Cross-Language Transfer of L1 Phonological Awareness to L2 Reading in Chinese Children Learning to Read English as a Second Language

The present study explored the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between Chinese phonological awareness and English reading and the cross-language transfer of different levels of PA to the English word and pseudoword reading among Chinese primary school children aged 6 to 8, who were beginners in English. Results showed that children’s Chinese phoneme awareness directly contributed to English pseudoword reading and predicted English word reading entirely through pseudoword reading. While the influence of Chinese onset-rime awareness on English reading is mediated exclusively through Chinese phoneme awareness. In addition, on the one hand, the bidirectional relationship between phonetic decoding and reading was found in the longitudinal English learning process. On the other hand, concurrent Chinese phoneme awareness could indirectly predict subsequent English pseudoword reading through concurrent pseudoword reading. Findings underscore the significant role of the cross-language transfer of Chinese PA in English reading and provided evidence that the coarse-grained representational unit of PA acts on reading through the fine-grained unit. Our findings also shed light on the evidence that native language proficiency directly affects second language acquisition and performance.