Cross-language transfer of syntactic skills and reading comprehension among Chinese-English bilingual children

Abstract

Purpose. The current study examined the contributions of different facets of syntactic skills to reading comprehension within and across languages with contrasting structural properties.

Method. Two hundred and two Grade 1 and 211 Grade 3 Chinese-English bilingual children in Hong Kong participated and were tested on word-order skill, morphosyntactic skill, and reading comprehension in both L1 Chinese and L2 English.

Results. Hierarchical regression results showed that over and above age, nonverbal intelligence, working memory, oral vocabulary and word reading, word-order skill was more predictive of reading performance in both L1 and L2 in Grade 1. In Grade 3, morphosyntactic correction emerged to be an equally and even a more important skill in reading L1 and L2, respectively. In both age groups, L1 syntactic skills cross-linguistically predicted L2 sentence- and passage-level reading comprehension after controlling for the effect of age, language and cognitive controls. SEM mediation analyses revealed that this cross-language syntactic transfer was fully mediated by L2 syntactic skills, but not by L1 reading comprehension. When we further investigated the transfer of individual syntactic skills, word-order correction appeared to be a more transferrable skill than morphosyntactic correction early in Grade 1, in support of the transfer facilitation model.

Conclusion. The findings suggested that young bilingual children readily draw on the correspondence between L1 and L2 syntactic skills to support their L2 learning, hence informing teachers and educators issues and strategies which they should take note of in designing an effective L2 learning programme.