Written Language & Literacy - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2007

In 2001, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducted a comparative study of reading literacy (PIRLS 2001). A reading comprehension assessment instrument was developed and translated into the languages of 35 participating countries for this purpose. After field testing of the instrument, the final version of the Reading Literacy Test (RLT) was established. In two studies, the validity of the Dutch version of the RLT was examined. In the first study, comparison of the linguistic characteristics of the Dutch and English versions of the test showed the Dutch passages and items to contain both a greater number of words and longer words than the English passages and items. However, the use of more and longer words did not produce a higher level of complexity with respect to content, sentence structure, text structure, or test items as judged by a panel of bilingual experts. While the Dutch children had to read more and longer words than the English children, moreover, they had no problems finishing the test within the allocated amount of time. In the second study, the possible impact of the changes made after the field testing of the RLT was examined. The omission of passages and the modification or omission of test items were found to have no consequences for the psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the test were examined.

The present study compared the influence of bi-literate bilingualism versus mono-literate bilingualism on the development of literary skills in English as L3. Two main predictions were made. First, it was predicted that Russian (L1) literacy would benefit decoding and spelling acquisition in English (L3), that is, bi-literate bilingualism would be superior to mono-literate bilingualism. Second, it was hypothesized that there would be positive transfer of phonological processing skills from L1 Russian to L3 English even in the context of two linguistically and orthographically distinct languages. The sample of 107 11-year-old children from Haifa, Israel, were divided into three groups matched in age, gender, social-economic level, verbal and non-verbal IQ: bi-literate bilinguals, mono-literate bilinguals and mono-literate monolinguals. The research was conducted in two stages. In the first stage a wide range of linguistic, meta-linguistic, cognitive and literacy tasks in Hebrew (L2) and in Russian (L1) were administered. In the second stage linguistic, meta-linguistic and literacy skills in English (L3) were assessed. The results demonstrated that bi-literate bilinguals outperformed mono-literate bilingual and mono-lingual children on a number of basic literacy measures (phoneme deletion and analysis, pseudoword decoding and spelling) in English (L3). Even after controlling for (L2) Hebrew reading accuracy, bi-literacy independently explained 16% of the variance in English reading accuracy among Russian-Hebrew fifth grade bilinguals.

This study focuses on compliments in Russian language used in electronic communication. 187 examples of compliments sent from mobile phones by means of short message service (SMS) to the participants of a beauty contest that took place in a big west-Russian city were analysed. The language used in the short messages (SM) was similar to the spoken Russian language of young generation and contained incomplete sentences, slang words, etc. However, the compliments made by SMS were more expressive, more ingenious, and longer than the spoken Russian compliments. The cultural specifics of Russian SM and the specific features of SM as a discourse genre, which affect the compliment realization, are accented in the study.

The Japanese kana script represents morae by assigning either graphs or digraphs. Kana digraphs are characteristic in that they each comprise two mora-bearing graphs and yet correspond to single morae. This paper develops a structural analysis of kana digraphs, in which the monomoraic value of every digraph is consistently derived from the bimoraic value of a two-graph string. It is argued that the derivational process involves two events, namely cancellation of moraicity in the first mora and amalgamation of all relevant segments into the resultant single mora. This accounts for the observed fact that each constituent of a kana digraph regularly corresponds to one portion of a single mora. The validity of the analysis is supported by evidence drawn from two orthographic phenomena, namely positioning of diacritics and use of a common constituent in digraphs denoting partially isomorphic morae.