Acquisition of Reading in a Second Language

THE PURPOSE of this longitudinal study was to investigate differences in reading acquisition processes between children learning to read in their native language and children learning to read in a second language. The author studied Dutch children and Turkish children as they learned to read in Dutch during the first two grades of primary school in the Netherlands. The children were given a number of tasks to test the efficiency of both word recognition (for words of varying familiarity and complexity) and comprehension processes (including text coherence, anaphoric reference, and inferences). The Turkish children were found to be less efficient in various reading processes in Dutch than their monolingual Dutch peers. However, there was evidence from both word recognition and reading comprehension tasks that Turkish and Dutch children rely on highly comparable strategies. The results from both series of tasks as well as data on the Turkish children's oral proficiency in Dutch and their sociocultural orientation were combined into a structural model to examine the interactions between the various reading processes in Dutch. During the first two grades, both word recognition and reading comprehension appear to be most strongly influenced by children's oral proficiency in the second language. This finding suggests that children learning to read in a second language should be helped to build up their oral skills, and that reading instruction should be matched to those skills.