Positive Transfer of Literacy Skills from Japanese to English by a Bilingual Child
Meredith Stephens, Hiroshima Shudo University, Hiroshima, Japan and Richard Blight,Ehime University, Matsuyama, Japan
This study investigates the development of English literacy by a child who is bilingual in English and Japanese. The participant was acquiring Japanese literacy through full-time attendance at a Japanese primary school and attempting to also acquire English literacy through routine short-term visits to an Australian primary school, principally during the Japanese school vacation periods. While her Japanese literacy was developing satisfactorily, her Australian parents were concerned that the development of her English literacy would be substantially inhibited due to insufficient exposure to English education. However, on an Australian Year 3 literacy test she achieved a good result in reading, a fair result in writing, and a poor result in spelling. Equal exposure to formal education appears not to have been necessary to achieve a good level of English reading and writing, but was important to achieving a good result in spelling. It is argued that linguistic interdependence (Cummins, 1984a) between English and Japanese accounts for the positive results in reading and writing, but that spelling involves language-specific knowledge that did not benefit from the common underlying proficiency. Positive transfer of the participant’s language proficiency appears to relate particularly to specific discourse competencies underlying the literacy skills. However, length of exposure to education appears to remain an important factor in the development of language-specific features such as spelling competence.
