The influence of language, metaphonology, RAN, and short-term memory on literacy is widely acknowledged. The existence of a bilingual advantage in these skills is highly debated. Nevertheless, longitudinal studies about the effects of these skills on reading and writing are sparse, notably in shallow-orthography languages and bilingual populations.
The book addresses this gap by longitudinally describing the typical and atypical development of preliteracy and literacy in Italian monolinguals and bilinguals. Childrens preliteracy skills and their effects on literacy are monitored from the last year of kindergarten to the 3rd grade. Metaphonological, RAN, and graphic interventions are administered.
A four-stage developmental pattern emerges for literacy. Interventions on preliteracy should be multicomponent, timely planned, and reinforced during early literacy. There is no evidence of the putative bilingual advantage, whose possible presence might depend on specific language conditions.
The book provides linguists, psychologists, speech therapists, and test developers with valuable information about the role of different component skills of literacy and suggests effective interventions on preliteracy in a shallow-orthography language.
The series Trends in Applied Linguistics meets the challenges of the rapidly growing field of applied linguistics. In a very broad sense, applied linguistics is understood by focusing on the application of theoretical linguistics to current problems arising in different contexts of human society. Given the interdisciplinary character of applied linguistics, the series includes cognitive, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and educational perspectives.
The following topics are included in the series:
- Second language acquisition and the acquisition of additional languages
- Bilingual and multilingual education
- Language planning and language policy
- Literacy skills
- Second/foreign language pedagogy
- Translation and interpretation
- Language for specific purposes
- Discourse analysis
- Language testing and assessment
- Child language
- Language and gender
- Pragmatics and rhetorics
- Corpus analysis
- Critical pedagogies
- Research methodology in applied linguistics
- Language and technology
