The simultaneous development of receptive skills in an orthographically transparent second language

Abstract

Learning to read in an orthographically very shallow language may seem easy. However, for adults who are non-literate in their first language (L1), have no experience of formal education, and have to acquire literacy in a new language (L2), learning to read at all can be a formidable task. In this article, the results of a case study of the outcome of the first 10 months of Finnish literacy training for five immigrant women (24–45 years of age) are presented. Relationships are sought between the participants' achieved reading skills, their oral receptive vocabulary, their knowledge of letters, their phonological working memory and their visual memory. The results of the study show that even when grapheme-phoneme correspondences are quite regular, mere knowledge of the letters is not enough to trigger their ability to blend sounds. Vocabulary skills are necessary for functional reading but may be difficult to acquire if the phonological working memory is poor. Deficiencies in learners' mental representations of word patterns make it difficult for them to connect strings of letters to words. A good visual memory may help with vocabulary acquisition but this too first requires cracking the alphabetic code. The main conclusion of this first study of Finnish L2 literacy acquisition by non-literate adults is that multiple pedagogical approaches are required to accommodate the needs of these learners.