- Copyright C 2005, The Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children. - The purpose of this article is to review published studies of the English literacy of children in Canada who are English language learners (ELLs) with the goal of understanding the read- ing development of ELLs and characteristics of reading disabilities (RD) in this population.. - On the basis of the evidence, ELLs are not at greater risk for RD than their native English-speaking peers. - Because literacy skill in English is an important variable in predicting academic success, the United States has made the development of the literacy acquisition of ELLs a research priority (August &. - Heritage language classes, in which the child receives instruction in the native or home language, are provided as part of a Canadian fed- eral multicultural initiative. - As of May million people, or 18.4 percent of the total population were born outside the country. - For comparison, 11.5 percent of the population (32.5 million people) were foreign-born in the United States. - In the United States, 9.2 percent of foreign-born individuals were under the age of 18 (Schmidley, 2003).. - The purpose of the present review is to evaluate the re- search on the development of literacy skills in Canadian chil- dren identified as ELLs. - As well, academic skills acquired successfully in the first language should be transferred to the second language.. - Thus, different reading and writing prob- lems will emerge across languages due to differences in the characteristics of language scripts. - The script-dependent hypothesis predicts that the deficits experi- enced in learning a second language are relative to the struc- ture of the language. - Figure 1 summarizes the perfor- mance of these three groups on the Reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT3. - These results support the linguistic-interdependence hypothesis because ELLs performed in a similar way, and in the Italian case, significantly better than L1 students. - COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ELL READING. - In the last 40 years, research on the development of read- ing skills has substantially advanced our understanding of the reading process, including reading failure. - Results have increased our ability to identify and respond to children at risk for reading failure in the early school years. - Current theories on the development of reading in English stress that phonological processing is the most significant un- derlying cognitive process used in the acquisition of reading skills (Stanovich, 1986). - In fact, there is a consensus in the reading literature that a core deficit in phonological pro- cesses underlies RD (Siegel, 1993).. - Figure 2 illustrates some of the Canadian research results for specific language groups by showing the performance on the Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT. - Comparison of the normally achieving L1 students and ELLs demonstrates that ELLs can perform similarly to their L1 peers at the elementary grades as long as they have ade- quate exposure to English. - These comparisons suggest that there may be differences in the ease with which students with different native languages learn word recoding. - In all, 30 language groups are represented in the district. - In this district, ELLs and native English-speaking children live in the same predominantly middle-class neighborhoods and attend the same schools.. - The lack of a significant correlation reduces the possibility that the performance of the ELLs was confounded by SES.. - This review focuses on aspects of the longitudinal study that have been completed to date. - Children were identified as normally achieving if their performance on the rhyme detection task was in the average range (one standard deviation or above the sample mean). - An- nual assessments of the children occurred at the end of each school year.. - That the ELLs had lower scores than L1 students might also be related to the fact that in pre-school years, there is a strong a concentration in the English language on activities with children that emphasize rhyming. - In regression analyses in the native English-speaking sam- ple (Chiappe, Siegel, &. - Similarly, kindergarten measures of phonological processing accounted for 14.8 percent of the variance in first-grade reading in the ELL group when entered into a regression model before letter identification. - Chiappe, Siegel, and Wade-Woolley (2002) found that phonological processing in the first grade also accounted for a significant amount of variance in first-grade reading in na-. - Taken together, the results of the longitudinal study indi- cate that in the early elementary years, ELLs who are not at risk for reading failure do not differ from their native English- speaking peers on phonological processing. - In fact, in the second grade, ELLs performed significantly better than the L1 students on a measure of phonological decoding, suggesting that ELLs might display an advantage in phonological decoding. - However, there is some suggestion in the literature on En- glish language learning that learning a second language ac- tually facilitates the acquisition of literacy skills presumably through transfer. - In fact, several studies have examined the reading skills of ELLs in both the native and second language to determine if phonological processing skills are correlated in the two languages. - The children in the Gottardo et al. - (2001) study varied in terms of their language experiences: some children were recent im- migrants to Canada, having lived in the country for less than 2 years, whereas other children had been born in Canada and had received all their primary academic schooling in English. - The results might reflect the language background of the families. - Here, too the background of the families might help us interpret the results. - The majority of the children came from a low socioeconomic level. - The different lev- els of performance in the segmentation task were not cor- related with success in reading. - The phoneme substitution task, considered the most predictive phonological awareness task for reading, was not influenced by the language experi- ence of the children. - First, there might be differences in instructional ap- proaches in the schools. - Another factor to consider might relate to the samples in the studies. - Therefore, it is difficult to determine if the differences in the results are due to a positive or negative transfer from a specific language to English, or a result of the different phonological processing skills of ELLs in general. - Syntactic awareness is “the ability to reason consciously about the syntactic aspects of language, and to exercise intentional control over the application of grammatical rules” (Gombert, 1992, p. - This ability ap- pears to be critical for fluent and efficient reading of text, and it requires making predictions about the words that come next in the sequence. - In the longitudinal study pre- viously discussed (Chiappe, Siegel, &. - The ELLs continued to have poor syntactic awareness skills in the first and second grades, although they performed similarly to their native English-speaking peers on word read- ing tasks (Chiappe, Siegel, &. - This finding suggests that three or more years of exposure to the English language was not enough to bring ELL performance on syntactic awareness to the level of the L1 students.. - In the syntactic judgment task, the child listened to a series of 35 sentences, 10 of which were syntactically well-formed (e.g., “The boy was chased by the dog”) and 25 that were syntactically ill-formed (e.g.,. - Thus, poor syntactic skills did not seem to be related to poor early literacy in ELL groups, at least in the first years of learning to read. - The findings indicate that syntactic awareness was weaker for Portugese ELLs but not for Arabic or Italian ELLs in the middle school years. - There may be rea- sons for the differences in the findings on the performance on the oral cloze task. - Most of the findings that demonstrated that ELLs experienced difficulty in acquiring English syn- tactic proficiency were studies of younger children (Chiappe. - Working memory has received increased attention in the L1 reading literature for its vital role in reading processes (see Swanson &. - Working memory refers to the limited capacity cognitive system involved in the simultaneous storage and processing of information (e.g., Baddeley &. - Beginning readers must retrieve the appro- priate grapheme–phoneme correspondences from long-term memory, hold those in memory in the appropriate sequence, and blend them to produce the appropriate pronunciation of the target word. - In the L1 literature, working memory tasks have been found to be among the most important predictors of reading performance (e.g., Siegel &. - In the longitu- dinal study discussed previously, working memory differ- ences were found between L1 and ELL children in kinder- garten and first grade (Chiappe, Siegel, &. - Working memory in kinder- garten and first grade was assessed using the Memory for Sentences subtest of the Stanford Binet (Thorndike, Hagen,. - In regression analyses in the L1 sample, kindergarten working memory accounted for a small but sig- nificant amount of variance in first-grade reading (between 1.7 and 5 percent), whereas kindergarten working mem- ory did not account for any variance in first-grade reading in the ELL sample. - Similarly, although first-grade working memory accounted for a significant albeit small amount of variance in first-grade reading in the L1 sample, working memory did not account for significant variance in the ELL sample.. - working memory and reading might have been affected by the vocabulary and syntactic demands of the verbal working memory task (Chiappe, Siegel, &. - The language demands of the task might be seen in the progress made by children in a study of children progressing from kindergarten to second graders (Lesaux &. - In contrast to their performance in kindergarten and first grade, by the end of the second grade, ELLs performed in a manner similar to that of their English-speaking peers on this verbal working memory task.. - Taken together, the findings from the longitudinal study suggest that in the early elementary years, verbal work- ing memory might play a somewhat different role in read- ing acquisition than as has typically been seen in the L1 literature. - These findings indicate that the weaknesses in working memory experienced by ELLs in the early grades tend to decrease over time. - In the longitudinal study previously described, kinder- garten measures of phonological processing discriminated between the at-risk and not at-risk ELLs, indicating that phonological processing deficits are characteristic of chil- dren at risk for reading difficulties (Lesaux &. - Figure 2 summarizes the performance of the three language groups on the Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT. - Many of the participants were born in Canada but did not speak English until they began to attend school. - As demonstrated in the Lesaux and Siegel study, the percentage of ELL kindergart- ners identified as at risk (37.2 percent) exceeded the percent- age of native English-speaking students identified as at risk (23.8 percent). - By the end of the second grade, there were similar percentages of students identified as RD in both ELL (3.72 percent) and L1 (4.2 percent) groups. - In the interim, the students had received phonological awareness training provided in the context of a variety of literacy activities, in- cluding a combination of activities with an explicit empha- sis on the sound–symbol relationship, in kindergarten, and a balanced early reading program that included small-group. - In the last 20 years, there has been a growing body of research that sug- gests IQ is not a valid measure to assess learning disabilities (e.g., Fletcher, Francis, Rourke, Shaywitz, &. - A low score on any of these measures, in the absence of co-occurring conditions such as mental retardation, severe neurological problems (e.g., autism), or severe social or emotional difficulties might indicate RD.. - Specifically, the inter- dependence hypothesis posits that the processes that are im- portant for the development of reading in the first language will also be important in learning to read a second language.. - With respect to the issue of the identification of a learning disability in ELL children, research in Canada indicates that in general performance on measures of phonological aware- ness, syntactic awareness, and working memory distinguishes students with RD and average readers, and that this is true for performances in both the native and second language for ELLs. - In the Canadian studies reviewed here, ELLs with RD generally performed similarly to native English-speaking stu- dents with RD. - Another limitation relates to the SES levels and native language proficiency measures represented in the studies in the review. - The studies in the current review tended to come from middle-class back- grounds, which are in contrast to many of the studies with ELLs reported in the United States. - In the United States, most ELLs come from disadvantaged SES backgrounds (August &. - for example, 70 percent of English language learning children were eligible for free or reduced price lunches compared with 38 percent overall in the same school (August &. - Finally, as is evident from our review, studies were not consistent in their reporting of the level of proficiency in first language for ELLs. - In addition, future research should consider such variables as the age of first exposure to English, literacy instructional methods, the proportion of ELLs in the classroom in which the child is being educated, and the specific characteristics of the first language of the student. - Whenever possible, it is important to consider language and reading skills in the first language.. - Future studies should examine specific language groups and their positive or negative transfer in the acquisition of English as a second language.. - in the United States, it is English Language Learner (ELL). - and in the United Kingdom, it is English as an Additional Language (EAL).. - The evils of the use of IQ tests to define learning disabilities in first-and second-language learners. - In Conference on the Exploration of the Perceptually Handicapped Child (pp. - The Foreign-Born Population in the United States:. - An evaluation of the discrepancy definition of dyslexia.. - Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. - Orly Lipka is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education at the University of British Columbia. - Siegel is a professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education at the University of British Columbia, and holds the Dorothy C. - She has conducted research in learning disabilities, language and cognitive development, the role of psychoeducational assessment in the identification of learning disabilities, premature and high-risk infants, bilingualism, and the early identification of learning difficulties.. - Rose Vukovic is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education. - Her research interests are in the early identification of children at risk for school failure, the cognitive development of at-risk learners, and learning disabilities.
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