Metalinguistic Transfer: Cross-Language Facilitation of Early Literacy Skills Among Chinese-English Bilingual Children in Diverse Contexts

• In Event: 81.032 - MTCC Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: 81.032-5 - Chinese Language Education: Insights and Challenges

Abstract

This paper reviews 79 studies on Chinese-English bilingual children’ metalinguistic transfer across the English-dominant and Chinese-dominant contexts. While our review confirms a cross-language facilitation of early literacy skills mediated by metalinguistic awareness between the two typologically distant languages, the findings also revealed significant variance of transfer patterns in phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness across the two contexts. The findings suggest that it is linguistics-external contextual factors such as individual language proficiency, exposure to the dominant social and instructional language and receipt of formal metalinguistic knowledge teaching that interfere with how such transfer is patterned. We conclude with tentative pedagogical implications for early literacy educators to incorporate children’s metalinguistic capital in developing their biliteracy under various language and instructional contexts.

Authors

• Guofang Li, University of British Columbia

• Zhuo Sun, The University of British Columbia

• Haoyun Li