Analyzing Cognitive and Reading Skills in Spanish-speaking English-language Learners and English-speaking Canadian Learners

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the cognitive processes and reading skills of Spanish-speaking English-language learners. A sample of English-speaking Canadian learners and Spanish-speaking English-language learners was selected from different Canadian schools in the Vancouver district of British Columbia. We examined both the cognitive and word-reading skills of English-speaking learners in the primary grades. For this purpose, we administered measures of linguistic proficiency (i.e., vocabulary and syntactic awareness), working memory, phonological awareness and word-reading skills to English-speaking Canadian learners, and parallel measures in English and Spanish to Spanish-speaking English-language learners. We also explored the cognitive and word-reading skills of children who had been exposed to a first-language orthography such as Spanish spelling, which is more transparent and regular than that of English, their second language. We hypothesized that there would be a positive transfer of cognitive and linguistic processes from L1 to L2 in word-reading skills development, if no significant differences were observed among native English speakers and Spanish-language learners in the L2 measurements. There were no significant differences between the English-language learners and the native English speakers in measurements of phonological awareness and word-reading skills. However, a difference was found in one measurement, sight word-reading efficiency. Additionally, English-speaking Canadian learners performed better than Spanish-speaking English-language learners on measurements of vocabulary and syntactic awareness. Our findings seem to support the linguistic interdependence hypothesis. Reading skills in both languages are significantly related, and there are no significant differences between groups in phonological and word-reading skills when the measurements used are based on accuracy.