The Acquisition of Reading in Two Languages:
Strategies Used by a Japanese-English Bilingual Child
Shimizu Tomoko
Sagami Women’s University, Kanagawa, Japan
This case study attempts to identify the strategies adopted and the processes undergone as a Japanese-English bilingual child tries to decode words while learning to read in two languages. The participant is a five-year-old Japanese girl named Akari who lives in Australia and who simultaneously began to show great interest in reading both her L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English). The subject’s reading-aloud behaviors in Japanese and English were observed and analyzed over a seven month period (from age 4;11 to 5;6) using a framework adapted from Clay (1995) to investigate what kind of information (cues) she used when she encountered an unfamiliar word. The study also examined whether the participant exhibited any distinctly “bilingual” behavior such as codeswitching when reading. The findings suggest that, while specific literacy skills differ considerably depending on the script, the underlying strategies and the basic processes of identifying words appeared to be similar in the two languages. Typically, the participant attempted to decode words mainly by using visual information. When she realized that she had made an error, she tried to correct it herself by confirming the orthography and checking the meaning of the word. These strategies evolved over time. The subject’s reading performance was strongly influenced by her oral language proficiency and her speech patterns. Frequent cases of codeswitching into her L1 were observed during her L2 reading. The findings suggest that continued development of a bilingual child’s L1 may be an important support for the acquisition of L2 literacy skills when the L1 is the home language and L2 literacy is being acquired at school.
