the context of the usage-based theory, with focus on the impact of word types for the acquisition of word groups.


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