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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 1, pp 187–207 | Cite as

Reading in multilingual learners of Urdu (L1), English (L2) and Arabic (L3)

  • Amna Mirza
  • Alexandra Gottardo
  • Xi Chen
Article
First Online:

Abstract

The present study examined the language and literacy skills and their relations to each other in multilingual children, who have a broad range of oral and written language proficiency in each language that they “know”. Reading and vocabulary skills were tested in 50 Canadian children (ages 6–10 years) who were Urdu–English speakers, learning Arabic. Reading skills were related to within-language oral proficiency and across languages with similar and different orthographies. The results suggest the need for hybrid models of language acquisition that combine language-general and language-specific components. The results also are discussed in terms of the need to consider the language and literacy skills of multilingual individuals in current theories of language and literacy acquisition.

Keywords

Second language acquisition Multilingualism Script similarities Word reading 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Psychology DepartmentWilfrid Laurier UniversityWaterlooCanada
  2. 2.OISE/University of TorontoTorontoCanada

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