The research reported in this article investigated how students learning Japanese or Russian as a third language (L3) perceived and produced word-initial stops in their respective target language and the link between perception and production. The participants in the study were 39 Chinese university students who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their…

Our aim here is to investigate reading in a foreign language from a multilingual perspective. Much research has focused on first- and second-language reading, especially the important role played by strategy deployment in helping readers to make meaning from texts in different languages. Less emphasis has been placed, however, on how bilinguals…

We review cognitive-linguistic approaches to conveying meaning, sound, and orthographic information across scripts in order to highlight the impact of variability in written and spoken language on learning to read and to write words. With examples of word recognition and word writing from different scripts, including Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how learning to read can be thought of as learning statistical regularities and to demonstrate why this is relevant for theory, modeling, and practice. This tutorial also shows how triangulation of methods and cross-linguistic research can be used to gain insight. Method: The impossibility of…

For learning English as a foreign language, the efficiency of the approach of incidental vocabulary acquisition depends on the word frequency and text coverage. However, the statistics of English corpus reveals that English is a language that has a large vocabulary size but a low word frequency as well as text coverage, which is obviously not in…

Published research shows that English speakers gain literacy skills up to the 7-year level more effectively when taught using a language experience approach rather than a word reading approach (reading common words plus phonic reading). It is suggested that this is because of the almost unique nature of English phonology, that is the strengthening…