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Abstract

As of 2022, about 50% of all FI students in B.C. and Ontario came from immigrant families and many of them are multilingual. Despite this trend, there is a gap in our understanding of how reading develops in these multilingual students. Languages with similar writing systems such as French and English can facilitate cross-language transfer of reading skills, while little or no transfer has been observed in languages with different writing systems, such as French and Chinese. This project investigated the effects of different writing systems on word reading in multilingual FI students from Chinese backgrounds. The two main research questions were: (1) How do language and literacy abilities compare across the three languages (French, English, Chinese) and across the two grades? (2) What are the language and literacy measure associations among the three languages? Data was collected from 24 Chinese-speaking students enrolled in FI in kindergarten and Grade 1. Students’ performance on standardized and experimental language and literacy measures in French, English, and Chinese was compared. Significant improvements from kindergarten to Grade 1 were observed in most Chinese skills; no significant changes were found in French and English. Students’ abilities across languages were similar. Partial support was found for possible cross-language transfer among all three languages between phonological awareness and decoding skills. Overall, the reading abilities in these young children did not differ across orthographies, supporting past research that strong readers in one language are generally strong readers in all languages.