Event Details

Does multilingualism support additional language learning? This talk explores reading development in French and Spanish among monolingual and multilingual secondary-school learners, focusing on literacy skills, language experience, and cognitive factors.

Exploring reading development among monolingual and multilingual learners of French and Spanish in secondary schools in England

Knowing more than one language may provide a ‘multilingual boost’ (Berthele & Udry, 2022) during the early stages of instructed language learning in low-exposure settings. For example, students who have English as an additional language are more likely achieve a good pass in GCSE modern languages than their monolingual peers (Department for Education, 2025). To date, relatively few studies have explored the linguistic, affective, and cognitive factors that might contribute to any multilingual advantage within this demographic.

In this talk, I will present an ongoing study that begins to address this gap by exploring the potential predictors of core literacy skills (namely, reading comprehension, phonological decoding, and vocabulary knowledge) among monolingual and multilingual adolescents studying French or Spanish in secondary schools in England. The study involves two strands. The first strand looks at the extent to which core literacy skills in English—the language of schooling—predict the same set of skills in French and Spanish. The second strand extends this focus to a specific group of multilingual learners—speakers of Portuguese as a home, heritage, or community language—and explores the extent to which core literacy skills in Portuguese determine the corresponding skills in French and Spanish.

Across both strands, I will also explore the extent to which relationships between core literacy skills across the relevant language pairs are moderated by individual differences in (a) reading habits in each known language, (b) attitudes towards languages and language learning, (c) working memory, and (d) language learning aptitude.

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