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Cross-linguistic Transfer in Literacy
Development and Implications for
Language Learners
Aydin Yücesan Durguno˘glu
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, Minnesota
One of the challenges for educators working in multilingual settings
has been to identify the causes of reading difficulties of language learn-
ers (LLs). It is difficult to distinguish between reading problems stem-
ming from low levels of linguistic proficiency versus more general
reading/learning difficulties. There is now growing research evidence
of cross-language transfer in different literacy processes. Literacy
components that reflect language-independent, metacognitive/
metalinguistic processes show similarities across the two languages of
students. Some examples are phonological awareness, syntactic aware-
ness, knowledge of genres and meaning-making strategies. A possible
way to use cross-language transfer as a diagnostic tool is proposed. If
children have had enough exposure to and possibly instruction in their
first language (L1), we can assess their skills and insights in L1. For
LLs who have these skills and insights in their strong L1, we can ex-
pect transfer to their second language (L2). If they do not have these
skills and insights in their L2 yet, it indicates a delay due to limited
language proficiency, and not because of a disability. This way LLs
who just need more L2 practice and exposure can be distinguished
from those LLs who truly have special needs.
In communities around the world, there are many students who
have home languages that are different from the school language.
These students are learning the majority language while at the
Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 52, 2002
Copyright ©2002 by The International Dyslexia Association®
ISSN 0736-9387
189
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same time developing literacy in that language. In this paper, I
will be using the term “Language Learners (LLs)” rather than
“bilinguals” to refer to these students because of several reasons:
First, I want to highlight the fact that the school language is an ad-
ditional language that these students are learning. Second, al-
though these students are bilingual in the sense they are exposed
to two (or more) languages at home and school, they may or may
not be truly bilingual in terms of linguistic proficiency in either or
both of these languages.
One of the dilemmas for educators working in such multilin-
gual settings has been the following: If LLs have difficulties in
reading, how can we distinguish between reading problems stem-
ming from low levels of linguistic proficiency versus more general
reading/learning difficulties (Geva, 2000)? In the last decade, sev-
eral studies have shown that LLs were overrepresented in special
education populations, implying that their language difficulties
may have been misinterpreted as a more general learning prob-
lem (Cummins, 1984; Ogbu, 1978; Yates, Ortiz, & Anderson, 1998).
The pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction, with ed-
ucators being reluctant to identify LLs with special needs, and
waiting to diagnose them after a certain level of linguistic profi-
ciency is reached (Gutierrez-Clellen & Peña, 2001; Limbos & Geva,
2001). This underestimation, of course, can lead to the loss of valu-
able intervention time. Given this uncertainty in the field, addi-
tional studies are needed to develop procedures that can
distinguish LLs from LLs with disabilities when the students are
experiencing reading difficulties.
My goal in this paper is to summarize the literature on cross-
language transfer effects in literacy, and based on these data, sug-
gest a possible way to distinguish between LLs who are
struggling because of low linguistic proficiency from those LLs
who are struggling because of cognitive/learning problems.
Recently, there have been attempts to develop reliable tests as
well as local norms for LLs with special needs. For example,
Everatt, Smythe, Adams, and Ocampo (2000) have compared
seven- to eight-year-old English monolinguals to Sylheti-English
LLs and identified subgroups within each population with spe-
cific literacy difficulties (SpLD) as indicated by their poor spelling
and reading skills. These subgroups of children were further as-
sessed with tasks tapping phonological skills, naming speed, ma-
nipulation of familiar sequences (such as numbers, months of the
year), short-term memory, and visual and motor skills and com-
pared to a matched control group. As expected, phonological
measures differentiated between control groups and SpLD chil-
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CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN LITERACY DEVELOPMENT 191
dren in both monolingual and bilingual samples. However, the re-
sults were complicated by the fact that when the monolingual
samples were from a certain region of London, the control groups
performed quite poorly as well, reducing the differences between
control and SpLD groups, indicating the importance of sociocul-
tural variables such as home and school practices. In addition,
tests may only reflect a student’s current level of performance,
rather than the potential to respond to learning experiences
(Gutierrez-Clellen & Peña, 2001).
To overcome this latter problem, another approach is to use
dynamic assessment that involves first assessing the students’ ex-
isting levels of performance on a specific task and then providing
them with specific learning experiences to improve that perfor-
mance. How this experience later modifies their performance,
and how much it is transferred and generalized to new contexts
are evaluated (Campione & Brown, 1987). When it comes to liter-
acy development of LLs, an untapped potential and a major
source of transfer is literacy proficiencies in the strong language
of a student. In the last decade, research exploring crosslanguage
transfer has identified many processes that can occur in both lan-
guages of a LL, reflecting the language-independent, metalin-
guistic nature of these processes. In fact, parallel studies with
English-speaking children learning a foreign language at school
has shown that certain metalinguistic, analytic skills in English
are the best predictors of foreign language learning. For example,
Sparks, Ganschow, and Patton (1995) have identified three pre-
dictors of success in foreign language learning: (1) a phonology-
orthography component reflecting the understanding of English
spelling-sound correspondences; (2) a meaning component re-
flecting English vocabulary and reading comprehension knowl-
edge; and (3) foreign language metalinguistic aptitude
component reflecting the metalinguistic understanding of an in-
vented language’s symbols, as operationalized by two subtasks
of the Modern Language Aptitude Test.
In this review paper, I want to suggest using crosslanguage
transfer as a diagnostic tool in the spirit of the dynamic assess-
ment approaches. The logic is as follows: It can be assumed that
LLs already have some learning experiences in their strong lan-
guage through their interactions within their community,
whether it is at home or at school. If LLs can accomplish certain
literacy tasks well in their (strong) first language (L1), and if
these proficiencies have been known to transfer across lan-
guages, then we can assume that their difficulty in the second
language (L2) is probably due to low linguistic proficiency,
IDA/AOD DURGUN 2p 10/03/2002 1:37 PM Page 191
rather than general learning/cognition impairments. In addi-
tion, their proficiencies in their L1 can be used as a facilitator or
springboard to develop their proficiencies in their L2.
As Bialystok and Hakuta (1994) stated when discussing the
representation of two languages in the LL mind “It is possible
that the representation that bilingual speakers construct for
their two languages may include two components-a common
representation that is the record of general linguistic knowl-
edge, and separate representations that record language-specific
information” (p. 119). A parallel structure can be envisioned for
biliteracy development. There are certain literacy concepts and
strategies that can be universal and operate across languages.
These insights and skills need to be acquired only once and
apply in all languages of LLs. However, there are also language-
specific concepts and knowledge; for example, orthographic
patterns that are specific to a language.
Tasks that reflect language-independent, metacognitive/
metalinguistic processes of literacy are good candidates for
transfer across languages. Hence, if LLs have these skills and in-
sights in their strong L1, we can expect these readers to also
transfer them to their L2. If they do not have these skills and in-
sights in their L2 yet, it indicates a delay due to limited lan-
guage proficiency, and not because of a disability. Therefore, it
can be informative to assess—in the strong language of the
LLs—certain proficiencies that have been known to transfer
across languages. If the proficiency is present in the strong lan-
guage of the student, we can expect those proficiencies to ap-
pear in the weaker language as the student becomes more
proficient in that language. However, for this purpose, we need
to define possible areas of transfer more specifically. Next, I will
describe research that has focused on transfer within specific
processes of literacy.
DOMAINS OF CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
Before children can understand how the writing system of their
community represents their spoken language, they need to be
aware of the relevant units in the spoken language. This insight
includes children’s awareness of phonological units such as
words, syllables, onset-rimes, and phonemes. Evidence from a
variety of research suggests that phonological awareness is
highly correlated with word recognition and spelling (for a re-
view, see Adams, 1990; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). There are
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CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN LITERACY DEVELOPMENT 193
also noncorrelational data indicating that specific instruction in
developing phonological awareness is effective in word recog-
nition and spelling, especially when the training phase includes
alphabet knowledge as well (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne &
Fielding-Barnsley, 1995; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster,
Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan, 2001).
Through exposure to spoken language and as their oral vo-
cabulary develops, children begin to distinguish between words
that differ by a few phonemes, but refer to completely different
concepts such as hat and hot (Metsala & Walley, 1998). In lan-
guages with complex morphologies, this differentiation develops
even faster. For example, in Turkish, the difference in meaning be-
tween gelmedi (did not come) versus gelemedi (could not come) is
expressed by the addition of a single phoneme to the second
word, hence children learn to attend to these small segments of
speech (Durguno˘glu & Oney, 1999). Children need to distinguish
between similar words in their spoken language. If a word has
many neighbors—that is, a large set of similar words that differ
from it by a few phonemes (e.g., “hot” has neighbors such as “not,
hat, hop”)—then it pressures the children to restructure their
phonological representations and to attend to the finer distinc-
tions among the words (Goswami, 2000). Interestingly, although
words with many neighbors are manipulated better in phonologi-
cal awareness tasks (Durguno˘glu & Oney, 1999; Goswami, 2000),
such words face competition from their neighbors, and hence are
recognized with more difficulty under incomplete or degraded
presentation conditions (Garlock, Walley, & Metsala, 2001).
Depending on the characteristics of a language, children may
start by attending to different phonological units. For example,
whereas for English speakers, the onset-rime units are salient,
for Japanese speakers, moraic units—mora of the vowel attached
to the initial consonant phoneme—are salient (Goswami, 2000).
Czech-speaking children show higher levels of awareness of
complex onsets than English or Canadian children (Caravolas &
Bruck, 1993). In addition, as children go to school and begin to
see how the written symbols represent the phonemes, their
awareness of the individual phonemes develops rapidly.
Children with dyslexia seem to be less successful or slower in re-
structuring their phonological representations, especially if their
language does not have a transparent orthography that makes
the links between phonemes and graphemes explicit (Goswami,
2000; Metsala, 1997; Wimmer, Mayringer, & Landerl, 2000).
Across many different monolingual populations (e.g., Czech,
Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish), high levels of
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phonological awareness have been shown to accompany high
levels of word recognition and spelling (Caravolas & Bruck, 1993;
Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988; Durguno˘glu,
1998; Durguno˘glu & Oney, 1999; Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall,
1980; Wimmer et al., 2000). This link has also been shown in non-
alphabetic languages such as Chinese (Hu & Catts, 1998; for a re-
view see Geva & Wang, 2001). Moreover, lower phonological
processing skills have been shown to accompany dyslexia in
many different monolingual populations, although the effect is
smaller in orthographies that have more systematic grapheme-
phoneme correspondences (Wimmer et al., 2000).
For LLs, these results imply that lower levels of linguistic pro-
ficiency, especially in vocabulary knowledge, may slow the
development of phonological awareness in their L2. However, if
they have phonological awareness in their strong language, it is
likely to facilitate its development in the L2. Many studies have
shown that phonological awareness levels are correlated across
languages as well as correlated with word recognition across lan-
guages (e.g., Cisero & Royer, 1995; Comeau, Cormier, Grand-
maison, & Lacroix, 1999; Durguno˘glu, 1998; Durguno˘glu, Nagy, &
Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley, 2001).
Recently, Geva, Yaghoub-Zadeh, and Schuster (2000) investigated
the English literacy development of a group of children from
many different linguistic backgrounds who were learning English
in Canadian schools. Even when the students’ English language
proficiency was still developing, English phonological awareness
was related to basic reading and spelling skills in English. All of
these studies imply that children with normally developing liter-
acy skills show some phonological awareness in their strong lan-
guage that can transfer to their L2, and that their phonological
awareness in L2 can also be assessed even when their L2 oral vo-
cabulary is not very well developed.
SYNTACTIC AWARENESS
This metalinguistic insight refers to the child’s ability to notice
the internal grammatical structure of sentences. Even though
unable to articulate a relevant rule, a child may still be aware of
the systematicities in a language. Recent studies have shown
that statistical regularities in speech are noticed even by infants
as young as several months old (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport,
1996). In another study, when children (ages six to nine) and
adults were exposed to an artificial language, they learned its
rules even under incidental learning conditions when they were
not particularly paying attention to the language as it played in
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CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN LITERACY DEVELOPMENT 195
the background (Saffran, 2001). Hence, as humans, we seem to
be programmed to notice statistical regularities that make up
the language.
Syntactic awareness affects literacy development through its
influence on decoding and listening comprehension (Tunmer,
1990; Tunmer & Chapman, 2001). It can enable readers to moni-
tor ongoing comprehension and notice when a word does not
fit the ongoing representation of the text. For example, if a
reader misreads the verb stares as stars in the sentence The cat
stares at the mouse, syntactic awareness enables the child to real-
ize that it should have been an action word and not the name of
an object.
Syntactic awareness can also influence reading by enabling
the reader to use the sentence context, and enhancing or verify-
ing the incomplete visual and phonological information that an
inexperienced reader has extracted when reading an unfamiliar
word in a text. However, using the sentence context to recog-
nize a word is not an effective substitute to recognizing a word
by analyzing it fully. Currently, there is some controversy about
how much syntactic awareness contributes to the decoding pro-
cess, especially after phonological awareness is taken into con-
sideration (Bowey & Patel, 1988; Blackmore & Pratt, 1997).
However, the role of syntactic awareness in understanding the
spoken language is still important. Also, syntactic awareness as
measured by morphological knowledge predicts spelling per-
formance in monolingual children (Muter & Snowling, 1997).
To assess how syntactic awareness is related across the two
languages of LLs, Verhoeven (1994) tested Turkish-speaking
children in Dutch schools by giving them sentence repetition
tasks in both Turkish and Dutch. The sentences in both lan-
guages had rich grammatical variations and word orders. The
accuracy of morphemes and word order in the repeated sen-
tence was analyzed. In the beginning of Grade 1, there was a
correlation between the tasks in the two languages, but this in-
terdependence became weaker during the next two years of
testing. However, since this task required short-term memory
capacity, it may have reflected memory span differences more
than syntactic awareness.
We tested the syntactic awareness of fourth grade Spanish-
English students by asking them to identify and correct syntactic
errors in sentences based on the Johnson and Newport (1989)
task (Durguno˘glu, Mir, & Ariño-Martí, 2002). In this task, partici-
pants were given a sentence with a specific error and asked to
correct the sentence. Although the English and Spanish
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sentences were not translations of each other, they both required
students to correct similar types of errors such as tense, inflection,
and word order. To reduce the memory load as we read the sen-
tences, we also presented them on index cards. English and
Spanish syntactic measures were correlated (.44), implying that a
common metalinguistic awareness was used in both tasks.
Children who could analyze and correct the syntactic structure of
a sentence accurately in one language were more likely to show
this analytic accuracy in the other language as well.
FUNCTIONAL AWARENESS
This metalinguistic insight includes children’s developing no-
tions about the functions and conventions of written language.
Through interactions with written language, children develop
“concepts about print” (Clay, 1979). This awareness also includes
an understanding of when and why print is used. Of course, lit-
eracy practices at home and in immediate surroundings provide
a model for the child to emulate. Research has shown that func-
tional awareness plays a role in literacy development because it is
related to letter discrimination ability and phonological aware-
ness (Lomax & McGee, 1987).
Verhoeven & Aarts (1998) analyzed whether understanding
the functions of print was interrelated in the two languages of
Turkish-speaking children in Dutch schools. They assessed sixth
graders’ understanding of the features of both Turkish and
Dutch authentic objects with print (e.g., a letter, an electricity
bill, an application form) by asking children detailed questions
such as where one signs a form. The measures were signifi-
cantly correlated across the two languages of the students, indi-
cating that once students notice the functions and conventions
of print in one language, they tend to apply this knowledge in
another language as well.
DECODING
In word recognition and spelling performance, instances of neg-
ative transfer occur quite often (see for example, Geva & Wang,
2001), and that is one of the reasons why educators worry about
the students confusing their two languages. The writing sam-
ples we have collected from upper elementary Spanish-English
LLs yielded many instances of such errors (Durguno˘glu, et al.,
2002). In this study, a very common strategy in English
spellings was to use the spelling-sound correspondences sys-
tematically and spell the words as they were heard, hence trans-
ferring a strategy that is quite effective for the more transparent
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CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN LITERACY DEVELOPMENT 197
Spanish orthography. As one student said, it is easier to read
and write in Spanish because “When you read or write some
thing [sic], you just sound it out. When you do it [in] English,
you have to remember.” To give examples, the words read, need,
witch, wardrobe, favorite, that, and adventures were spelled as rid,
nid, wich, worldrol, favret, thet, and adengers. Because the students
tended to spell the words as they heard them, they omitted the
silent letters in both English and Spanish words, errors such as
ago for hago, asemos for hacemos, aser for hacer, stor for store, and
hom for home were quite common. The students also used com-
mon English consonant clusters when spelling Spanish words:
scuela for escuela, stoy for estoy, spero for espero, studios for estu-
dios, and different for diferent. They also interchanged sounds be-
tween English and Spanish, for example iand y. In both
Spanish and English spellings, the phoneme /i/, which is some-
times spelled as y, was interchanged with ior e. For example,
“happily” was spelled as hapali, “lady” as late. Also, Sanish words
“mi” (me) and “y” (and) were spelled as my and i, respectively.
However, at a global level, in the aforementioned study as
well as in others, there are positive correlations among word
recognition and spelling scores both within- and across-
languages (Durguno˘glu, 1998; Durguno˘glu, Peynircioglu, & Mir,
in press; see Leong & Joshi, 1997, for an overview of studies).
Even with two languages with different complexities of grapheme-
phoneme correspondences—such as the more transparent, vow-
eled form of Hebrew and opaque English—accuracy and speed
of reading words in isolation are similar (Geva, Wade-Woolley, &
Shany, 1997). Further supporting the transfer hypothesis are stud-
ies showing that word recognition and spelling follow very simi-
lar developmental paths for ESL (English as a second language)
and EFL (English as first language) students (Geva, 2000). For ex-
ample, cognitive and linguistic profiles of average and at-risk
readers were similar for both ESL students who had a variety of
Asian languages as their home language and EFL students (Geva
et al., 2000). For both groups, phonological awareness and rapid
naming were predictors of word recognition, even after nonver-
bal intelligence and receptive vocabulary were entered into the
equation. Likewise, for Portuguese-English LLs, phonological
processing was the source of weakness for poorer readers across
languages (DaFontoura & Siegel, 1995).
What are some underlying metalinguistic sources of common-
ality in decoding across languages? Word recognition and spelling
require sensitivity to the statistical patterns in language. For
example, Pacton, Perruchet, Fayol, and Cleeremans (2001) studied
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the acceptability judgments of monolingual French children to
different nonwords. Children understood that vowels could not
be doubled and showed an awareness of the frequency and loca-
tion of double consonants (see also Cassar & Treiman, 1997 for
similar results with English monolinguals). Children who show
an awareness of the recurring statistical patterns in their home
language may be more sensitive to accumulating that information
in their second language as well. However, if the home language
does not require such alphabetic systematicities, then crosslan-
guage transfer cannot be expected. Indeed, as Gottardo et al.
(2001) reported in a study comparing word recognition perfor-
mance of Cantonese-English speaking students, the word recogni-
tion measures were not correlated across the two languages.
USE OF FORMAL DEFINITIONS,
DECONTEXTUALIZED LANGUAGE
One of the difficulties for children is to understand the decon-
textualized language of the schools. In schools, reading and
writing usually focus on objects, people, and events that are not
present here and now. Children need to communicate with indi-
viduals (e.g., the book’s author) with whom they may not have
a personal link. In addition, print is decontextualized language
as it does not have the rich nonlinguistic information such as
gestures and immediate feedback that is part of oral communi-
cation. Therefore, reading comprehension requires more than an
understanding of the informal, contextualized, communicative
aspects of speech. Decontextualized school language has differ-
ent rules and requirements. One example of such specialized
language is how concepts are defined formally. Formal defini-
tions require a “culturally prescribed” structure (Snow, Cancini,
Gonzalez, & Shriberg, 1989, p. 234) such as “X is a Y that is . . .”
with a nonpersonal voice. For example, for the word “ocean,”
the definition “it is a large body of water that surrounds the
land” is more acceptable than the definition, “in the summers
when it gets hot, I go to the ocean.”
Gutierrez-Clellen and DeCurtis (1999) noted a marked differ-
ence in the quality of formal definitions produced by Spanish-
speaking children with or without language impairments.
Children without language impairment provided formal defini-
tions 50% of the time whereas this number was only 19% for chil-
dren with language impairment. Children without language
impairment used superordinate categories (e.g., animal) rather
than the generic term (e.g., “una cosa” = a thing). They also pro-
vided more specific details about the object. If the quality of for-
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CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN LITERACY DEVELOPMENT 199
mal definitions is considered a metalinguistic skill, then it can be
expected to correlate across the two languages of a LL.
We compared the formal definition quality of 26 Spanish-
English LL fourth graders, and related their performance to read-
ing comprehension (Durguno˘glu, et al., in press). Indeed, the
quality of formal definitions was correlated across the languages
of Spanish-English fourth graders. Multiple regression analyses
indicated that the quality of formal definitions in each language
was most strongly predicted by the quality of the formal defini-
tions in the other language, even when word recognition and gen-
eral vocabulary levels in the same language were also entered into
the equation. Also, the quality of formal definitions was corre-
lated with reading comprehension across languages.
KNOWLEDGE OF WRITING CONVENTIONS,
STORY GRAMMAR
Another possible metalinguistic strategy that can transfer across
languages is the knowledge of writing conventions. Skilled
writers know how information is organized in different genres,
e.g., in stories versus newspaper articles. In a study with fourth
grade Spanish-English speakers, we asked them to write two
stories describing the events in a photograph (Durguno˘glu, et
al., 2002). For the English story, we used the black and white
photograph depicting an older woman with some tomatoes in
her hand and a puzzled expression on her face (Chall, Jacobs, &
Baldwin, 1990). For the Spanish story, we used a color photo-
graph showing a young boy with a green face looking at a mir-
ror, and his family members staring at him with various
expressions of surprise and horror on their faces. We evaluated
the quality of the writing on a scale of 1 to 4 in terms of the rich-
ness of content based on the frameworks of Bruce (1983) and
Myers (1980). There was a significant correlation between the
content rating of the English and Spanish stories. Supporting
this result, qualitative analyses of the stories showed that chil-
dren who had a rich, coherent storyline with character develop-
ment, a conflict, suspense, and resolution were likely to show
these proficiencies in their writing in both languages. They in-
cluded details about characters such as their names and mo-
tives, and snippets of conversation in both samples.
GOOD MEANING-MAKING STRATEGIES
IN READING COMPREHENSION
Research with monolingual readers have indicated the impor-
tance of a reader interacting with the text actively and creating a
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200 CROSS-LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT
rich mental representation of the text (see Block & Pressley, 2002,
for a recent overview). Good readers use a multitude of strategies
(labeled as “good meaning-making strategies” by Langer,
Bartolome, Vasquez, & Lucas, 1990) such as monitoring their com-
prehension, identifying and repairing comprehension problems,
clarifying the meaning of words, focusing on constructing a sensi-
ble overall representation, forming hypotheses, using genre char-
acteristics, inferencing; questioning the author, and relating the
new information to existing background knowledge. Because
these strategies are metacognitive, we can expect them to transfer
across languages.
Several studies have analyzed the reading comprehension
processes of upper elementary students while they read texts in
both Spanish and English. In these studies, students produced
think-aloud protocols while reading. They also answered ques-
tions tapping their understanding of the reading process and
their use of comprehension strategies (Jiménez, 2000; Jiménez,
García, & Pearson, 1995, 1996; Langer et al., 1990). Several
themes emerged across these studies. First, replicating the pat-
tern with monolingual readers, there were significant differ-
ences between good and poor readers when their meaning
construction during reading was analyzed. Poor readers were
more interested in plowing through the text and finishing the
reading of the words. In contrast, good readers showed fre-
quent self-reflection and monitoring of their comprehension.
Even when they noticed an inconsistency or a missing concept
in their representation of the text, poor readers did not try to re-
pair and resolve the problem. In contrast, good readers per-
sisted and used multiple strategies to resolve the conflict. Good
readers also made many more inferences about the text, and
produced and tested hypotheses on what an unknown word
may mean. More interestingly, good readers used these rich
strategies to facilitate their comprehension of both Spanish and
English texts. As Langer et al. (1990) summarized: “The use of
good meaning-making strategies rather than the degree of flu-
ency in English differentiated the better from poorer readers . . .
the students who had developed good meaning-making strate-
gies in one language used those strategies in their second lan-
guage . . .” (p. 463). In fact, the students themselves articulated
how they used both languages to help them with their reading,
especially when they encountered an unfamiliar word. They re-
ported that they tried to translate sentences or think of similar
sounding words (cognates) in the other language (Jiménez et
al., 1995). Students also reported that they used strategies such
IDA/AOD DURGUN 2p 10/03/2002 1:37 PM Page 200
CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN LITERACY DEVELOPMENT 201
as questioning, rereading, evaluating, and monitoring compre-
hension in both of their languages (Jiménez et al, 1996).
SUMMARY
One of the challenges for educators of LL students is to distin-
guish between literacy problems stemming from low linguistic
proficiency versus general cognitive/learning problems. In this
article, I have described instances of crosslanguage transfer ob-
served in certain components of literacy and suggested using
transfer as a diagnostic tool. If LLs have certain strengths in their
L1, and those strengths are known to transfer across languages,
then we can expect that the LLs will develop those proficiencies
in their L2 as their L2 proficiency develops. For example, young
children who have some level of phonological awareness in their
L1 are more likely to show that awareness in their developing L2
as well. In this instance, as their vocabulary and familiarity with
the sounds of their new language increases, we can expect them
to show phonological awareness in their L2 as well, even though
they may be experiencing some delays at the moment. For these
children, tailoring the L2 instruction to build on their existing L1
strengths also may be helpful.
In contrast, children with low levels of certain metacognitive/
metalinguistic awareness in their home language need to be ob-
served further. One possibility is that they may not have a
strong enough grasp of their L1, possibly because of low home
or school support. In that case, instructing in L2, and periodi-
cally assessing their language and literacy development is needed.
However, if children have had reasonable exposure and instruc-
tion in their L1 and still had not developed certain metacognitive/
metalinguistic skills, then we can suspect cognitive/develop-
mental deficits that are likely to affect both L1 and L2 literacy
development.
Address correspondence to: Department of Psychology,
University of Minnesota Duluth, 1207 Ordean Court, Duluth,
MN 55812. Phone: (218) 726–6885. e-mail: adurguno@d.umn.edu
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