Around the world, children embark on learning to read in their home language or writing system. But does their specific language, and how it is written, make a difference to how they learn? How is learning to read English similar to or different from learning in other languages? Is reading alphabetic writing a different challenge from reading syllabic or logographic writing? Learning to Read across Languages and Writing Systems examines these questions across seventeen languages representing the world's different major writing systems. Each chapter highlights the key features of a specific language, exploring research on learning to read, spell, and comprehend it, and on implications for education. The editors' introduction describes the global spread of reading and provides a theoretical framework, including operating principles for learning to read. The editors' final chapter draws conclusions about cross-linguistic universal trends, and the challenges posed by specific languages and writing systems.

This book systematically examines how learning to read occurs in diverse languages, and in so doing, explores how literacy is learned in a second language by learners who have achieved at least basic reading skills in their first language. As a consequence of rapid globalization, such learners are a large and growing segment of the school population worldwide, and an increasing number of schools are challenged by learners from a wide variety of languages, and with distinct prior literacy experiences. To succeed academically these learners must develop second-language literacy skills, yet little is known about the ways in which they learn to read in their first languages, and even less about how the specific nature and level of their first-language literacy affects second-language reading development. This volume provides detailed descriptions of five typologically diverse languages and their writing systems, and offers comparisons of learning-to-read experiences in these languages. Specifically, it addresses the requisite competencies in learning to read in each of the languages, how language and writing system properties affect the way children learn to read, and the extent and ways in which literacy learning experience in one language can play a role in subsequent reading development in another. Both common and distinct aspects of literacy learning experiences across languages are identified, thus establishing a basis for determining which skills are available for transfer in second-language reading development. Learning to Read Across Languages is intended for researchers and advanced students in the areas of second-language learning, psycholinguistics, literacy, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic issues in language processing.

The first truly systematic, multi-disciplinary, and cross-linguistic study of the language and writing system factors affecting the emergence of dyslexia.

Second Language Writing Systems looks at how people learn and use a second language writing system, arguing that they are affected by characteristics of the first and second writing systems, to a certain extent independently of the languages involved. This book for the first time presents the effects of writing systems on second language reading and writing and on second language awareness, and provides a new platform for discussing bilingualism, biliteracy and writing systems.

This book examines how children learn to read across seventeen languages and their orthographies. Each chapter discusses a different language in terms of its writing system, reading development, and implications for education. The editors' comprehensive introduction frames the key issues and the final chapter draws conclusions across the seventeen languages.

This book provides readers with a unique array of scholarly reflections on the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in relation to reading processes and data-driven interpretations of cross-language transfer. Distinctively broad in scope, topics addressed in this volume include word reading with respect to orthographic, phonological, morphological, and semantic processing as well as cross-linguistic influences on reading in English as a second language or a foreign language. Given that the three focal scripts have unique orthographic features not found in other languages – Chinese as logography, Japanese with multi-scripts, and Korean as non-Roman alphasyllabary – chapters expound script-universal and script-specific reading processes. As a means of scaling up the body of knowledge traditionally focused on Anglocentric reading research, the scientific accounts articulated in this volume importantly expand the field’s current theoretical frameworks of word processing to theory building with regard to these three languages.

This distinctive cross-linguistic examination of spelling examines the cognitive processes that underlie spelling and the process of learning how to spell. The chapters report and summarize recent research in English, German, Hebrew, and French. Framing the specific research on spelling are chapters that place spelling in braod theoretical perspectives provided by cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistic, and writing system-linguistic frameworks. Of special interest is the focus on two major interrelated issues: how spelling is acquired and the relationship between reading and spelling. An important dimension of the book is the interweaving of these basic questions about the nature of spelling with practical questions about how children learn to spell in classrooms. A motivating factor in this work was to demonstrate that spelling research has become a central challenging topic in the study of cognitive processes, rather than an isolated skill learned in school. It thus brings together schooling and learning issues with modern cognitive research in a unique way. testing, children writing strings of letters as a teacher pronounces words ever so clearly. In parts of the United States it can also bring an image of specialized wizardry and school room competition, the "spelling bee." And for countless adults who confess with self-deprecation to being "terrible spellers," it is a reminder of a mysterious but minor affliction that the fates have visited on them. Beneath these popular images, spelling is a human literacy ability that reflects language and nonlanguage cognitive processes. This collection of papers presents a sample of contemporary research across different languages that addresses this ability. To understand spelling as an interesting scientific problem, there are several important perspectives. First, spelling is the use of conventionalized writing systems that encode languages. A second asks how children learn to spell. Finally, from a literacy point of view, another asks the extent to which spelling and reading are related. In collecting some of the interesting research on spelling, the editors have adopted each of these perspectives. Many of the papers themselves reflect more than one perspective, and the reader will find important observations about orthographies, the relationship between spelling and reading, and issues of learning and teaching throughout the collection.